Chapter 10 No.10

It is obvious that Rousseau and all other theorists of Regress would be definitely refuted if it could be proved by an historical investigation that in no period in the past had man's lot been happier than in the present. Such an inquiry was undertaken by the Chevalier de Chastellux. His book On Public Felicity, or Considerations on the lot of Men in the various Epochs of History, appeared in 1772 and had a wide circulation.

[Footnote: There was a new edition in 1776 with an important additional chapter.] It is a survey of the history of the western world and aims at proving the certainty of future Progress. It betrays the influence both of the Encyclopaedists and of the Economists. Chastellux is convinced that human nature can be indefinitely moulded by institutions; that enlightenment is a necessary condition of general happiness; that war and superstition, for which governments and priests are responsible, are the principal obstacles.

But he attempted to do what none of his masters had done, to test the question methodically from the data of history. Turgot, and Voltaire in his way, had traced the growth of civilisation; the originality of Chastellux lay in concentrating attention on the eudaemonic issue, in examining each historical period for the purpose of discovering whether people on the whole were happy and enviable. Has there ever been a time, he inquired, in which public felicity was greater than in our own, in which it would have been desirable to remain for ever, and to which it would now be desirable to return?

He begins by brushing away the hypothesis of an Arcadia. We know really nothing about primitive man, there is not sufficient evidence to authorise conjectures. We know man only as he has existed in organised societies, and if we are to condemn modern civilisation and its prospects, we must find our term of comparison not in an imaginary golden age but in a known historical epoch. And we must be careful not to fall into the mistakes of confusing public prosperity with general happiness, and of considering only the duration or aggrandisement of empires and ignoring the lot of the common people.

His survey of history is summary and superficial enough. He gives reasons for believing that no peoples from the ancient Egyptians and Assyrians to the Europeans of the Renaissance can be judged happy. Yet what about the Greeks? Theirs was an age of enlightenment. In a few pages he examines their laws and history, and concludes, "We are compelled to acknowledge that what is called the bel age of Greece was a time of pain and torture for humanity." And in ancient history, generally, "slavery alone sufficed to make man's condition a hundred times worse than it is at present." The miseries of life in the Roman period are even more apparent than in the Greek. What Englishman or Frenchman would tolerate life as lived in ancient Rome? It is interesting to remember that four years later an Englishman who had an incomparably wider and deeper knowledge of history declared it to be probable that in the age of the Antonines civilised Europe enjoyed greater happiness than at any other period.

Rome declined and Christianity came. Its purpose was not to render men happy on earth, and we do not find that it made rulers less avaricious or less sanguinary, peoples more patient or quiet, crimes rarer, punishments less cruel, treaties more faithfully observed, or wars waged more humanely. The conclusion is that it is only those who are profoundly ignorant of the past who can regret "the good old times."

Throughout this survey Chastellux does not, like Turgot, make any attempt to show that the race was progressing, however slowly. On the contrary, he sets the beginning of continuous Progress in the Renaissance-here agreeing with d'Alembert and Voltaire. The intellectual movement, which originated then and resulted in the enlightenment of his own day, was a condition of social progress. But alone it would not have been enough, as is proved by the fact that the intellectual brilliancy of the great age of Greece exerted no beneficent effects on the well-being of the people. Nor indeed was there any perceptible improvement in the prospect of happiness for the people at large during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, notwithstanding the progress of science and the arts. But the terrible wars of this period exhausted Europe, and this financial exhaustion has supplied the requisite conditions for attaining a measure of felicity never realised in the past.

Peace is an advantageous condition for the progress of reason, but especially when it is the result of the exhaustion of peoples and their satiety of fighting. Frivolous ideas disappear; political bodies, like organisms, have the care of self-preservation impressed upon them by pain; the human mind, hitherto exercised on agreeable objects, falls back with more energy on useful objects; a more successful appeal can be made to the rights of humanity; and princes, who have become creditors and debtors of their subjects, permit them to be happy in order that they may be more solvent or more patient.

This is not very lucid or convincing; but the main point is that intellectual enlightenment would be ineffective without the co-operation of political events, and no political events would permanently help humanity without the progress of knowledge.

Public felicity consists-Chastellux follows the Economists-in external and domestic peace, abundance and liberty, the liberty of tranquil enjoyment of one's own; and ordinary signs of it are flourishing agriculture, large populations, and the growth of trade and industry. He is at pains to show the superiority of modern to ancient agriculture, and he avails himself of the researches of Hume to prove the comparatively greater populousness of modern European countries. As for the prospect of peace, he takes a curiously optimistic view. A system of alliances has made Europe a sort of confederated republic, and the balance of power has rendered the design of a universal monarchy, such as that which Louis XIV. essayed, a chimera. [Footnote: So Rivarol, writing in 1783 (OEuvres, i. pp. 4 and 52): "Never did the world offer such a spectacle. Europe has reached such a high degree of power that history has nothing to compare with it. It is virtually a federative republic, composed of empires and kingdoms, and the most powerful that has ever existed."] All the powerful nations are burdened with debt. War, too, is a much more difficult enterprise than it used to be; every campaign of the king of Prussia has been more arduous than all the conquests of Attila. It looks as if the Peace of 1762-3 possessed elements of finality. The chief danger he discerns in the overseas policy of the English-auri sacra fames. Divination of this kind has never been happy; a greater thinker, Auguste Comte, was to venture on more dogmatic predictions of the cessation of wars, which the event was no less utterly to belie. As for equality among men, Chastellux admits its desirability, but observes that there is pretty much the same amount of happiness (le bonheur se compense assez) in the different classes of society. "Courtiers and ministers are not happier than husbandmen and artisans." Inequalities and disportions in the lots of individuals are not incompatible with a positive measure of felicity. They are inconveniences incident to the perfectibility of the species, and they will be eliminated only when Progress reaches its final term. The best that can be done to remedy them is to accelerate the Progress of the race which will conduct it one day to the greatest possible happiness; not to restore a state of ignorance and simplicity, from which it would again escape.

The general argument of the book may be resumed briefly. Felicity has never been realised in any period of the past. No government, however esteemed, set before itself to achieve what ought to be the sole object of government, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number of individuals." Now, for the first time in human history, intellectual enlightenment, other circumstances fortunately concurring, has brought about a condition of things, in which this object can no longer be ignored, and there is a prospect that it will gradually gain the ascendant. In the meantime, things have improved; the diffusion of knowledge is daily ameliorating men's lot, and far from envying any age in the past we ought to consider ourselves much happier than the ancients.

We may wonder at this writer's easy confidence in applying the criterion of happiness to different societies. Yet the difficulty of such comparisons was, I believe, first pointed out by Comte. [Footnote: Cours de philosophie positive, iv. 379.] It is impossible, he says, to compare two states of society and determine that in one more happiness was enjoyed than in the other. The happiness of an individual requires a certain degree of harmony between his faculties and his environment. But there is always a natural tendency towards the establishment of such an equilibrium, and there is no means of discovering by argument or by direct experience the situation of a society in this respect. Therefore, he concludes, the question of happiness must be eliminated from any scientific treatment of civilisation.

Chastellux won a remarkable success. His work was highly praised by Voltaire, and was translated into English, Italian, and German. It condensed, on a single issue, the optimistic doctrines of the philosophers, and appeared to give them a more solid historical foundation than Voltaire's Essay on Manners had supplied. It provided the optimists with new arguments against Rousseau, and must have done much to spread and confirm faith in perfectibility. [Footnote: Soon after the publication of the book of Chastellux-though I do not suggest any direct connection-a society of Illuminati, who also called themselves the Perfectibilists, was founded at Ingoldstadt, who proposed to effect a pacific transformation of humanity. See Javary, De l'idee de progres, p. 73.]