III.
THE REACTION AT THE BEGINNING OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY.
In the earlier part of the nineteenth century, after the defeat of the Great Revolution, Europe passed, as is known, through a period of general reaction in the domain both of politics and of science and philosophy. The White Terror of the Bourbons in France; the Holy Alliance concluded in 1815 at Vienna between Austria, Germany, and Russia; mysticism and pietism at the Courts and in the upper classes, and State police everywhere, triumphed all along the line. However, with all that, the fundamental principles of the Revolution did not perish. The gradual liberation of the peasants and the town workers from a state of semi-serfdom in which they had been living till then, equality before the law, and representative government—these three principles promulgated by the Revolution and carried by the French armies all over Europe, as far as Poland and Russia, gradually made headway in France and elsewhere. After the Revolution, which had begun to preach the great principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity, the slow evolution began—that is to say, the slow transformation of institutions, and the application to every-day life of the ideas proclaimed in France in 1789–1793. Such a slow realisation, during a period of evolution, of the principles that have been proclaimed during the preceding revolutionary period, can even be considered as a general law of human development.
If the Church, the State, and Science trampled under their feet the banner on which the Revolution had inscribed its device: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"; if compromise with existing conditions, political and economical servitude, had become the watchword of the moment, even with philosophers of that period—Hegel in Germany and Cousin in France—nevertheless, the great principles of Liberty gradually began to penetrate into life. True, that serfdom for the peasants all over Eastern Europe, and the Inquisition that had been abolished in Italy and Spain by the armies of the Revolution, were re-established. But a death-blow had been dealt to these institutions, and never since could they recover from it.
The liberation wave first reached Western Germany; then it rolled as far as Prussia and Austria in 1848; it spread over the peninsulas of Spain and Italy, and, flowing further eastwards, it finally reached Russia, where serfdom was abolished in 1861, and the Balkan States, where it ceased to exist in 1878. Slavery disappeared in North America in 1863.
At the same time, the idea of equality of all before the law, and that of representative government also, spread from West to East, and at the end of the nineteenth century Russia and Turkey alone remained under the yoke of autocracy—already weakened, however, and doomed to a certain death in a near future.[1]
More than that. On the line of demarcation separating the eighteenth century from the nineteenth, we already find the ideas of economic enfranchisement loudly advocated. Immediately after the overthrow of the King by the uprising of the people of Paris of August 10, 1792, and especially after the overthrow of the Girondins on June 2, 1793, there was, both in Paris and the provinces, an outburst of Communist feeling, leading to direct action in this sense in the revolutionary sections of the large cities and the municipalities of the small towns and villages over large portions of France.
The people proclaimed that the time had come when Equality must cease to be a shallow word: it must become a fact; and as the burden of the war that the Republic had to fight against the allied monarchies, fell especially upon the poor, the people forced the Commissaries of the Convention in the provinces to take Communistic measures.
The Convention itself was compelled by the people to take Communistic measures tending towards the "abolishing of poverty" and "levelling the fortunes." And after the bourgeois Republican party of the Girondists had been thrust out of power on May 31—June 2, 1793, the National Convention and the Radical bourgeois Club of the Jacobinists were compelled to agree to a series of measures tending to nationalise not only the land, but also all the commerce in the main necessaries of life.
This deeply seated movement lasted till July, 1794, when the bourgeois reaction of the Girondists, combining with the Monarchists, to@k the upper hand. But it was this movement which gave to the nineteenth century its specific character—the Communist and Socialist tendency of its advanced elements.
So long as that movement lasted, it found several spokesmen from among the people. But amongst the writers of the period there was none who would have been able to give a literary expression to its aspirations and foundations, and to advocate it in such a way as to produce a lasting impression upon the minds of his contemporaries.
It was only in 1793, in England, that William Godwin brought out his truly remarkable work: "An Enquiry into Political Justice and its Influence on Public Morality," which made him the first theoriser of Socialism without government—that is to say, of Anarchism; while Babeuf, aided and perhaps inspired by Buonarotti, came forward, in 1796, as the first theoriser of centralised Socialism, i.e., of State Socialism.
Later on, developing the principles already put forth at the end of the preceding century by the people of France, came Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen—the three founders of modern Socialism, representing its three principal schools; and later on, in the "forties," we have Proudhon, who, without knowing Godwin's work, laid anew the foundations of Anarchism.
The scientific basis of Socialism under both aspects, governmental and anti-governmental, was thus elaborated from the beginning of the nineteenth century with a wonderful richness of development. Unfortunately, this is too much ignored by our contemporaries. But the reality is that modern Socialism, which dates from the International Working Men's Association, founded in 1864, has outdistanced its founders by two points only—both, no doubt, quite essential. Modern Socialism has declared that its aims can only be brought into life by a social revolution—which Fourier, Saint-Simon and Robert Owen did not wish or dare to say; and it has completely broken with the conception of "Christ being a Socialist and revolutionist," which was so often paraded before 1848.
Modern Socialism has understood that to realise its aspirations a social revolution is absolutely necessary, not in the sense in which the word "revolution" is made use of when an "industrial revolution" or a "revolution in science" is spoken of, but in its exact concrete meaning: that of a general and sudden reconstruction of the foundations themselves of society. Moreover, modern Socialism has ceased to mix its conceptions with certain innocent reforms of a sentimental order mentioned by a few Christian reformers. But this last—we must point out—had had already been done by Godwin, Fourier, and Robert Owen. As to centralisation and the cult of authority and discipline, which humanity owes to theocracy and to Imperial Roman law—all survivals of an obscure past—these survivals are still retained by many modern Socialists, who consequently have not yet reached the level of their two predecessors, Godwin and Proudhon.
It would be difficult to give here an adequate idea of the influence which reaction, having become supreme after the Great French Revolution, exercised upon the development of science.[2] Suffice it to remark that what modern science is so proud of to-day was already indicated, and often more than indicated—it was sometimes put forth in a definite scientific form—towards the end of the eighteenth century. The mechanical theory of heat; the indestructibility of movement (preservation of energy); the variability of species by the direct influence of surroundings; physiological psychology; the anthropologic comprehension of history, of religions, and of legislation; the laws of development of thought—in a word, the whole mechanical conception and synthetic philosophy (a philosophy that discusses the foundations of all physical, chemical, vital, and social phenomena as a whole) were already sketched and partly elaborated in the eighteenth century.
But when the reactionaries had got the upper hand, after the defeat of the Great French Revolution, for fully half a century, they stifled all these discoveries. Reactionary scientists represented them as "unscientific." On the pretext of "first studying facts" and accumulating "materials" for science in scientific societies, they even went so far as to repudiate any research which was not merely mensuration. Such remarkable discoveries as the elder Séguin's and, later on, Joule's determination of the mechanical equivalent of heat (the quantity of mechanical friction necessary in order to obtain a certain quantity of heat) were repudiated by these keepers of tradition. Even the Royal Society of Great Britain, which is the English Academy of Science, refused to print Joule’s work, finding it "unscientific." As to Grove's remarkable work on the unity of all physical forces, written in 1843—no attention was paid to it till 1856. One must read the history of science in the first half of the nineteenth century to realise how dense was the obscurity which enveloped Europe at that time.
The veil was suddenly rent when, towards the end of the "fifties," under the impulse of the revolutionary year of 1848, there began in Western Europe the movement which brought about Garibaldi's rising, the liberation of Italy, the abolition of slavery in America, liberal reforms in England, and a few years later the abolition of serfdom and the knout in Russia. The same movement overthrew in Europe the philosophical authority of Schelling and Hegel, and in Russia it gave vise to an open rebellion against intellectual serfdom and cringing to all sorts of authority, which rebellion was known by the name of Nihilism.
Now that we can look backwards upon the history of those times, it is evident for us that it was the propaganda of Republican and Socialist ideas in the "thirties" and "forties" of the nineteenth century, and the Revolution in 1848, which helped science to rend the bonds that had stifled it since the anti-revolution reaction had begun after the crushing, by the united Kings, of the revolutionary French Republic of 1789–1793.
Without entering into details, it will be sufficient to remember a few facts. Séguin, whose name has just been mentioned as the promoter of the mechanical theory of heat; Augustin Thierry, the historian who first laid the basis of the study of the rule of the people in the small Republics of the early Middle Ages, and of the Federalist ideas of those times; Sismondi, the historian of the free mediæval Republics in Italy, were followers of Saint-Simon—one of the three great founders of Socialism in the first half of the nineteenth century; and Alfred R. Wallace, who discovered at the same time as Darwin the theory of origin of species through natural selection, was in his youth a convinced partisan of Robert Owen; Auguste Comte was a follower of Saint-Simon; Ricardo, as well as Bentham, followed Owen; and the materialists Carl Vogt and George Lewes, as well as Grove, Mill, Herbert Spencer, and so many others, were under the influence of the Radical-Socialist movement in the "thirties" and "forties." From this movement they drew their scientific courage.
The appearance, in the short space of five or six years, 1856–1862, of the works of Grove, Joule, Berthelot, Helmholtz, Mendéléeff; of Darwin, Claude Bernard, Spencer, Moleschott, and Vogt; of Lyell on the origin of man; of Bain, Mill, Burnouf,—the sudden appearance of this wonderful constellation of works produced a complete revolution in the fundamental conception of science. Science immediately ventured into new paths. Whole branches of learning were created with prodigious rapidity. The science of life (biology), that of human institutions (anthropology and ethnology), that of understanding, will and passions (physical psychology), the history of law and of religions on a scientific, anthropological basis, soon grew up under our very eyes, striking the mind by the boldness of their generalisations and the revolutionary spirit of their conclusions. What were mere general guesses in the eighteenth century now became facts, proved by the scales and the microscope, and verified by thousands of observations and experiments. Even the manner of writing completely changed. The men of science just mentioned, one and all, returned to the simplicity, the exactitude, and, I must say, the beauty of style which was characteristic of the followers of the inductive method, and of which the writers of the eighteenth century, since they had given up metaphysics, were such great masters.
It is impossible to predict in which direction science will henceforth go. As long as men of science depend on the rich and on Governments, as they do now, their science will inevitably bear the stamp of these influences, and a stagnant period, like the one in the first half of the nineteenth century, can certainly be produced once more. But one thing is certain. In science, such as it appears to-day, there is no necessity for the hypothesis which Laplace knew how to dispense with, nor the metaphysical "little words" which Goethe mocked at. We can already read the book of Nature, which comprises that of the development of both inorganic and organic life and of mankind, without resorting to a Creator, or to a mystical vital force, or to an immortal soul; and without consulting the trilogy of Hegel, or hiding our ignorance behind any metaphysical symbols whatever, endowed with a real existence by the writer. Mechanical phenomena, becoming more and more complicated as we pass from physics to the facts of life, are sufficient to explain Nature and all the intellectual and social organic life on our planet.
No doubt much that is unknown, obscure and not understood remains in the Universe, and we know that in proportion as we bridge over gaps in our knowledge, new chasms will open up. But we know no region in which it would be impossible for us to find an explanation of the phenomena if we turn to simple physical facts which we see produced when two billiard balls meet, or when a stone falls; or to the chemical facts which we see going on around us. These mechanical facts have been sufficient till now to explain all the phenomena we have studied. They have never yet played us false, and we do not see the possibility of ever discovering a sphere in which mechanical facts would not meet our want. Nothing up till now justifies us in surmising the existence of such a domain.