The Idea Of Progress | Page 8

Stoic philosopher saw clearly, and declared emphatically,
that increases in knowledge must be expected in the future.
"There are many peoples to-day," Seneca wrote, "who are ignorant of
the cause of eclipses of the moon, and it has only recently been
demonstrated among ourselves. The day will come when time and
human diligence will clear up problems which are now obscure. We
divide the few years of our lives unequally between study and vice, and
it will therefore be the work of many generations to explain such
phenomena as comets. One day our posterity will marvel at our
ignorance of causes so clear to them.
"How many new animals have we first come to know in the present age?
In time to come men will know much that is unknown to us. Many
discoveries are reserved for future ages, when our memory will have
faded from men's minds. We imagine ourselves initiated in the secrets
of nature; we are standing on the threshold of her temple."
[Footnote: The quotations from Seneca will be found in Naturales
Quaestiones, vii. 25 and 31. See also Epist. 64. Seneca implies
continuity in scientific research. Aristotle had stated this expressly,
pointing out that we are indebted not only to the author of the
philosophical theory which we accept as true, but also to the
predecessors whose views it has superseded (Metaphysics, i. ii. chap. 1).
But he seems to consider his own system as final.]
But these predictions are far from showing that Seneca had the least
inkling of a doctrine of the Progress of humanity. Such a doctrine is
sharply excluded by the principles of his philosophy and his profoundly
pessimistic view of human affairs. Immediately after the passage which
I have quoted he goes on to enlarge on the progress of vice. "Are you
surprised to be told that human knowledge has not yet completed its
whole task? Why, human wickedness has not yet fully developed."
Yet, at least, it may be said, Seneca believed in a progress of
knowledge and recognised its value. Yes, but the value which he

attributed to it did not lie in any advantages which it would bring to the
general community of mankind. He did not expect from it any
improvement of the world. The value of natural science, from his point
of view, was this, that it opened to the philosopher a divine region, in
which, "wandering among the stars," he could laugh at the earth and all
its riches, and his mind "delivered as it were from prison could return to
its original home." In other words, its value lay not in its results, but
simply in the intellectual activity; and therefore it concerned not
mankind at large but a few chosen individuals who, doomed to live in a
miserable world, could thus deliver their souls from slavery.
For Seneca's belief in the theory of degeneration and the hopeless
corruption of the race is uncompromising. Human life on the earth is
periodically destroyed, alternately by fire and flood; and each period
begins with a golden age in which men live in rude simplicity, innocent
because they are ignorant not because they are wise. When they
degenerate from this state, arts and inventions promote deterioration by
ministering to luxury and vice.
Interesting, then, as Seneca's observations on the prospect of some
future scientific discoveries are, and they are unique in ancient
literature, [Footnote: They are general and definite. This distinguishes
them, for instance, from Plato's incidental hint in the Republic as to the
prospect of the future development of solid geometry.] they were far
from adumbrating a doctrine of the Progress of man. For him, as for
Plato and the older philosophers, time is the enemy of man. [Footnote:
The quotations and the references here will be found in Nat. Quaest. i.
Praef.; Epist. 104, Sec. 16 (cp. 110, Sec. 8; 117, Sec. 20, and the fine
passage in 65, Sec. 16-21); Nat. Quaest. iii. 28-30; and finally Epist. 90,
Sec. 45, cp. Sec. 17. This last letter is a criticism on Posidonius, who
asserted that the arts invented in primitive times were due to
philosophers. Seneca repudiates this view: omnia enim ista sagacitas
hominum, non sapientia inuenit.
Seneca touches on the possibility of the discovery of new lands beyond
the ocean in a passage in his Medea (374 sqq.) which has been often
quoted:
uenient annis secula seris, quibus oceanus uincula rerum laxet et ingens
pateat tellus Tiphysque novos detegat orbes, ... nec sit terris ultima
Thule.]

4.
There was however a school of philosophical speculation, which might
have led to the foundation of a theory of Progress, if the historical
outlook of the Greeks had been larger and if their temper had been
different. The Atomic theory of Democritus seems to us now, in many