History and Providence

320 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY especially that on Coleridge, require to be supplemented by exploration in these two authors themselves. He accepts, without comment, Mill's predominantly secular reading of Coleridge, who was nothing if not a religious philosopher, and proceeds to disregard the whole religious motive in nineteenth-century thought: Newman is not even dismissed as obsolete, or left to be got up from secondary sources: he is ignored. Critical of some deficiencies in Philosophical Radicalism, Mr. Leavis has nothing to say of Philosophical Conservatism: Burke does not rate a backward, nor Disraeli a forward, glance; yet Coleridge was the great exponent of Philosophical Conservatism. On Idealism, in its German and its English sources, Mr. Leavis is equally silent, though Mill is not. This is a grave deficiency in any introduction to nineteenthcentury thought, and perhaps accounts for the dismissal of Carlyle to limbo since it leaves no point of connection for his greatest work, Sartor Resartus. We hear nothing, really, of the Empirical tradition, which Bentham represents, Coleridge criticizes, and Mill discusses. We hear nothing of natural science and its relation to, and modification of, this tradition, in Mill himself, in Darwin, Herbert Spencer, T. H. Huxley, and Samuel Butler. We hear nothing of the conflict of science and religion, and nothing of the adjustments of literature and science in education (which Arnold discusses and whose results are with us today ).... In short, there are a good many objects visible from Brighton Pier, some close at hand, others more distant, upon which our discoverer bestows no attention, as he sweeps the horizon for vessels not yet in sight. Or, to abandon metaphor, there are important authors and issues in nineteenth-century thought for whom and which it would be worthwhile to postpone, if unavoidable, the perusal of Mrs. Webb, Dr. Richards, and Mr. Eliot. HISTORY AND PROVIDENCE' WILLIAM BLiSSEIT A "study in the background of the idea of progress" may be expected to relate its findings to the body of material presented in J. B. Bury's classic work on the subject and to the researches into primitivism and related ideas by the Johns Hopkins school. Professor Tuveson's does so, but with such significant modifications of its own as to mark a distinctly new phase in the historical study of the idea. Following out a suggestion of Professor R. S. Crane in his article on "Anglican Apolo- *Millennium and Utopia: A Study in the Background of the Idea of Progress. By ERNEST Lee TUVESON . Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1949. Pp. xiv, 341. $6.50. REVIEWS 32 1 getics and the Idea of Progress" (Modern Philology, XXXI, 1934, 273 ff.), that the conception of history as development under Providence is pervasive in Christian thought of the Early Church and the Middle Ages, he argues for the modification-though not the rejection --{)f Bury's contention that the conditions for a theory of progress did not exist before the eighteenth century. Nways latent and often manifest in the theological writing of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is this general Christian view of the course of history under Providence; and in speculation as to the meaning of the prophecies in the Apocalypse and especially of the promised millennium, a train of thought is initiated which will lead eventually to the full, secularized concept. While the appropriation by some eighteenth-century rationalists of the Christian idea of a Heavenly City has been discussed at length by Professor Carl Becker, this thread has not until now been followed back into the period of the Renaissance and Reformation; and the sources of progressivism before the eighteenth century have been sought, by Professor R. F. Jones and others, almost exclusively in the early scientists and the secular historians with their "modernist" or "cyclical" views of the course of history. While Tuveson gives this investigation its due, he maintains that the dynamic of later progressivism -a more interesting feature than its rather 'shallow content of thought-was to be supplied not from the scientists' or historians' assumption of the possibility of advance or of cyclical return but from the conviction of speculative theologians (and their host of readers)springing from...