Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
stimulating suggestion that came out of the Enlightenment, it was
evolved by Turgot in France and by Price and Priestley in England,
from the psychology of John Locke. If the human mind at birth is an
empty vessel, wanting in innate ideas and waiting to be filled by sense
perceptions, or if--to accept the familiar figure--it is a clean slate
on which the finger of experience writes what it will, then it follows
from the philosophy of Locke that the shaping of the individual is
determined by the environment that cradles him. It is not an unfolding
from within but a molding from without. Hence the idea of growth, and
hence the vast preoccupation of the Enlightenment with sociology--or
the science of environment--the hand of the sculptor that models the
plastic clay. From such a conception the principle of progress was an
inevitable deduction.
1 • Sociology and the Enlightenment
It is convenient, if not quite exact, to trace the rise of the new
gospel to Condorcet, who in the midst of the Terror and whilst in
hiding from the Jacobins, wrote his stimulating _History of the
Progress of the Human Mind_[682]--a work that was early reprinted in
America and profoundly influenced Jefferson, who professed to find its
principles exemplified in the history of his native Virginia. Condorcet
was a humane and liberal spirit, a mathematician, a physicist, a
sociologist, one of those eager Revolutionary minds passionately
devoted to the creation of a more generous social order; and his
celebrated work deserves a distinguished place in the history of social
thought. He begins as a good Lockean with the psychology of sense
perception, on which he erects his entire superstructure. Here is his
opening paragraph:
Man is born with the faculty of receiving sensations; of perceiving
and distinguishing the simple sensations of which they are
composed; of retaining them, reproducing them, combining them; of
comparing these combinations; of grasping what they have in common
and what sets them apart; of fixing signs on all such objects
in order to reproduce them more clearly and to facilitate new
combinations.[683]
He then proceeds to trace the growth of the scientific attitude from
the time of Bacon, till it culminated in the rise of social science,
with the new politics of natural rights and the new conception of man
as perfectible. It is commonly believed that the philosophers of the
Enlightenment were speculative dreamers who created a fantastic natural
man that flouted the sober realism of experience. Such a notion is
grossly absurd. Condorcet was immersed in the scientific spirit of his
age; it was to science that he looked for guidance and he had acquired
a remarkable understanding of the data already gathered in western
Europe. When he set down the following passages, therefore, he was
writing not as a speculative dreamer, but as a sociologist who relied
solely on scientific inquiry to find a way out of the social mess into
which western civilization was plunged by the selfish stupidity of
rulers who were hostile to scientific truth.
After long errors, after having lost their way in incomplete or
vague theories, the publicists have finally come to recognize the
true rights of man, to deduce them from this single truth, that he
is a being endowed with sense perceptions (_un être sensible_),
capable of shaping a train of reasoning (_capable de former des
raisonnements_), and of acquiring moral ideas.[684]
Finally, we have seen a new doctrine appear.... It is that of the
indefinite perfectibility of the human species, a doctrine of which
Turgot, Price and Priestly, were the first and most distinguished
apostles; it belongs to the tenth epoch, in which we shall develop
it broadly.[685]
In such passages is contained the kernel of Condorcet’s philosophy, the
grounds of that hope for human betterment which awakened his generous
sympathies. The _Esquisse_ is a noble contribution to the work which
the heirs of the Enlightenment, from Turgot to Comte, so eagerly and
hopefully engaged in--the work of tracing scientifically the changes of
the past in order to forecast the path of the future. After dividing
the history of social evolution into nine periods, Condorcet projects
the outlines of the tenth which is still to come.
If man can predict, with almost complete assurance, the phenomena
of which he knows the laws; if, while they are still unknown in
him, from the experience of the past he can forecast, with much
probability, the events of the future; why should one regard as a
chimerical undertaking the attempt to trace with some likeness the
picture of the future destiny of the human species, in accordance
with the facts of its history (_d’après les résultats de son
histoire_)? The sole ground of faith in the natural sciences is
this idea, that the general laws, known or unknown, that rule the
phenomena of the universe, are necessary and constant; and on what
grounds would this principle be less true for the development of
the intellectual and moral faculties of man, than for the other
operations of nature? Finally, since opinions formed from the
experience of the past, in matters of the same kind, are the
sole rule of conduct for the wisest men, why should one deny the
philosopher the right to rest his conjectures on the same base,
provided he does not attribute to them a certainty beyond that
which springs from the number, the constancy and the exactness of
his observations?
Our hopes for the future state of the human species may be
reduced to these three important points: the destruction of
inequality between nations; the progress of equality amongst a
common people; finally, the growth of man towards perfection
(_le perfectionnement réel de l’homme_). May not all nations one
day approach the state of civilization to which have arrived the
most enlightened peoples, the freest, the most emancipated from
prejudice, such as the French and the Anglo-Americans? The vast
distance that divides these peoples from the servitude of nations
subject to kings, from the barbarism of African tribes, from the
ignorance of savages, must it not gradually disappear?[686]
Condorcet was an idealist, and the grand object towards which he was
working was an adequate social philosophy that should interpret justly
the evolution of civilization. True to the genius of the Enlightenment
he believed that in reason and in the moral sense man possessed the
keys to his own progress--that the general reason under the guidance
of humane feeling must assure a progressive amelioration of life that
will eventuate in the common well-being of men in a rational society.
The age of the Enlightenment, he believed, had “opened new paths to the
political and moral sciences,” and laid bare what to him were “the true
principles of social happiness.” The American Federalists, who were
prodigal of vituperative rhetoric in assailing all French theorists,
might have read the pages of Condorcet with profit.
The idea of progress with its corollary of a philosophy of history,
thus elaborated by Condorcet, was taken over by Saint-Simon, but
came to its most elaborate expression in the work of Auguste Comte.
The grandiose philosophy of history to which Comte gave the name
of Positivism, was an attempt to formulate the law of progress in
civilization; and his dynamic sociology, which emerged naturally
from his conception of history, was an attempt to apply that law to
society. That the principle of progress is the law of nature Comte
professed to discover in the unity of all natural processes and the
historical unfolding of all systems; there are no breaks and no fresh
beginnings, but everywhere and always, continuity. From this principle
emerged the Comtean law of historical evolution with its three phases:
the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific-industrial.
If continuity is the law of nature, such continuity presupposes an
objective--presumably benevolent; and in view of such continuity
towards a benevolent objective, it is only logical to endeavor to
dispose the forces of society in harmony with the teleological purpose,
and through the application of positive knowledge hasten the advent
of the Golden Age. Hence the grand science, hitherto neglected, is
sociology. Earlier generations had placed the Golden Age in a dim past;
Comtean philosophy, in harmony with the Enlightenment, placed it in
the future as the ultimate goal of an evolving society. To forecast
the lines along which such progress will move, to read the future as a
child of the past, became therefore a prime objective of the new school
of history. The tracing of social laws was the great business at hand,
and as the founder of a new social science Comte carried further and
systematized the work begun by the Physiocrats. Before Comte history
had been little more than chronicles, without pattern or meaning,
unconcerned with the sources of change and providing no basis for
forecast; after Comte history became an interpretation and a philosophy.
One would have supposed that Positivism would have appealed to
American intellectuals, as it appealed to liberal English thinkers
like Mill and Spencer. Not only has the American mind taken kindly
to sociology, but the history of America, as Woodbridge Riley has
pointed out, offers too pat an illustration of the Comtean law of
progress to be overlooked.[687] The three centuries of American
existence--the seventeenth with its theocracy, the eighteenth with its
abstract theories of political rights and its faith in constitutions,
and the nineteenth with its industrialism based on science--would
seem to be pages out of the Positivist philosophy of history. That
Comte made so slight an impression on the mind of New England was
due, no doubt, to the current influence of transcendentalism with its
metaphysical backgrounds. Although eager young intellectuals like John
Fiske might accept it while awaiting a more adequate evolutionary
philosophy, the country was not yet ripe for Positivism. When that
time came it was Spencer rather than Comte who became the master of
American intellectuals--Spencer and in a lesser degree John Stuart
Mill. Both Spencer and Mill had come under the influence of the French
sociological school, and it was through their writings that the new
social philosophy penetrated America.[688]
2 • Biology and the Enlightenment
The appeal of Spencer to the generation born after the Civil War was
extraordinary. Ardent young minds, for whom the candles of theology
were burnt out and who were seeking new light to their feet, were drawn
to him irresistibly. Young rebels who had thrown off the guidance of
their elders and were bent on discovering fresh paths through the
tangle of dead faiths--independent souls like Hamlin Garland and
Jack London and Theodore Dreiser who were to become leaders of the
realistic revolt against the genteel tradition in life and letters and
faith--went to school to him to prepare themselves for the great work
of freeing the American mind from the old theological inhibitions.
Young men in colleges no longer read _Butler’s Analogy_, as their
fathers had done before the war, but turned with zest to Spencer’s
_Data of Ethics_ to discover a more scientific theory of conduct.
Everywhere the influence of the great Victorian penetrated, and
wherever that influence spread the old theological prepossessions
disintegrated. It is probably no exaggeration to say that Spencer laid
out the broad highway over which American thought traveled in the later
years of the century.
If the supreme excellence of Comte, as has been suggested by Lester
F. Ward, was his insistence on the ultimate unity of all processes