7.5 The Age of Progress and Modernity

The French thinker Auguste Comte founded positivism in the 1830s and 1840s. He argued that human thinking passes through three stages: religious, then philosophical, then scientific (positive). Only knowledge gained through observation and experiment was real, and society itself could be studied scientifically; Comte coined the word sociology.

The century's achievements seemed to prove him right. Louis Pasteur showed that microorganisms cause fermentation and disease, developed pasteurization and a rabies vaccine (1885). Robert Koch identified the bacteria that cause tuberculosis (1882) and cholera (1883). Joseph Lister introduced antiseptic surgery in the 1860s. Dmitri Mendeleev organized the periodic table (1869). Together with railways, electricity and falling death rates, these advances encouraged a belief in progress that peaked around 1900.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche rejected both Christian morality and the Enlightenment faith in reason. He declared that “God is dead,” meaning that belief in God no longer held European culture together, and warned that Europeans had not faced what this meant. He argued that conventional morality was a “slave morality” that rewarded weakness, and he praised the will to power and an ideal of the Übermensch (superman or overman) who would create his own values.

Nietzsche was not a nationalist or anti-Semite, and he scorned both, but after his death his ideas were selectively quoted to glorify struggle and strong leaders. More and more thinkers treated instinct and will, not logic, as the real forces in human life, and some came to see struggle and conflict as the engine of progress. Other thinkers also stressed the irrational: Henri Bergson emphasized intuition and a vital force, and Georges Sorel argued that violence and myths could inspire workers more than reason.

Sigmund Freud, a Viennese doctor, developed psychoanalysis. In The Interpretation of Dreams (published 1899, dated 1900) he argued that much of the mind is unconscious: hidden desires and fears, often sexual and rooted in childhood, shape what we do without our knowing it. Dreams, slips of the tongue and neurotic symptoms were clues to these hidden forces. Later he described the mind as a conflict among the id (instinctive drives), the ego (the reasoning self) and the superego (conscience).

Freud's work challenged the Enlightenment image of humans as rational beings in control of themselves. If irrational forces drive people, then reason, education and progress might not be enough to improve society.

Newton's physics had pictured a predictable universe of solid matter moving by fixed laws. New discoveries complicated this picture. Research on radioactivity by Henri Becquerel and by Marie and Pierre Curie in the late 1890s showed that atoms were not solid, unchanging building blocks and could give off energy. Max Planck proposed in 1900 that energy is given off in small packets, called quanta. Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity (1905) showed that measurements of time and space depend on the observer's motion, and that mass and energy are related (E = mc²).

These ideas did not make science less reliable, but they made the universe seem less certain and harder to picture, and they undermined the feeling that the basic laws of nature were already known. Together with Nietzsche and Freud, they encouraged a new relativism, the sense that values and even knowledge depend on point of view, which shaped modernism in thought and the arts. They also led, decades later, to nuclear energy and weapons (8.10).