His early book, _L’Avenir de la Science_, glows with ardent belief in this assured progress, which is bound up with his confidence in science and rationality. “Our creed,” he there declares, “is the reasonableness of progress.” This idea of progress is almost as central a point in Renan’s thought as it was in that of Comte, and he gave it a more metaphysical significance. His general philosophy owes much to history, and for him the philosophy of history is the explanation of progress. By this term he means an ever-growing tendency to perfection, to fuller consciousness and life, to nobler, better and more beautiful ends. He thinks it necessary to conceive of a sort of inner spring, urging all things on to fuller life. He seems here to anticipate vaguely the central conception of Guyau and of Bergson. But, like Taine, Renan founds his doctrine of progress on rationalism. He well expresses this in one of his _Drames philosophiques (L’Eau de Jouvence)_, through the mouth of Prospero, who represents rational thought. This character declares that “it is science which brings about social progress, and not progress which gives rise to science. Science only asks from society to have granted to it the conditions necessary to its life and to produce a sufficient number of minds capable of understanding it.”[4] In the preface written for this drama he declares that science or reason will ultimately succeed in creating the power and force of government in humanity.
[4] _L’Eau de Jouvence_, Act 4, Scene I., Conclusion.
These thoughts re-echo many of the sentiments voiced on behalf of progress by Condorcet, Saint-Simon and Comte. It is interesting, however, to note an important point on which Renan not only parts company with them, but ranges himself in opposition to them. This point is that of socialism or democracy, call it what one will.
In the spring of 1871 Renan was detained at Versailles during the uproar of the Commune in Paris, and there wrote his _Dialogues et Fragments philosophiques_, which were published five years later. In these pages certain doctrines of progress and history are set forth, notably in the “dialogues of three philosophers of that school whose ground-principles are the cult of the ideal, the negation of the supernatural and the investigation of reality.” Renan raises a discussion of the end of the world’s development. The universe, he maintains, is not devoid of purpose: it pursues an ideal end. This goal to which the evolutionary process moves is the reign of reason. But there are striking limitations to this advance. From this kingdom of reason on the earth the mass of men are shut out. Renan does not believe in a gradual improvement of the mass of mankind accompanied by a general rationalisation which is democratic. The truth is that Renan was an intellectual aristocrat and, as such, he abhorred Demos. His gospel of culture, upon which he lays the greatest stress, is for the few who are called and chosen, while the many remain outside the pale, beyond the power of the salvation he offers. The development of the democratic idea he looks upon as thoroughly mischievous, inasmuch as it involves, in his opinion, degeneration, a levelling down to mediocrity. In his philosophy of history he adopts an attitude somewhat akin to that of Carlyle in his worship of Great Men. The end of history is, Renan states, the production of men of genius. The great mass of men, the common stuff of humanity, he likens to the soil from which these Great Ones grow. The majority of men have their existence justified only by the appearance upon the scene of “Heroes of Culture.” In this teaching the parallelism to the gospel of the Superman is apparent, yet it seems clear that although Renan’s man of culture despises the ignorance and vulgarity of the crowd, he does so condescendingly as a benefactor, and is free from the passionate hatred and scorn to which Nietzsche’s Superman is addicted. Nevertheless, Renan’s attitude of uncompromising hostility to democratic development is very marked. He couples his confidence in Science to his anti-democratic views, and affirms the “Herd” to be incapable of culture. Although the process of rationalisation and the establishment of the kingdom of reason is applicable only to the patrician and not to the _plebs_, this process is claimed by Renan to be capable of great extension, not in the number of its adherents but in the extent of culture. In this final reign of reason, instinctive action and impulse will be replaced by deliberation, and science will succeed religion.