The idea of progress

Inge, W.R.

The idea of progress

67

1920
c. 1
ROBA

__ _.OMANES LECTURE

19x0

T 'be Idea of
Progress

BY

W. R. INGE

C.V.O., D.D., Hon. Fellow of Hertford College

DELIVERED ' . "

IN THE SHELDONIAN THEATRE

27 MAY, 1920

OXFORD

AT THE CLARENDON PRESS

1920

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON EDINBURGH GLASGOW NEW YORK

TORONTO MELBOURNE CAPE TOWN BOMBAY

! ' HUMPHREY MILFORD

PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY

( 3 )

The Idea of 'Progress

THE belief in Progress, not as an ideal but as an
indisputable fact, not as a task for humanity but as a
law of Nature, has been the working faith of the West
for about a hundred and fifty years. Some would have
us believe that it is a long neglected part of the
Christian revelation, others that it is a modern dis-
covery. The ancient Pagans, we are told, put their\
golden age in the past ; we put ours in the future. The
Greeks prided themselves on being the degenerate
descendants of gods, we on being the very creditable
descendants of monkeys. The Romans endeavoured -
to preserve the wisdom and virtue of the past, we to
anticipate the wisdom and virtue of the future. This,
however, is an exaggeration. The theory of progress »
and the theory of decadence are equally natural, and s
have in fact been held concurrently wherever men have
speculated about their origin, their present condition,
and their future prospects. Among the Jews the theory
of decadence derived an inspired authority from Genesis,
but the story of the Fall had very little influence upon
the thought of that tenaciously optimistic race. Among
the Greeks, who had the melancholy as well as the
buoyancy of youth, it was authorized by Hesiod, whose
scheme of retrogression, from the age of gold to the age
of iron, was never forgotten in antiquity. Sophocles, in
a well-known chorus imitated by Bacon, holds that the
best fate for men is ' not to be born, or being born to
die*. Aratus develops the pessimistic mythology of

2379 A 2

4 TH E I DE A

Hesiod. In the golden age Dike or Astraea wandered
about the earth freely; in the silver age her visits
became fewer, and in the brazen age she set out for
s* heaven and became the constellation Virgo. Perhaps
Horace had read the lament of the goddess : ' What
a race the golden sires have left — worse than their
fathers ; and your offspring will be baser still.' In the
third century after Christ, when civilization was really
crumbling, Pagans and Christians join in a chorus of
woe. On the other side, the triumphs of man over
nature are celebrated by the great tragedians, and the
Introduction to the First Book of Thucydides sketches
the past history of Greece in the spirit of the nineteenth
century. Lucretius has delighted our anthropologists
by his brilliant and by no means idealized description of
savage life, and it is to him that we owe the blessed
word Progress in its modern sense.

1 Usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientes.
sic unum quicquid paulatim protrahit aetas
in medium, ratioque in luminis erigit oras/

liny believes that each age is better than the last.
Seneca, in a treatise, parts of which were read in the
Middle Ages, reminds us that ' not a thousand years
have passed since Greece counted and named the stars,
and it is only recently that we have learned why the
moon is eclipsed. Posterity will be amazed that we did
not know some things that will seem obvious to them/
' The world ', he adds, ' is a poor affair if it does not
contain matter for investigation for men in every
age. We imagine that we are initiated into the mysteries
of Nature ; but we are still hanging about her outer
courts.^ These last are memorable utterances, even if
Seneca confines his optimism to the pleasure of explor-

OFPROGRESS 5

ing Nature's secrets. The difference between Rousseau,
who admired the simple life, and Condorcet, who be-
lieved in modern civilization, was no new one ; it was
a common theme of discussion in antiquity, and the
ancients were well aware that the same process may be
called either progress or decline. As Freeman says, ' In
history every step in advance has also been a step back-
wards '. (The picture is a little difficult to visualize, but
the meaning is plain.) The fruit of the tree of know-
ledge always drives man from some paradise or other ;
and even the paradise of fools is not an unpleasant
abode while it is habitable. Few emblematic pictures
are more striking than the Melencolia (as he spells it)
of Durer, representing the Spirit of the race sitting
mournfully among all her inventions : and this was at
the beginning of the age of discovery! But the deepest
thought o£ antiquity was neither optimistic nor pessi-
mistic/Ot was that progress and retrogression are only
the incoming and outgoing tide in an unchanging
The pulse of the universe beats in an alternate expan-
sion and contraction. f<fhe result is a series of cycles,
in which history repeats itself. Plato contemplates a
world-cycle of 36,000 solar years, during which the
Creator guides the course of events ; after which he
relaxes his hold of the machine, and a period of the
same length follows, during which the world gradually
degenerates^/ When this process is complete, the
Creator restores again the original conditions, and a
new cycle begins. Aristotle thinks that all the arts and
sciences have been discovered and lost ' an infinite
number of times'. Virgil in the Fourth Eclogue tries
to please Augustus by predicting the near approach of
a new golden age, which, he says, is now due. This
doctrine of recurrence is not popular to-day; but

A3

6 THE IDEA

whether we like it or not, no other view of the macro-
cosm is even tenable. Even if those physicists are
right who hold that the universe is running down like
a clock, that belief postulates a moment in past time
when the clock was wound up; and whatever power
it up once may presumably wind it up again,
doctrine of cycles was held by Goethe, who, in
reply to Eckermann's remark that 'the progress of
humanity seems to be a matter of thousands of years ',
answered, ' Perhaps of millions. Men will become more
clever and discerning, but not better or happier, except
for limited periods. I see the time coming when God
will take no more pleasure in our race, and must again
proceed to a rejuvenated creation. I am sure that the
time and hour in the distant future are already fixed for
the beginning of this epoch. But we can still for
thousands of years enjoy ourselves on this dear old
playground of ours/ Nietzsche also maintained the
law of recurrence, and so did the Danish philosophic
theologian Kierkegaard. Shelley's fine poem, 'The
world's great age begins anew ', is based upon it. Still,
I must admit that on the whole the ancients did tend to
regard time as the enemy : ' damnosa quid non imminuit
dies ? J they would have thought the modern notion of
human perfectibility at once absurd and impious.

The Dark Ages knew that they were dark, and we
hear little talk about progress during those seven
centuries which, as far as we can see, might have been
cut out of history without any great loss to posterity.
The Middle Ages (which we ought never to confuse
with the Dark Ages), though they developed an interest-
ing type of civilization, set their hopes mainly on another
world. The Church has never encouraged the belief
that this world is steadily improving ; the Middle Ages,

OFPROGRESS 7

like the early Christians, would have been quite content
to see the earthly career of the race closed in their own
time. Even Roger Bacon, who is claimed as the
precursor of modern science, says, that all wise men
believe that we are not far from the time of Antichrist,
which was to be the herald of the end. The Renais-
sance was a conscious recovery from the longest and
dreariest set-back that humanity has ever experienced
within the historical period — a veritable glacial age of
the spirit. At this time men were too full of admiration
and reverence for the newly recovered treasures of
antiquity to look forward to the future. In the seven-
teenth century a doctrine of progress was already in the
air, and a long literary battle was waged between the
Ancients and the Moderns. But it was only in t
eighteenth century that Western Europe began to
dream of an approaching millennium without miracle,
to be gradually ushered in under the auspices of a
faculty which was called Reason. Unlike some of their
successors, these optimists believed that perfection was
to be attained by the self-determination of the human
will ; they were not fatalists. In France, the chief home
of this heady doctrine, the psychical temperature soon
began to rise under its influence, till it culminated in the
delirium of the Terror. The Goddess of Reason hardly
survived Robespierre and his guillotine-fout the belief
in progress, which might otherwise have subsided
when the French resumed their traditional pursuits—
'rem militarem et argute loqui'— was reinforced by
the industrial revolution, which was to run a very
different course from that indicated by the theatrical dis-
turbances at Paris between 1789 and 1794, the impor-
tance of which has perhaps been exaggerate^/ In
England above all, the home of the new industry,

8 T HE IDEA

progress was regarded (in the words which Mr. Mallock
puts into the mouth of a nineteenth-century scientist)
as that kind of improvement which can be measured by
statistics. This was quite s^v^usly the view of the last
century generally, and tnere has never been, nor will
there ever be again, such an opportunity for gloating
over this kind of improvement. The mechanical inven-
tions of Watt, Arkwright, Crompton, Stephenson, and
others led to an unparalleled increase of population.
Exports and imports also progressed, in a favourite
phrase of the time, by leaps and bounds. Those who,
like Malthus, sounded a note of warning, showing that
population increases, unlike the supply of food, by geo-
metrical progression, were answered that compound
interest follows the same admirable law. It was obvious
to many of our grandparents that a nation which travels
sixty miles an hour must be five times as civilized as
one which travels only twelve, and that, as Glanvill had
already declared in the reign of Charles II, we owe
more gratitude to the inventor of the mariner's compass
' than to a thousand Alexanders and Caesars, or to ten
times the number of Aristotles '. The historians of the
time could not contain their glee in recording these
triumphs. Only the language of religion seemed appro-
priate in contemplating so magnificent a spectacle. If
they had read Herder, they would have quoted with
approval his prediction that 'the flower of humanity,
captive still in its germ, will blossom out one day into
the true form of man like unto God, in a state of which
no man on earth can imagine the greatness and the
majesty'. Determinism was much in vogue by this
time; but why should determinism be a depressing
creed ? The law which we cannot escape is the blessed
law of progress — ' that kind of improvement that can be

OF PROGRESS 9

measured by statistics'. We had only to thank our
stars for placing us in such an environment, and to
carry out energetically the course of development which
Nature has prescribed for us, and to resist which would
be at once impious and futile.

Thus the superstition of progress " ;.- firmly estab-
lished. To become a popular religion, it is only
necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.
The superstition of progress had the singular good
fortune to enslave at least three philosophies— those of
Hegel, of Comte, and of Darwin. The strange thing is
that none of these philosophies is really favourable to
the belief which it was supposed to support. Leaving
for the present the German and the French thinkers,
we observe with astonishment that many leading men
in Queen Victoria's reign found it possible to use the
great biological discovery of Darwin to tyrannize over
the minds of their contemporaries, to give their blessing
to the economic and social movements of their time,
and to unite determinism with teleology in the highly
edifying manner to which I have already referred.
Scientific optimism was no doubt rampant before Darwin.
For example, Herschel says : * Man's progress towards
a higher state need never fear a check, but must
continue till the very last existence of histor^>* But
""Herbert Spencer asserts the perfectibility of man with
I an assurance which makes us gasp. ' Progress is not
an accident but a necessity. What we call evil and
j immorality must disappear. It is certain that man
1 must become perfect.' ' The ultimate development of
the ideal man is certain — as certain as any conclusion in
1 which we place the most implicit faith ; for instance,
Ithat all men will die.' ' Always towards perfection is
jthe mighty movement — towards a complete develop
Tnent and a more unmixed good.'

io T H E I D E A

t

It has been pointed out by Mr. Bradley that these
apocalyptic prophecies have nothing whatever to do with
Darwinism. If we take the so-called doctrine of evolu-
tion in Nature as a metaphysics of existence, which
Darwin never intended it to be, ' there is in the world
nojjiing_like value, or goodj or evil. Anything imply-
ing evolution, in the ordinary sense of development or
progress, is wholly rejected/ The survival of the fittest
does not mean that the most virtuous or the most useful
or the most beautiful or even the most complex survive ;
there is no moral or aesthetic judgement pronounced on
the process or any part of it. ' Darwinism ', Mr. Bradley
goes on to say, ' often recommends itself because it is
confused with a doctrine of evolution which is radically
different. Humanity is taken in that doctrine as a real
being, or even as the one real being ; and humanity (it
is said) advances continuously. Its history is develop-
ment and progress towards a goal, because the type and
character in which its reality consists is gradually
brought more and more into fact. That which is
strongest on the whole must therefore be good, and the
ideas which come to prevail must therefore be true.
This doctrine, though I certainly cannot accept it, for
good or evil more or less dominates or sways our minds
to an extent of which most of us perhaps are danger-
ously unaware. Any such view of course conflicts
radically with Danvinism, w^kJLjanly teaches that the
true idea is the idea which prevails.

in the_end with no criterion at all/ It may further be
suggested that Spencer's optimism depends on the trans-
missibility of acquired characters; but this is too
dangerous a subject for a layman in science to discuss.

Although the main facts of cosmic evolution, and the
main course of human history from Pithecanthropus

OFPROGRESS n

downwards, are well known to all my hearers, and to
some of them much better than to myself, it may be
worth while to recall to you, in bald and colourless
language, what science really tells us about the nature
and destiny of our species. It is so different from the
gay colours of the rhapsodists whom I have just quoted,
that we must be amazed that such doctrines should ever
have passed for scientific. Astronomy gives us a picture
of a wilderness of space, probably boundless, sparsely
sown with aggregations of elemental particles in all
stages of heat and cold. These heavenly bodies are in
some cases growing hotter, in other cases growing
colder ; but the fate of every globe must be, sooner or
later, to become cold and dead, like the moon. Our
sun, from which we derive the warmth which makes
our life possible, is, I believe, an elderly star, which
has long outlived the turbulent heats of youth, and is
on its way to join the most senile class of luminiferous
bodies, in which the star Antares is placed. When
a star has once become cold, it must apparently remain
dead until some chance collision sets the whole cycle
going again. From time to time a great conflagration
in the heavens, which occurred perhaps in the seven-
teenth century, becomes visible from this earth; and
we may imagine, if we will, that two great solar systems
have been reduced in a moment to incandescent gas.
But space is probably so empty that the most pugna-
cious of astral knights-errant might wander for billions
of years without meeting an opponent worthy of its
bulk. .If timf* as wHI RS spa™* is' infinity worlds must

h^_hnrr^ an^ <Ji^ innnmprflhlft tim^-S however few and

far between theiii_pp.rinHs nf ..artivity may he. Of pro-
gress, in such a system tgken as a whole, thftrff ran not
j>e_au_tnice. Nor can there be any doubt about the fate

2379 A 4

12 T H E I D E A

of our own planet. Man and all his achievements will
one day be obliterated like a child's sand-castle when
the next tide comes in. Lucretius, who gave us the
word progress, has told us our ultimate fate in sonorous
lines :

' Quorum naturam triplicem, tria corpora, Memmi,
tres species tarn dissimiles, tria talia texta,
una dies dabit exitio, multosque per annos
sustentata ruet moles et machina mundi '.

The racial life of the species to which we happen to
belong is a brief episode even in the brief life of the
planet. And what we call civilization or culture, though
much older than we used to suppose, is a brief episode
in the life of our race. For tens of thousands of years
the changes in our habits must have been very slight,
and chiefly those which were forced upon our rude
ancestors by changes of climate. Then in certain
districts man began, as Samuel Butler says, to wish to
live beyond his income. This was the beginning of the
vast series of inventions which have made our life so
complex. And, we used to be told, the 'law of all
progress is the same, the evolution of the simple into
the complex by successive differentiations '. This is the
gospel according to Herbert Spencer. As a universal
law of nature, it is ludicrously untrue. Some species
have survived by becoming more complex, others, like
the whole tribe of parasites, by becoming more simple.
On the whole, perhaps the parasites have had the best
of it. The progressive species have in many cases
flourished for a while and then paid the supreme penalty.
The living dreadnoughts of the Saurian age have left us
their bones, but no progeny. But the microbes, one of
which had the honour of killing Alexander the Great at
the age of thirty-two, and so changing the whole course

OF PROGRESS 13

of history, survive and flourish. The microbe illustrates
the wisdom of the maxim, XdOe /ifraxra?. It took thou-
sands of years to find him out. Our own species, being
rather poorly provided by nature for offence and defence,
had to live by its wits, and so came to the top. It
developed many new needs, and set itself many insoluble
problems. Physiologists like Metchnikoff have shown
how very ill-adapted our bodies are to the tasks which
we impose upon them; and in spite of the Spencerian
identification of complexity with progress, our surgeons
try to simplify our structure by forcibly removing
various organs which they assure us that we do not
need. If we turn to history for a confirmation of the
Spencerian doctrine, we find, on the contrary, that
civilization is a disease which is almost invariably fatal,
unless its course is checked in time. The Hindus and
Chinese, after advancing to a certain point, were content
to mark time ; and they survive. But the Greeks and
Romans are gone; and aristocracies everywhere die
out. Do we not see to-day the complex organization of
the ecclesiastic and college don succumbing before the
simple squeezing and sucking organs of the profiteer
and trade-unionist ? If so-called civilized nations show
any protracted vitality, it is because they are only
civilized at the top. Ancient civilizations were destroyed
by imported barbarians ; we breed our own.

It is also an unproved assumption that the domination
of the planet by our own species is a desirable thing,
which must give satisfaction to its Creator. We have
devastated the loveliness of the world ; we have exter-
minated several species more beautiful and less vicious
than ourselves ; we have enslaved the rest of the animal
creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and
feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able

AS

14 T H E I D E A

to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in
human form. If it is progress to turn the fields and
woods of Essex into East and West Ham, we may be
thankful that progress is a sporadic and transient
phenomenon in history. It is a pity that our biologists,
instead of singing paeans to Progress and thereby stulti-
fying their own speculations, have not preached us
sermons on the sin of racial self-idolatry, a topic which
really does arise out of their studies. ' Uanthropolatrie,
voila I'ennemi', is the real ethical motto of biological
science, and a valuable contribution to morals.

It was impossible that such shallow optimism as that
of Herbert Spencer should not arouse protests from
other scientific thinkers. Hartmann had already shown
how a system of pessimism, resembling that of
Schopenhauer, may be built upon the foundation of
evolutionary science. And in this place we are not
likely to forget the second Romanes Lecture, when
Professor Huxley astonished his friends and opponents
alike .by throwing down the gauntlet in the face of
Nature, and bidding mankind to find salvation by accept-
ing for itself the position which the early Christian
writer Hippolytus gives as a definition of the Devil-
'he who resists the cosmic process' (6 avriraTTtov rols
Koo-ftiKois.) The revolt was not in reality so sudden as
some of Huxley's hearers supposed. He had already
realized that l so far from gradual progress forming any
necessary part of the Darwinian creed, it appears to us
that it is perfectly consistent with indefinite persistence
in one state, or with a gradual retrogression. Suppose,
e. g., a return of the glacial period or a spread of polar
climatical conditions over the whole globe/ The
alliance between determinism and optimism was thus
dissolved ; and as time went on, Huxley began to see in

OFPROGRESS 15

the cosmic process something like a power of evil. The
natural process, he told us in this place, has no tendency
to bring about the good of mankind. Cosmic nature is
no school of virtue, but the head-quarters of the enemy
of ethical nature. Nature is the realm of tiger-rights ;
it has no morals and no ought-to-be; its only rights are
brutal powers. Morality exists only in the 'artificial'
moral world: man is a glorious rebel, a Prometheus
defying Zeus. This strange rebound into Manicheism
sounded like a blasphemy against all the gods whom the
lecturer was believed to worship, and half-scandalized
even the clerics in his audience. It was bound to raise
the question whether this titanic revolt against the
cosmic process has any chance of success. One recent
thinker, who accepts Huxley's view that the nature of
things is cruel and immoral, is willing to face the
probability that we cannot resist it with any prospect of
victory. Mr. Bertrand Russell, in his arresting essay,
'A Free Man's Worship', shows us Prometheus again,
but Prometheus chained to the rock and still hurling
defiance against God. He proclaims the moral bank-
ruptcy of naturalism, which he yet holds to be forced
upon us. ' That man is the product of causes which
had no prevision of the end they were achieving ; that
his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and
his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations
of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of
thought and feeling, can preserve an individual beyond
the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the
devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness
of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast
death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of
man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath
the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not

i6 THE IDEA

quite beyond dispute^ are yet so nearly certain, that no
philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand.
Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the
firm .foundation, of unyielding despair, can the soul's
habitation henceforth be safely built. ' Man belongs to
1 ah alien and inhuman world ', alone amid ' hostile
forces '. What is man to do ? The God who exists is
evil ; the God whom we can worship is the creation of
our own conscience, and has no existence outside it.
The ' free man ' will worship the latter ; and, like John
Stuart Mill, ' to hell he will go '.

If I wished to criticize this defiant pronouncement,
which is not without a touch of bravado, I should say
that so complete a separation of the real from the ideal
is impossible, and that the choice which the writer
offers us, of worshipping a Devil who exists or a God
who does not, is no real choice, since we cannot worship
either. But my object in quoting from this essay is to
show how completely naturalism has severed its alliance
with optimism and belief in progress. Professor Huxley
and Mr. Russell have sung their palinode and smashed
the old gods of their creed. No more proof is needed,
Jl think, that the alleged law of progress has no scientific
basis whatever.

Jut the superstition has also invaded and vitiated our
history, our political science, our philosophy, and our
religion.

The historian is a natural snob ; he sides with the
gods against Cato, and approves the winning side. He
lectures the vanquished for their wilfulness and want of
foresight, sometimes rather prematurely, as when Seeley,
looking about for an example of perverse refusal to
recognize facts, exclaims, 'Sedet, aeternumque sedebit
unhappy Poland!' The nineteenth-century historian

OF PROGRESS 17

was so loath to admit retrogression that he liked to
fancy the river of progress flowing underground all
through the Dark Ages, and endowed the German
barbarians who overthrew Mediterranean civilization
with all the manly virtues. If a nation^ or a religion,
or a schoo] of art dies, the historian explains whyjtjaras
not worthyJoJiye. *

In political science the corruption of the scientific
spirit by the superstition of progress has been flagrant.
It enables the disputant to overbear questions of right
and wrong by confident prediction, a method which has
the double advantage of being peculiarly irritating and
incapable of refutation. Qn the theory ...of J3j[ggiessr
what is 'coming* must be right. Forms of government
and modes of thought which for the time being are not
in favour are assumed to have been permanently left
behind. A student of history who believed in cyclical
changes and long swings of the pendulum would take
a very different and probably much sounder view of
contemporary affairs. The votaries of progress mistake
the flowing tide for the river of eternity, and when the
tide turns they are likely to be left stranded like the
corks and scraps of seaweed which mark the high-water
line. This has already happened, though few realize it.
The praises of Liberty are mainly left to Conservatives,
who couple it with Property as something to be
defended, and to conscientious objectors, who dissociate
it from their country, which is not to be defended.
Democracy — the magic ballot-box—has few worshippers
any longer except in America, where men will still
shout for about two hours— and indeed much longer—
that she is 'great'. But our pundits will be slow to
surrender the useful words ' progressive' and ' reaction-
ary '. The classification is, however, a little awkward.

18 T H E I D E A

If a reactionary is any one who will not float with the
stream, and a progressive any one who has the flowing
tide with him, we must classify the Christian Fathers
and the French Encyclopaedists as belonging to the
same type, the progressive; while the Roman Stoics
under the Empire and the Russian bureaucrats under
Nicholas II will be placed together under the opposite
title, as reactionaries. Or is the progressive not the
supporter of the winning cause for the time being, but
the man who thinks, with a distinguished Head of a
College who, as I remember, affirmed his principles in
Convocation, that t any leap in the dark is better than
standing still ' ; and is the reactionary the man whose
constitutional timidity would deter him from performing
this act of faith when caught by a mist on the Matter-
horn ? Machiavelli recognizes fixed types of human
character, such as the cautious Fabius and the im-
petuous Julius II, and observes that these qualities lead
sometimes to success and sometimes to failure. If a
reactionary only means an adherent of political opinions
which we happen to dislike, there is no reason why
a bureaucrat should not call a republican a reactionary,
as Maecenas may have applied the name to Brutus and
Cassius. Such examples of evolution as that which
turned the Roman Republic into a principate and then
into an empire of the Asiatic type, are inconvenient for
those who say ' It is coming J, and think that they have
vindicated the superiority of their own theories of
government.

We have next to consider the influence of the super-
stition of progress on the philosophy of the last century.
To attempt such a task in this place is a little rash, and
to prove the charge in a few minutes would be impos-
sible even for one much better equipped than I am.

\l

OFPROGRESS 19

But something must be said. Hegel and Comte are
often said to have been the chief advocates of the
doctrine of progress among philosophers. Both of
them give definitions of the word — a very necessary
thing to do, and I have not yet attempted to do it.
Hegel defines progress as spiritual freedom ; Corate as
true or positive social philosophy. The definitions are
peculiar; and neither theory can be made to fit past
history, though that of Comte, at any rate, falls to the
ground if it does not fit past history. Hegel is perhaps
more independent of facts; his predecessor Fichte
professes to be entirely indifferent to them. 'The
philosopher', he says, 'follows the a priori thread of
the world-plan which is clear to him without any history ;
and if he makes use of history, it is not to prove any-
thing, since his theses are already proved independently
of all history.' Certainly, Hegel's dialectical process
cannot easily be recognized in the course of European
events ; and, what is more fatal to the believers in a law
of progress who appeal to him, he does not seem to
have contemplated any further marked improvements
upon the political system of Prussia in his own time,
which he admired so much that his critics have accused
him of teaching that the Absolute first attained full
self-consciousness at Berlin in the nineteenth century.
He undoubtedly believed that there has been progress
in the past ; but he does not, it appears, look forward to
further changes ; as a politician, at any rate, he gives us
something like a closed system. Comte can only bring
his famous ' three stages ' into history by arguing that
the Catholic monotheism of the Middle Ages was an
advance upon pagan antiquity. A Catholic might de-
fend such a thesis with success; but for Comte the
chief advantage seems to be that the change left the

20 T H E I D E A

Olympians with only one neck, for Positive Philosophy
to cut off. But Comte himself is what his system
requires us to call a reactionary; he is back in the
' theological stage ' ; he would like a theocracy, if he
could have one without a God. The State is to be
subordinate to the Positive Church, and he will allow
' no unlimited freedom of thought '. The connexion of
this philosophy with the doctrine of progress seems
very slender. It is not so easy to answer the question
in the case of Hegel, because his contentment with the
Prussian government may be set down to idiosyncrasy
or prudence ; but it is significant that some of his ablest
disciples have discarded the belief. To say that 'the
world is as it ought to be' does not imply that it goes
on getting better, though some would think it was not
good if it was not getting better. It is hard to believe
that a great thinker really supposed that. the universe
as a whole is progressing, a notion which Mr. Bradley has
stigmatized as 'nonsense, unmeaning or blasphemous*.
Mr. Bradley may perhaps be interpreting Hegel rightly
when he says that for a philosopher ' progress can
never have any temporal sense', and explains that a
perfect philosopher would see the whole world of
appearance as a 'progress', by which he seems to
mean only a rearrangement in terms of ascending and
descending value and reality. But it might be objected
that to use ' progress ' in this sense is to lay a trap for
the unwary. Mathematicians undoubtedly talk of pro-
gress, or rather of progression, without any implication
of temporal sequence ; but outside this science to speak
of ' progress without any temporal sense ' is to use
a phrase which some would call self-contradictory. Be
that as it may, popularized Hegelianism has laid hold of
the idea of a self-improving universe, of perpetual and

OFPROGRESS 21

universal progress, in a strictly temporal sense. The
notion of an evolving and progressing cosmos, with
a Creator who is either improving himself (though we
do not put it quite so crudely) or who is gradually
coming into his own, has taken strong hold of the
popular imagination. The latter notion leads straight
to ethical dualism of the Manichean type. The theory
of a single purpose in the universe seems to me un-
tenable. Such a purpose, being infinite, could never
have been conceived, and if conceived, could never be
accomplished. The theory condemns both God and
man to the doom of Tantalus. Mr. Bradley is quite
right in finding this belief incompatible with Christianity.
It would not be possible, without transgressing the
limits set for lecturers on this foundation, to show how
the belief in a law of progress has prejudicially affected
the religious beliefs of our time. I need only recall to
you the discussions whether the perfect man could have
lived in the first, and not in the nineteenth or twentieth
century — although one would have thought that the
ancient Greeks, to take one nation only, have produced
many examples of hitherto unsurpassed genius ; the
secularization of religion by throwing its ideals into the
near future — a new apocalyptism which is doing mis-
chief enough in politics without the help of the clergy ;
and the unauthorized belief in future probation, which
rests on tiie queer assumption that, if a man is given
time enough, he must necessarily become perfect. In
fact, the superstition which is the subject of this lecture
has distorted Christianity almost beyond recognition.
Only one great Church, old in worldly wisdom, knows
that human nature does not change, and acts on the
knowledge. Accordingly, the papal syllabus of 1864
declares : ' Si quis dixerit : Romanus pontifex potest ac

22 T H E I D E A

debet cum progressu, cum liberalismo, et cum recenti
civilitate sese reconciliare et componere, anathema sit!

Our optimists have not made it clear to themselves or
others what they mean by progress, and we may suspect
that the vagueness of the idea is one of its attractions.
There has been no physical progress in our species for
many thousands of years. The Cro-Magnon race, which
lived perhaps twenty thousand years ago, was at least
equal to any modern people in size and strength ; the
ancient Greeks were, I suppose, handsomer and better
formed than we are; and some unprogressive races,
such as the Zulus, Samoans, and Tahitians, are envied
by Europeans either for strength or beauty. Although
it seems not to be true that the sight and hearing of
civilized peoples are inferior to those of savages, we

A

have certainly lost our natural weapons, which from one
point of view is a mark of degeneracy. Mentally, we
are now told that the men of the Old Stone Age, ugly
as most of them must have been, had as large brains as
ours ; and he would be a bold man who should claim
that we are intellectually equal to the Athenians or
superior to the Romans. The question of moral im-
provement is much more difficult. yUntil tne Great War
few would have disputed that civilized man had become
much more humane, much more sensitive to the suffer-
ings of others, and so more just, more self-controlled, and
less brutal in his pleasures and in his resentments. The
habitual honesty of the Western European might also
* have been contrasted with the rascality of inferior races
in the past and present. It was often forgotten that, if
progress means the improvement of human nature itself,
the question to be asked is whether the modern civilized
man behaves better in the same circumstances than his
ancestor would have done. Absence of temptation may

OF PROGRESS 23

produce an appearance of improvement; but this is
hardly what we mean by progress, and there is an old
saying that the Devil has a clever trick of pretending to
be dead. It seems to me very doubtful whether when
we are exposed to the same temptations we are more
humane or more sympathetic or juster or less brutal
than the ancients. [Even before this war, the examples
of the Congo and Putumayo, and American lynchings,
proved that contact with barbarians reduces many white
men to the moral condition of savages ; and the outrages
committed on the Chinese after the Boxer rebellion
showed that even a civilized nation cannot rely on
being decently treated by Europeans if its civilization is
different from their own) During the Great War, even if
some atrocities were magnified with the amiable object
of rousing a good-natured people to violent hatred, it
was the well-considered opinion of Lord Bryce's com-
mission that no such cruelties had been committed for
three hundred years as those which the Germans
practised in Belgium and France. It was startling to
observe how easily the blood-lust was excited in young
men straight from the fields, the factory, and the counter,
many of whom had never before killed anything larger
than a wasp, and that in self-defence. As for the Turks,
we must go back to Genghis Khan to find any parallel
to their massacres in Armenia ; and the Russian terror-
ists have reintroduced torture into Europe, with the
help of Chinese experts in the art. With these examples
before our eyes, it is difficult to feel any confidence that
either the lapse of time or civilization has made the bete
humaine less ferocious. On biological grounds there is
no reason to expect it. No selection in favour of
superior types is now going on ; on the contrary, civil-
ization tends now, as always, to an Ausrottung der

24 T H E I D E A

Besten — a weeding-out of the best ; and the new practice
of subsidizing the unsuccessful by taxes extorted from
the industrious is cacogenics erected into P. principle.
The best hope of stopping this progressive degeneration
is in the science of eugenics. But this science is still
too tentative to be made the basis of legislation, and we
are not yet agreed what we should breed for. The two
ideals, that of the perfect man and that of the perfectly
organized State, would lead to very different principles
of selection. Do we want a nation of beautiful and
moderately efficient Greek gods, or do we want human
mastiffs for policemen, human greyhounds for postmen,
and so on? However, the opposition which eugenics
has now to face is based on less respectable grounds,
such as pure hedonism ('would the superman be any
happier? ') ; indifference to the future welfare of the race
(' posterity has done nothing for me ; why should I do
anything for posterity?1) ; and, in politics, the reflection
that the unborn have no votes.

We have, then, been driven to the conclusion that
neither science nor history gives us any warrant for
believing that humanity has advanced, except by
accumulating knowledge and experience and the instru-
ments of living. The value of these accumulations is
not beyond dispute. Attacks upon civilization have
been frequent, from Crates, Pherecrates, Antisthenes,
and Lucretius in antiquity to Rousseau, Walt Whitman,
Thoreau, Ruskin, Morris, and Edward Carpenter in
modern times. I cannot myself agree with these ex-
tremists. I believe that the accumulated experience of
mankind, and his wonderful discoveries, are of great
value. I only point out that they do not constitute real
-progress in human nature itself, and that in the absence
of any real progress these gains are external, precarious,

OFPROGRESS 25

and liable to be turned to our own destruction, as new
discoveries in chemistry may easily be.

But it is possible to approach the whole question of
progress from another side, and from this side the
results will not be quite the same, and may be more
encouraging. We have said that there can be no
progress in the macrocosm, and no single purpose in
a universe which has neither beginning nor end in time.
But there may be an infinite number of finite purposes,
some much greater and others much smaller than the
span of an individual life ; and within each of these
some Divine-. thought mayJae-woFking itsd£~out, bring-
ing someJife_.Qr series ._o£. lives, .'jgrflf natior> nr.jace or
species, to that perfection., which is natural io_it— what
the Greeks__call£d-Jl^JLDatiire '. The Greeks saw n*
contradiction between this belief and the theory *f
cosmic cycles, and I do not think that there is any con-
tradiction. It mavbe,-that there is an immanent-ldejL:

i&t "' "*•*" •'

logy which is shaping theJife-of-the ^human-race. towards

whirh \\px not yet be^n

reached. To advocate such a theory seems like going
back from Darwin tcj^XailiarcE^ but * vitalism ', if it
be a heresy, is a very vigorous and ._.obstiiHtg-Qnp ; w_e
can Jiardly^ dismiss it as-JLiDsdmtific. The possibility
that such a development is going on is not disproved by
the slowness of the change within the historical period.
Progress in the re.rent millennia segms^Ji£LJJ^lQ.-h^ve
been externa^ precarious. ancLdjsappointing. But let
Eislast adjective give us pause. By what standard do
we_pronounce it disappointing»-and who gave us thisL
standard? This disappointment has been a constant
phenomenon, with a very few exceptions. What does
it mean? Have those who-reject the law of progress..
taken it into account ? The philosophy of naturalism

26 T H E I D E A

always makes thejnistake of leaving human nature
The climbing instinct of humanity, and^our discontent
with things as^ they are, are facts which have to be
accounted for no less than the stable instincts of nearly
all other species. We all desire to make progress, and
our ambitions are not limited to our own lives or our
lifetimes. It is partpf our nature to aspire and hope ;
even on biological grounds this instinct must be
assumed to serve some function. The first Christian
poet, Prudentius, quite in the spirit of Robert Browning,
names Hope as the distinguishing characteristic of
mankind.

' Nonne hominum et pecudum distantia separat una?"
quod bona quadrupedum ante oculossitasunt,ego contra
spero.'

We rrjust consider sprimisly what this instinct of hope
means and implies in the scheme of things, t-

It is of course possible to dismiss it as a fraud. Per-
haps this was the view most commonly held in antiquity.

UlusJQnjwhirh

action ; but in the last resort an ignis fatuus. A
Greek could write for his tombstone :

' I've entered port. Fortune and Hope, adieu !
Make game of others, for I've done with you/

And Lord Brougham chose this epigram to adorn his
villa at Cannes. So for Schopenhauer hope is the bak
by which Nature gets her hook in our nose, and induces
us to serve her purposes, which are not our own. This
is ^pessimism, which,- like optimism, is a mood*.. .not
^philosophy. Neither of them needs refutation, except
for the adherent of the opposite mood ; and these will
never convince each other, for the same arguments are

OFPROGRESS 27

fatal to both. If our desires are clearly contrary to the
nature of things, of which we are a part, it is our wisdom
and our duty to correct our ambitions, and, like the
Bostonian Margaret Fuller, to decide to 'accept the
universe '. ' Gad ! she'd better/ was Carlyle's comment
on this declaration. The true inference from Nature's
law of vicarious sacrifice is not that life is a fraud, but
that selfishness is unnatural. The pessimist can only
condemn the world by a standard which he finds some-
where, if only in his own heart ; in passing sentence
upon it he affirms an optimism which he will not sur-
render to any appearances.

; butthey-distrusled

Hope. I will not follow those who say that they
succumbed to the barbarians because they looked back
instead of forward ; I do not think it is true. If the
Greeks and Romans had studied chemistry and metal-
lurgy instead of art, rhetoric, and law, they might have
discovered gunpowder and poison gas and kept the
Germans north of the Alps. BjjlJSiJPjJiLs ..deliberate
v^rdict-^H-pagan~-SjQciety, that _fc / had no hope *, cannot
be lightlY_§£t_aside. No ..... othgr. religion, before f.hris-

-hope into a moral virtue.

by hope ', waS-^L-Qew-doctrine when it was pro*
nounced. The later Neoplatonists borrowed St. Paul's
triad, Faith, Hope, and Love, adding Truth as a fourth.
Hopefulness may have been — partly a legacy—from
Jhldaism ; _butjt^was muchjnore a part of the intense
spiritual vitality jwhich was

faith. In an isolated but extremely interesting passage
St. Paul extends his hope of 'redemption into the
glorious liberty of the children of God ' to the ' whole
creation ' generally. In the absence of any explanation
or parallel passages it is difficult to say what vision of

28 T H E I D E A

cosmic deliverance was in his mind. Students of early

jr "

Christian thought must_be, struck b}r th

in the minds of men, combined with great fluidity in the
forms or moulds into which it ran. After much fluctua-
tion, it tended to harden as belief in a supramundane
future, a compromise between Jewish and Platonic
eschatology, since the Jews set their hopes on a terres-
trial future, the Platonists on a supramundane present.
Christian philosophers inclined to the Platonic faith,
while popular belief retained the apocalyptic Jewish
idea under the form of Millenarianism. Religion has
oscillated between these two types of belief ever since,
and both have suffered considerably by being vulgarized.
In times of disorder and decadence, the Platonic ideal
world, materialized into a supraterrestrial physics and
geography, has tended to prevail : in times of crass
prosperity and intellectual confidence the Jewish dream
of a kingdom of the saints on earth has been coarsened
into promises of 'a good time coming'. At the time
when we were inditing the paeans to Progress which I
quoted near the beginning of my lecture, we were
evolving a Deuteronomic religion for ourselves even
more flattering than the combination of determinism
with optimism which science was offering at the same
period. We almost persuaded ourselves that the words
' the meek-spirited shall possess the earth ' were a pro-
phecy of the expansion of England. Our new privileged
class, organized Labour, is now weaving similar dreams
for itself.

It is easy to criticiza_the^forms which Hope_ has
assumed. But the Hope which has generated them is
a solid fact, and we have to recognize its indomitable
tenacity and power of taking new shapes. The belief
in a law of progress, which I have criticized so un-

OFPROGRESS 29

mercifully, is one of these forms.< and if I am not
mistaken, it is nearly worn out. "Disraeli in his detached
way said, * The European talks of progress because by
the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established
a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization \
It would not be easy to sum up better/the achievements
of the nineteenth century, which will be always re-
membered as the century of accumulation and expansion.
It was jme_nf the great ages of the world ; and its great-
ness was bound up with

which, in the crude forms which it usually assumed, we
have seen to be an illusion. It was a strenuous, not
a self-indulgent age. The profits of industry were not
squandered, but turned into new capital, providing new
markets and employment for more labour. The nation,
as an aggregate, increased in wealth, numbers, and
power every day; and public opinion approved this
increase, and the sacrifices which it involved. It was
a great century ; there were giants in the earth in those
days ; I have no patience with the pygmies who gird at
themT) But, as its greatest and most representative poet
said : ' God fulfils himself in many ways, Lest one good
custom should corrupt the world/ The mould in which
the Victorian age cast its hopes is broken. TJierejs jnp
law-joiLprogress ; and the gains of that age now seem
to some of us to have been purchased too high, or even
to be themselves of doubtful value. In dough's fine
poem, beginning, ' Hope evermore and believe, O man ',
a poem in which the ethics of Puritanism find their
perfect expression, the poet exhorts us :

'Go! say not in thine heart, And what then, were

it accomplished,

Were the wild impulse allayed, what were the use
and the good?'

30 T H E I D E A

But this question, which the blind Puritan asceticism
resolutely thrust on one side, has begun to press for an
answer. It had begun to press for an answer before the
great cataclysm, which shattered the material symbols
of the cult which for a century and a half had absorbed
the chief energies of mankind. Whether our wide-
spread discontent is mainly caused, as I sometimes
think, by the unnatural conditions of life in large towns,
or by the decay of the ideal itself, it is not easy to say.
In any case, the gods of Queen Victoria's reign are no
longer worshipped. And I believe that£the dissatis-
faction with things as they are is caused not only by
the failure of nineteenth-century civilization, but partly
also by its success J We no longer wish to progress on
those lines if we could. Our^ apocalyptic dream is
vanishing into thin air. It may be that the industrial
revolution which began in the reign of George the Third
has produced most of its fruits, and has had its day.
We may have to look forward to such a change as is
imagined by Anatole France at the end of his Isle of
the Penguins, when, after_an_orgy of revolutiqn_and
destruction, we shall slideback into the quiet rural life
of the early modern period. If sor the authors of the
revolution will have cut theirjxwn throats, for there can
be no great manufacturing towns insuch a society.
Their disappearance will be no great loss. The race
will have tried a great experiment, and will have rejected
it as unsatisfying. We shall have added something to
our experience. Fontenelle exclaimed, ' How many
foolish things we should say now, if the ancients had
not said them all before us ! J Fools are not so much
afraid of plagiarism as this Frenchman supposed ; but it
is true that ' Eventu rerum stolidi didicere magistro '.
There is much to support the belief that there is

OF PROGRESS 31

far existence among^jdeas, and that those
tend Jta_4ii£^aiL3£likli-C^^

It doe^LJioLnecessarily

th e ideas which pre^aiLajxJietteiLmorallyf or eyen^truer
to thejaws of Nature, than those which fail. Life is
so chaotic, and development so sporadic and one-sided,
that a brief and brilliant success may carry with it the
seeds of its own early ruin. The great triumphs of human-
ity have not come all at once. Architecture reached its
climax in an age otherwise barbarous ; Roman Law was
perfected in a dismal age of decline ; and the nineteenth
century, with its marvels of applied science, has pro-
duced the ugliest of all civilizations. There have been
notable flowering times of the Spirit of Man— Ages of
Pericles, Augustan Ages, Renaissances.

npknnwn. They

may depend on undistinguished periods when force is
being stored up. So in individual greatness, the wind
bloweth where it listeth.

have died unknownf ' carent quia vate sacro '. Emerson
indeed tells us that l One 'accent of the Holy Ghost The
careless world has never lost'. But I should like to
know how Emerson obtained this information. The
world has not always been ' careless ' about its inspired
prophets ; it has often, a£ Faust remarks, burnt or
crucified them, before they have delivered all their
message. The activities of the Race-Spirit have been
quite unaccountable. It has stumbled along blindly,
falling into every possible pitfall.

The laws of Nature neither promise progress nor ,/
forbid it. We could do much to determine. ..our own *
future ; but there has been no consistency about our
aspirations, ^H w^ have frpgnpntly followed falsejights,
andjDeen __djsLllusigned as^much by success as by failure.

32 T H E I D E A

The well-known law that all institutions carry with them

the seeds of their own dissolution is not so much an

illustration of the law of cyclical revolution, as a proof

that we have been carried to and fro by every wind of

doctrine. What we need i$ a fixed and absolute stan-

f dard-Df values, that^we may know wha±.jaza_want tn

-c' and where we wanLloero. ltjs_jao-aaswer to

s^ 0 ^

alljvalues are relative and ought to change.
values jirejiDt relatiye_but absolute. Spiritual progress
must be within the sphere of a reality which is not itself
progressing, or for which, in Milton's grand words*
' progresses the dateless and irrevoluble circle of its own
perfection, joining inseparable hands with joy and bliss
in over-measure for ever'. Assuredly there must j)e_

jarjvanre in_nnr apprahgn^inn of the ideal, which .can
never be fully-realiz£_d because it belongs-lo the eternal
world. We count not ourselves to have apprehended
in aspiration any more than in practice. As Nicolas of
Cusa says : ' To be able to know-ever more
withouLend, this is our.. likeness to the eternal

1 Man always desires to know better what he knows, and
to love more what he loves ; and the whole world is not
sufficient for him, because it does not satisfy his craving
for knowledge/ But since our object is to enter within
the realm of unchanging perfection, finite and relative
progress cannot be our ultimate aim, and such progress,
like everything else most worth having, must not be
aimed at too directly. Qur_ultunate aim is fo live in the.
knowledge and enjoyment of t^p absolute values. Truth,
Goodness, andJBeauly. If the-EIatonists are right, we
.^hal] [shape JMIT surrpnn Hinge; more effectively
kind_oX...i deal ism than by-adopting

methods of secularism. I have suggested that our
disappointments have been very largely due to the

OFPROGRESS

33

unworthiness of our ideals, and to the confused manner
in which we have set them before our minds. The best
men and women do not seem to be subject to this con-
fusion. So_farj.s_they can make their environment^ it
is a society immensely in advance of anything which
has-been

If any social amelioration is to be hoped for, and I can
see few favourable signs at present, its main character-
istic will probably be sunplifkation-Jaih^
complexity. This, however, is not a question which can
be handled at the end of a lecture.

Plato says of his ideal State that it does not much

. matter whether jt is ever realized on earth or not. Xh<e

type is laid up mjif:a.ve.n, and ^approximations to it_ will

be made from time to time^since all living creatures. are,

JJrami npwaHg towards ttlp .^"rrp Of their heing It

does not matter very much, if he was right in believing
— as we too believe — in_human immortality. ^nd_yet_
it does matter; for unless our communing with the
eternal TfJpa.s.-endQW.&_iis with somje, . creatiyg__virtuey
whjch makes itsellfelt upon our immediate^
, if ran not: he that we have made those Ideas
own There is no alchemy by which

we jnay , get. golden rominrt nnt of leaden instincts — so
Herbert Spencer ^^ 11Ci very truly: but if our ideals
are of gold, there is an alchemy which will transmute
our external activities, so that our contributions to the
spiritual temple may be no longer ( wood, hay, and
stubble ', to be destroyed in the next conflagration, but
precious and durable material.

For individuals, then, the path of progress is always
open ; but, as Hesiod told us long before the Sermon
on the Mount, it is a narrow path, steep and difficult,
especially at first. There will never be a crowd

34 THE IDEA OF PROGRESS

gathered round this gate ; ' few there be that find it J.
For this reason, we must cut down our hopes for our
nation, for Europe, and for humanity at large, to a very
modest and humble aspiration. We have no millennium
to look forward to ; but neither need we fear any pro-
tracted or widespread retrogression. There will • be
new types of achievement which will enrich the experi-
ence of the race ; and from time to time, in the long
vista which science seems to promise us, there will be new
flowering-times of genius and virtue, not less glorious
than the age of Sophocles or the age of Shakespeare.

/They will, not merely repeat the triumphs of the past,
but will add new varieties to the achievements of the

• human mind.

Whether the human type itself is capable of further
physical, intellectual, or moral improvement, we do not
know. It is safe to predict that we shall go on hoping,
though our recent hopes have ended in disappointment.
Our lower ambitions partly succeed and partly fail, and
never wholly satisfy us ; of

our race^we may perhaps cherish the faitlrthat no pure
hope_£an_.£>zer with
of its roots.

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