R. Nisbet Bain - The Cambridge Modern History

At this point, where France retires for a time from the stage, leaving England to enter upon it and open the drama of Anglo-American history, we drop the thread of events to resume our survey of the effect produced by the discovery and unveiling of the New World on European ideas and intellectual habits. The complete revolution in geography, which now suddenly revealed to man his gross ignorance in the most elementary field of knowledge—the earth beneath his feet—had a wider effect. It shook the existing system of the sciences, though it had not as yet the effect of shattering it, much less of replacing it by something more nearly in accordance with the truth of things. It produced in many—over and above the suspicion already long harboured in logical minds, that neither the accepted doctrine and practice of the Catholic Church nor any modification of it likely to meet with acceptance in its place, could possibly represent the true construction of God’s will revealed in Scripture—that sense of general intellectual insecurity which is best named “scepticism.” Charron’s future motto, “Que sais-je?,” became the leading motive in intellectual conduct. It is impossible to attempt here to trace this movement in its entirety; we can but select three writers, belonging to three successive generations, and all prominent among their contemporaries as pioneers of new paths of thought, and all of whom avowedly derived much of their inspiration from the events briefly noticed above. All three were laymen; a fact not in itself devoid of significance. The writings of ecclesiastics during this period, even in the case of distinguished humanists such as Bembo or Erasmus, show scarcely a trace of the same influence. The control of thought was passing away from the Church. All three, too, were lawyers, and two of them were Lord Chancellors of England. Sir Thomas More, born ten years before the voyage of Colombo, wrote and published his Utopia in 1516, soon after the Pacific had been first descried from a mountain in Darien, and while the Spaniards in the Antilles were gathering the information which led to the conquest of Mexico and Peru, both as yet unknown. This admirable classic of the Renaissance, too keen in its satire and too refined in its feeling to have any practical effect commensurate with the acceptance which it instantly won among cultivated and thoughtful contemporaries, was avowedly suggested by the discovery and settlement of the new Western World. What possibilities of discovery, not merely in the realm of geography, but in that of social organisation, morals, and politics, were laid open by this amazing revelation of a strange world of oceans, islands and continents, covering one-third of the sphere! The extent of America to the westward, with all that lay beyond, was as yet unknown; and More was not exceeding the limits of those possibilities when he described a traveller, who had accompanied Vespucci in his last voyage, as remaining in South America with a few companions and making their way westwards home by shore and sea, thus anticipating the circumnavigation of the globe which a few more years were to see achieved. The traveller’s name is Hythlodaeus, or Expert in Nonsense; and none among the countries visited by him so strongly arrests his attention as the island of Utopia, or Nowhere, where the traditional absurdities dominant in the Old World are unknown, and society is constituted on a humane and reasonable basis. Utopia is an aristocratic republic, in which the officers of government, elected annually, are presided over by a chief magistrate elected for life. Everyone is engaged in agriculture, and drones are banished from the hive; it is an accepted principle that every man has a natural right to so much of the earth as is necessary for his subsistence, and may lawfully dispossess of his land any possessor who leaves it untilled. Even the generous imagination of More did not rise to the conception of a state of society in which slavery was unknown: and the labouring population of Utopia are still slaves. Not that they are held as private property, for private property is unknown. Whatever is valuable is held as it were on lease from the community, on condition of making such use of it as shall enure for the public benefit. The family is patriarchally governed; there is no coinage; gold and silver are not used as ornaments, but are only applied to the basest purposes, and precious stones serve only to adorn children. The energies of the Utopians, released from the empty employments of Old World life, are concentrated on the development of learning and science. Many of them worship the heavenly bodies and the distinguished dead, but the majority are theists. Their priests are chosen by popular election: they have few and excellent laws, but no professional lawyers; they detest war, but are well armed, and fight intrepidly when necessary, though by preference they employ a neighbouring nation of herdsmen as mercenaries. The temples of the Utopians are private buildings, and there is no worship of images. No living thing is offered in sacrifice, though incense is burned, and wax candles are lighted during the service of God, and vocal and instrumental music is practised in connexion with it. But in all religious matters there is absolute toleration. There is indeed a limited exception in favour of the immortality of the soul, and a future state of rewards and punishments, belief in both of which is thought to be essential to good citizenship. Yet even those who reject these doctrines are tolerated, on the principle that a man cannot make himself believe that which he might desire to believe, but which his reason compels him to reject: these, however, are regarded as base and sordid natures, and excluded from public offices and honours. The attitude of the Utopians towards Christianity, of which they hear for the first time from Hythlodaeus, is described as favourable: what chiefly disposes them to receive it is its original doctrine of community of goods. Before the strangers quit Utopia, many of the inhabitants have embraced Christianity and received baptism. The question of the Christian priesthood presents a difficulty. All the European travellers are laymen; how then can the Utopian Christians obtain the services of duly qualified pastors? They settle this question for themselves. Applying the established principle of popular election, they hold that one so chosen could effectually do all things pertaining to the priestly office, notwithstanding the lack of authority derived through the successors of St Peter. Although Christianity is thus permitted and even encouraged, its professors are forbidden to be unduly zealous for its propagation; a Christian convert who condemns other religions as profane, and declares their adherents doomed to everlasting punishment, is found guilty of sedition and banished. The Utopia, it will be seen, is no mere academic imitation of Plato’s Republic. Specifically, the New World has little to do with its details. It was the mere possibilities suggested by the New World which occasioned this remarkable picture of a state of society diametrically opposed to the aspect of contemporary Europe. More’s romance lost its hold on public attention, as soon as headstrong enthusiasts on the Continent endeavoured to realise some of its fundamental principles; but at a later date, through the founders of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, it had some ultimate effect on, as it took its motive from, the New World which was beginning to stir European minds to their depths at the time when it was written.

From More we turn to a writer of a later generation, remarkable for the freedom and independence of his mental attitude towards contemporary ideas and institutions, and who avows in more than one place that the New World profoundly modified his habits of thought. No close reader of Montaigne will dispute that the contemplation of the New World, in connexion with the events which happened after its discovery, greatly contributed to give him that large grasp of things, that mental habit of charity and comprehensiveness, something of which passed from him to Bacon and to Shakspere, both diligent students of his writings. Michel de Montaigne, a French advocate and country gentleman, who may be called the Plato of modern philosophical literature, was born in 1533, when Pizarro was overrunning Peru. During his life the New World was growing ever larger in the eyes of mankind; and as it drew him to itself, by a species of intellectual gravitation, it detached him from the standing-ground of his time, and raised him in a corresponding degree far above it. The facts of aboriginal American history and ethnology, narrated by the Conquistadores and by other travellers, sank deeply into his mind; and his knowledge of the New World was not mere book-learning. As a counsellor of Bordeaux, he often came in contact with merchants and seamen who were familiar with America; but his chief source of information was a man in his own service, who had lived ten or twelve years in Brazil, whom he describes as a plain ignorant fellow, but from whom he seems never to have been weary of learning at first hand. Before Colombo’s voyage the savage or “brute man” had been as little known in Europe, and was in fact as much of a myth, as the unicorn or griffin. When Montaigne wrote, he had become as well known as the Moor, the Berber, or the Guinea negro, and the spectacle of a new transatlantic continent, scarcely less extensive than the aggregate of those Old World countries of which Europe possessed any definite knowledge, and peopled by men scarcely above the state of nature, seized the French philosopher with a strange fascination. By its contrast with European life it suggested some startling reflections. What if civilisation, after all, were a morbid and unnatural growth? What if the condition of man in America were that for which the Creator designed him? What if those omnipotent powers, law and custom, as at present constituted, were impudent usurpers, destined one day to decline under the influence of right reason, and to give place, if not to the original rule of beneficent Nature, at least to something essentially very different from the systems which now passed under their names? Montaigne puts these questions very pointedly. In the Tupi-Guarani of Brazil, as described by one who had known them long and intimately, he recognised nothing of the character associated with the words “barbarous” and “savage.” They were rather a people permanently enjoying the fabled Golden Age of ancient poetry; strangers to the toils, diseases, social inequalities, vices, and trickeries which chiefly made up civilised life; dwelling together in vast common houses, though the institutions of the family were strictly preserved, and enjoying with little or no labour, and no fears for the future, all the reasonable commodities and advantages of human life, while knowing nothing of its superfluities; refined in their taste for poetry, specimens of which were recited to him by his domestic informant, and which appeared to him Anacreontic in their grace and beauty: and employed chiefly in the chase, the universal pleasure of the human race, even in the highest state of refinement. This they carried, perhaps, a stage too far. They hunted their neighbouring tribesman for his flesh, and, like others among the more advanced American peoples, were cannibals—a name which Montaigne used as the title of the laudatory tractate here quoted. What of that? Civilised man, says the philosopher, who practically enforces servitude on nine-tenths of the human race, consumes the flesh and blood of his fellow-man alive. Is it not worse to eat one’s fellow-man alive, than to eat him dead? These Americans torture their prisoners, it is true; worse tortures are inflicted in civilised Europe, in the sacred names of justice and religion. We Europeans regard these our fellow-men with contempt and aversion. Are we, in the sight of God, much better than they? Have we done, are we doing, by our fellow-man at home, according to the light which is, or should be, within us?