The Idea of Progress: An Inguiry into Its Origin and Growth. J. B. Bury
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generation must be good for another. For Machiavelli, as for Plato, change meant corruption. Thus his fundamental theory excluded any conception of a satisfactory social order gradually emerging by the impersonal work of successive generations, adapting their institutions to their own changing needs and aspirations. It is characteristic, and another point of resemblance with ancient thinkers that he sought the ideal state in the past—republican Rome.
These doctrines, the sameness of human nature and the omnipotent lawgiver, left no room for anything resembling a theory of Progress. If not held afterwards in the uncompromising form in which Machiavelli presented them, yet it has well been pointed out that they lay at the root of some of the most famous speculations of the eighteenth century. [Footnote: Villari, loc. cit.]
Machiavelli's sameness of human nature meant that man would always have the same passions and desires, weaknesses and vices. This assumption was compatible with the widely prevailing view that man had degenerated in the course of the last fifteen hundred years. From the exaltation of Greek and Roman antiquity to a position of unattainable superiority, especially in the field of knowledge, the degeneration of humanity was an easy and natural inference. If the Greeks in philosophy and science were authoritative guides, if in art and literature they were unapproachable, if the Roman republic, as Machiavelli thought, was an ideal state, it would seem that the powers of Nature had declined, and she could no longer produce the same quality of brain. So long as this paralysing theory prevailed, it is manifest that the idea of Progress could not appear.
But in the course of the sixteenth century men began here and there, somewhat timidly and tentatively, to rebel against the tyranny of antiquity, or rather to prepare the way for the open rebellion which was to break out in the seventeenth. Breaches were made in the proud citadel of ancient learning. Copernicus undermined the authority of Ptolemy and his predecessors; the anatomical researches of Vesalius injured the prestige of Galen; and Aristotle was attacked on many sides by men like Telesio, Cardan, Ramus, and Bruno. [Footnote: It has been observed that the thinkers who were rebelling against the authority of Aristotle—the most dangerous of the ancient philosophers, because he was so closely associated with theological scholasticism and was supported by the Church—frequently attacked under the standard of some other ancient master; e.g. Telesio resorted to Parmenides, Justus Lipsius to the Stoics, and Bruno is under the influence of Plotinus and Plato (Bouillier, La Philosophie cartesienne, vol. i. p. 5). The idea of "development" in Bruno has been studied by Mariupolsky (Zur Geschichte des Entwicklungsbegriffs in Berner Studien, Bd. vi. 1897), who pointed out the influence of Stoicism on his thought.] In particular branches of science an innovation was beginning which heralded a radical revolution in the study of natural phenomena, though the general significance of the prospect which these researches opened was but vaguely understood at the time. The thinkers and men of science were living in an intellectual twilight. It was the twilight of dawn. At one extremity we have mysticism which culminated in the speculations of Bruno and Campanella; at the other we have the scepticism of Montaigne, Charron, and Sanchez. The bewildered condition of knowledge is indicated by the fact that while Bruno and Campanella accepted the Copernican astronomy, it was rejected by one who in many other respects may claim to be reckoned as a modern—I mean Francis Bacon.
But the growing tendency to challenge the authority of the ancients does not sever this period from the spirit which informed the Renaissance. For it is subordinate or incidental to a more general and important interest. To rehabilitate the natural man, to claim that he should be the pilot of his own course, to assert his freedom in the fields of art and literature had been the work of the early Renaissance. It was the problem of the later Renaissance to complete this emancipation in the sphere of philosophical thought. The bold metaphysics of Bruno, for which he atoned by a fiery death, offered the solution which was most unorthodox and complete. His deification of nature and of man as part of nature involved the liberation of humanity from external authority. But other speculative minds of the age, though less audacious, were equally inspired by the idea of freely interrogating nature, and were all engaged in accomplishing the programme of the Renaissance—the vindication of this world as possessing a value for man independent of its relations to any supermundane sphere. The raptures of Giordano Bruno and the sobrieties of Francis Bacon are here on common ground. The whole movement was a necessary prelude to a new age of which science was to be the mistress.
It is to be noted that there was a general feeling of complacency as to the condition of learning and intellectual pursuits. This optimism is expressed by Rabelais. Gargantua, in a letter to Pantagruel, studying at Paris, enlarges to his son on the vast improvements in learning and education which had recently, he says, been brought about. "All the world is full of savants, learned teachers, large libraries; and I am of opinion that neither in the time of Plato nor of Cicero nor of Papinian were there such facilities for study as one sees now." It is indeed the study of the ancient languages and literatures that Gargantua considers in a liberal education, but the satisfaction at the present diffusion of learning, with the suggestion that here at least contemporaries have an advantage over the ancients, is the significant point. [Footnote: Rabelais, Book ii. chap. 8.] This satisfaction shines through the observation of Ramus that "in one century we have seen a greater progress in men and works of learning than our ancestors had seen in the whole course of the previous fourteen centuries." [Footnote: Praefat. Scholarum Mathematicarum, maiorem doctorum hominum et operum proventum seculo uno vidimus quam totis antea 14 seculis maiores nostri viderent. (Ed. Basel, 1569.)] [Footnote 1. Guillaume Postel observed in his De magistratibus Atheniensium liber (1541) that the ages are always progressing (secula semper proficere), and every day additions are made to human knowledge, and that this process would only cease if Providence by war, or plague, or some catastrophe were to destroy all the accumulated stores of knowledge which have been transmitted from antiquity in books (Praef., B verso). What is known of the life of this almost forgotten scholar has been collected by G. Weill (De Gulielmi Postelli vita et indole, 1892). He visited the East, brought back oriental MSS., and was more than once imprisoned on charges of heresy. He dreamed of converting the Mohammedans, and of uniting the whole world under the empire of France.]
In this last stage of the Renaissance, which includes the first quarter of the seventeenth century, soil was being prepared in which the idea of Progress could germinate, and our history of it origin definitely begins with the work of two men who belong to this age, Bodin, who is hardly known except to special students of political science, and Bacon, who is known to all the world. Both had a more general grasp of the significance of their own time than any of their contemporaries, and though neither of them discovered a theory of Progress, they both made contributions to thought which directly contributed to its subsequent appearance.
CHAPTER I. SOME INTERPRETATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY: BODIN AND LE ROY
1.
It is a long descent from the genius of Machiavelli to the French historian, Jean Bodin, who published his introduction to historical studies [Footnote: Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem, 1566.] about forty years after Machiavelli's death. His views and his method differ widely from those of that great pioneer, whom he attacks. His readers were not arrested by startling novelties or immoral doctrine; he is safe, and dull.
But Bodin had a much wider range of thought than Machiavelli, whose mind was entirely concentrated on the theory of politics; and his importance for us lies not in the political speculations by which he sought to prove that monarchy is the best form of government [Footnote: Les six livres de la Republique, 1576.], but in his attempt to substitute a new theory of universal history for that which prevailed in the Middle Ages. He rejected the popular conception of a golden age and a subsequent degeneration of mankind; and he refuted the view, generally current among medieval theologians, and based on the prophecies of Daniel, which divided the course of history into four periods corresponding to the Babylonian Persian, Macedonian, and Roman monarchies, the