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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Progress and History, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Progress and History
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: F. S. Marvin
+
+Release Date: January 31, 2009 [EBook #27948]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROGRESS AND HISTORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+  +------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Note                                         |
+  |                                                            |
+  | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in        |
+  | this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of   |
+  | this document.                                             |
+  | Text printed using the Greek alphabet in the original book |
+  | is shown as follows: [Greek: logos]                        |
+  +------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+PROGRESS AND
+HISTORY
+
+_ESSAYS ARRANGED AND EDITED_
+
+BY
+
+F. S. MARVIN
+
+LATE SENIOR SCHOLAR OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD
+
+AUTHOR OF 'THE LIVING PAST'
+
+EDITOR OF 'THE UNITY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION'
+
+
+'Tanta patet rerum series et omne futurum
+Nititur in lucem.'
+                    LUCAN.
+
+
+_THIRD IMPRESSION_
+
+
+
+HUMPHREY MILFORD
+
+OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
+LONDON  EDINBURGH  GLASGOW  NEW YORK
+TORONTO  MELBOURNE  CAPE TOWN  BOMBAY
+
+1919
+
+
+PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+This volume is a sequel to _The Unity of Western Civilization_ published
+last year and arose in the same way, from a course of lectures given at
+the Woodbrooke Settlement, Birmingham.
+
+The former book attempted to describe some of the permanent unifying
+factors which hold our Western civilization together in spite of such
+catastrophic divisions as the present war. This book attempts to show
+these forces in growth. The former aimed rather at a statical, the
+present at a dynamical view of the same problem. Both are historical in
+spirit.
+
+It is hoped that these courses may serve as an introduction to a series
+of cognate studies, of which clearly both the supply and the scope are
+infinite, for under the general conception of 'Progress in Unity' all
+great human topics might be embraced. One subject has been suggested for
+early treatment which would have especial interest at the present time,
+viz. 'Recent Progress in European Thought'. We are by the war brought
+more closely than before into contact with other nations of Europe who
+are pursuing with inevitable differences the same main lines of
+evolution. To indicate these in general, with stress on the factor of
+betterment, is the aim of the present volume.
+
+F.S.M.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+   I. THE IDEA OF PROGRESS                                           7
+
+         By F. S. MARVIN.
+
+  II. PROGRESS IN PREHISTORIC TIMES                                 27
+
+        By R. R. MARETT, Reader in Social Anthropology,
+          Oxford.
+
+ III. PROGRESS AND HELLENISM                                        48
+
+        By F. MELIAN STAWELL, late Lecturer at
+          Newnham College, Cambridge.
+
+  IV. PROGRESS IN THE MIDDLE AGES                                   72
+
+        By the Rev. A. J. CARLYLE, Tutor and
+          Lecturer at University College, Oxford.
+
+   V. PROGRESS IN RELIGION                                          96
+
+        By BARON FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL.
+
+  VI. MORAL PROGRESS                                               134
+
+        By L. P. JACKS, Principal of Manchester
+          New College, Oxford.
+
+ VII. GOVERNMENT                                                   151
+
+        By A. E. ZIMMERN, late Fellow of New
+          College, Oxford.
+
+VIII. INDUSTRY                                                     189
+
+        By A. E. ZIMMERN.
+
+  IX. ART                                                          224
+
+        By A. CLUTTON BROCK.
+
+   X. SCIENCE                                                      248
+
+        By F. S. MARVIN.
+
+  XI. PHILOSOPHY                                                   273
+
+        By J. A. SMITH, Waynflete Professor of
+          Mental and Moral Philosophy, Oxford.
+
+ XII. PROGRESS AS AN IDEAL OF ACTION                               295
+
+        By J. A. SMITH.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE IDEA OF PROGRESS
+
+F. S. MARVIN
+
+
+The editor of these essays was busy in the autumn of last year collating
+the opinions attached by different people to the word 'progress'. One
+Sunday afternoon he happened to be walking with two friends in Oxford,
+one a professor of philosophy, the other a lady. The professor of
+philosophy declared that to him human progress must always mean
+primarily the increase of knowledge; the editor urged the increase of
+power as its most characteristic feature, but the lady added at once
+that to her progress had always meant, and could only mean, increase in
+our appreciation of the humanity of others.
+
+The first two thoughts, harmonized and directed by the third, may be
+taken to cover the whole field, and this volume to be merely a
+commentary upon them. What we have to consider is, when and how this
+idea of progress, as a general thing affecting mankind as a whole, first
+appeared in the world, how far it has been realized in history, and how
+far it gives us any guidance and hope for the future. In the midst of a
+catastrophe which appears at first sight to be a deadly blow to the
+ideal, such an inquiry has a special interest and may have some
+permanent value.
+
+Words are the thought of ages crystallized, or rather embodied with a
+constantly growing soul. The word 'Progress', like the word 'Humanity',
+is one of the most significant. It is a Latin word, not used in its
+current abstract sense until after the Roman incorporation of the
+Mediterranean world. It contains Greek thought summed up and applied by
+Roman minds. Many of the earlier Greek thinkers, Xenophanes and
+Empedocles as well as Plato and Aristotle, had thought and spoken of a
+steady process in things, including man himself, from lower to higher
+forms; but the first writer who expounds the notion with sufficient
+breadth of view and sufficiently accurate and concrete observation to
+provide a preliminary sketch, was the great Roman poet who attributed
+all the best that was in him to the Greeks and yet has given us a highly
+original picture of the upward tendency of the world and of human
+society upon it. He, too, so far as one can discover, was the first to
+use the word 'progress' in the sense of our inquiry. The passage in
+Lucretius at the end of his fifth book on the Nature of Things is so
+true and brilliant and anticipates so many points in later thought that
+it is worth quoting at some length, and the poet's close relation with
+Cicero, the typical Greco-Roman thinker, gives his ideas the more weight
+as an historical document.
+
+He begins by describing a struggle for existence in which the less
+well-adapted creatures died off, those who wanted either the power to
+protect themselves or the means of adapting themselves to the purposes
+of man. In this stage, however, man was a hardier creature than he
+afterwards became. He lived like the beasts of the field and was
+ignorant of tillage or fire or clothes or houses. He had no laws or
+government or marriage, and though he did not fear the dark, he feared
+the real danger of fiercer beasts. Men often died a miserable death, but
+not in multitudes on a single day as they do now by battle or shipwreck.
+
+The next stage sees huts and skins and fire which softened their
+bodies, and marriage and the ties of family which softened their
+tempers. And tribes began to make treaties of alliance with other
+tribes.
+
+Speech arose from the need which all creatures feel to exercise their
+natural powers, just as the calf will butt before his horns protrude.
+Men began to apply different sounds to denote different things, just as
+brute beasts will do to express different passions, as any one must have
+noticed in the cases of dogs and horses and birds. No one man set out to
+invent speech.
+
+Fire was first learnt from lightning and the friction of trees, and
+cooking from the softening and ripening of things by the sun.
+
+Then men of genius invented improved methods of life, the building of
+cities and private property in lands and cattle. But gold gave power to
+the wealthy and destroyed the sense of contentment in simple happiness.
+It must always be so whenever men allow themselves to become the slaves
+of things which should be their dependants and instruments.
+
+They began to believe in and worship gods, because they saw in dreams
+shapes of preterhuman strength and beauty and deemed them immortal; and
+as they noted the changes of the seasons and all the wonders of the
+heavens, they placed their gods there and feared them when they spoke in
+the thunder.
+
+Metals were discovered through the burning of the woods, which caused
+the ores to run. Copper and brass came first and were rated above gold
+and silver. And then the metals took the place of hands, nails, teeth,
+and clubs, which had been men's earliest arms and tools. Weaving
+followed the discovery of the use of iron.
+
+Sowing, planting, and grafting were learnt from nature herself, and
+gradually the cultivation of the soil was carried farther and farther up
+the hills.
+
+Men learnt to sing from the birds, and to blow on pipes from the
+whistling of the zephyr through the reeds: and those simple tunes gave
+as much rustic jollity as our more elaborate tunes do now.
+
+Then, in a summary passage at the end, Lucretius enumerates all the
+chief discoveries which men have made in the age-long process--ships,
+agriculture, walled cities, laws, roads, clothes, songs, pictures,
+statues, and all the pleasures of life--and adds, 'these things practice
+and the experience of the unresting mind have taught mankind gradually
+as they have progressed from point to point'.[1]
+
+It is the first definition and use of the word in literature. If we
+accept it as a typical presentation of the Greco-Roman view, seen by a
+man of exceptional genius and insight at the climax of the period, there
+are two or three points which must arrest our attention. Lucretius is
+thinking mainly of progress in the arts, and especially of the arts as
+they affect man's happiness. There is no mention of increase in
+knowledge or in love. As in the famous parallel passage in Sophocles'
+_Antigone_, it is man's strength and skill which most impressed the
+poet, and his skill especially as exhibited in the arts. Compared with
+what we shall see as typical utterances of later times, it is an
+external view of the subject. The absence of love as an element of
+progress carries with it the absence of the idea of humanity. There is
+no conception here, nor anywhere in classical thought before the Stoics,
+of a world-wide Being which has contributed to the advance and should
+share fully in its fruits. Still less do we find any hint of the
+possibilities of an infinite progress. The moral, on the contrary, is
+that we should limit our desires, banish disturbing thoughts, and settle
+down to a quiet and sensible enjoyment of the good things that
+advancing skill has provided for us. It is, of course, true that
+thoughts can be found in individual writers, especially in Plato and
+Aristotle, which would largely modify this view. Yet it can hardly be
+questioned that Lucretius here represents the prevalent tone of
+thoughtful men of his day. They had begun to realize the fact of human
+progress, but envisaged it, as was natural in a first view, mainly on
+the external side, and, above all, had no conception of its infinite
+possibilities.
+
+When we turn to typical utterances of the next great age in history the
+contrast is striking. Catholic doctrine had absorbed much that was
+congenial to it from the Stoics, from Plato and Aristotle, but it added
+a thing that was new in the world, a passionate love and an overpowering
+desire for personal moral improvement. This is so clear in the greatest
+figures of the Middle Ages, men such as St. Bernard and St. Francis, and
+it is so unlike anything that we know in the world before, that we are
+justified in treating it as characteristic of the age. To some of us,
+indeed, it will appear as the most important element in the general
+notion of progress which we are tracing. It so appeared to Comte.[2] Of
+numberless passages that might be quoted from fathers and doctors of the
+Church, a few words from Nicholas of Cusa must suffice. He was a divine
+of the early fifteenth century, true to the faith, but anxious to
+improve the discipline of the Church. To him progress took an entirely
+spiritual form. 'To be able to understand more and more without end is
+the type of eternal wisdom.... Let a man desire to understand better
+what he does understand and to love more what he does love and the whole
+world will not satisfy him.'
+
+Here is a point of view so different from the last that we find some
+difficulty in fitting it into the same scheme of things. Yet both are
+essential elements in Western civilization; both have been developed by
+the operations of similar forces in the world civilized and incorporated
+by Greece and Rome.
+
+The Catholic divine looks entirely inward for his idea of progress, and
+his conception contains elements of real and permanent validity, of
+which our present notions are full. His eyes are turned towards the
+future and there is no limit to his vision. And though the progress
+contemplated is within the soul of the individual believer, it rests on
+the two fundamental principles of knowledge and love which are both
+essentially social. The believer may isolate himself from the world to
+develop his higher nature, but the knowledge and the love which he
+carries with him into his solitude are themselves fruits of that
+intercourse with his fellows from which an exclusive religious ideal
+temporarily cuts him off.
+
+Nor must we forget that Catholic doctrine and discipline, though aiming
+at this perfection of the individual rather than of the race, was
+embodied in an organization which carried farther than the Roman Empire
+the idea of a united civilization and furnished to many thinkers,
+Bossuet as well as Dante, a first sketch of the progress of mankind.
+
+But it is clear that this construction was provisional only, either on
+the side of personal belief and practice, or of ecclesiastical
+organization; provisional, that is, if we are looking for real unity in
+the mind of mankind. For we need a doctrine, a scheme of knowledge, into
+which all that we discover about the world and our own nature may find
+its place; we need principles of action which will guide us in attaining
+a state of society more congruent with our knowledge of the
+possibilities of the world and human nature, more thoroughly inspired
+by human love, love of man for man as a being living his span of life
+here and now, under conditions which call for a concentration of skill
+and effort to realize the best. The breaking of the old Catholic
+synthesis, narrow but admirable within its limits, took place at what we
+call the Renascence and Reformation; the linking up of a new one is the
+task of our own and many later generations. Let it not be thought that
+such a change involves the destruction of any vital element in the idea
+of progress already achieved; if true and vital, every element must
+survive. But it does involve an acceptance of the fact that progress, or
+humanity, or the evolution of the divine within us--however we prefer to
+phrase it--is a larger thing than any one organization or any one set of
+carefully harmonized doctrines. The truth, and the organ in which we
+enshrine it, must grow with the human minds who are collectively
+producing it. The new unity is itself progress.
+
+It must give us confidence in facing such a prospect to observe that at
+each remove from the first appearance of the idea of progress in the
+world man's use of the word has carried more meaning and, though
+sometimes quieter in tone, as in recent times, is better grounded in the
+facts of life and history. Such an advance in our conceptions took place
+after the Renascence. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when
+the art and science of the ancient world had been recovered, the word
+and the idea of progress started on a fresh course of unexampled vigour.
+The lines were closer to those of the pre-Christian than of the Catholic
+world, but it would be by no means true to call them pagan. When Bacon
+and Descartes begin to sound the modern note of progress, they think
+primarily of an advance in the arts and sciences, but there is a
+spiritual and human side to their ideal which could not be really
+paralleled in classical thought. The Spirit of Man is now invoked, and
+this, not in the sense of an élite, the builders of the Greek State or
+the rulers of the Roman Empire, but of mankind as a whole. This is
+Christian, or perhaps we should say, Stoical-Christian. Thus Descartes
+tells us that he looks to science to furnish us ultimately with an art
+which will make us 'masters and possessors of nature ... and this not
+solely for the pleasure of enjoying with ease the good things of the
+world, but principally for the preservation and improvement of human
+health which is both the foundation of all other goods and the means of
+strengthening the spirit itself' ('Discours de la Méthode'). It is
+significant that the two words Progress and Humanity come into use in
+their modern sense side by side. The latter is the basis and the ideal
+of the former.
+
+But the new thing which had come into the world at this point, and gives
+a fresh impulse and content to the idea of progress, is the development
+of science. The Greeks had founded it and, as we shall see in a later
+chapter, it was the recovery of the Greek thread which gave the moderns
+their clue. But no one before the sixteenth century, before the marvels
+revealed by Galileo's telescope and knit up by Newton's synthetic
+genius, could have conceived the visions of human regeneration by
+science which light up the pioneers of the seventeenth century and are
+the gospel of the eighteenth.
+
+We turn to the eighteenth century, and primarily to the school of
+thinkers called 'philosophes' in France, for the fullest and most
+enthusiastic statement of progress as a gospel. It is, of course,
+European, as all the greatest advances of thought have been; and German
+thinkers, as well as English, stand with the French in the vanguard.
+Kant and Herder, from different points of view, thought it out perhaps
+more thoroughly than any one else at that time; but the French believed
+in it as a nation and were willing to stake their lives and souls on the
+belief. Thus Turgot, before the Revolution, declared that 'the total
+mass of the human race marches continually though sometimes slowly
+towards an ever-increasing perfection'. And Condorcet, in the midst of
+the Revolution, while himself under its ban, painted a picture 'of the
+human race, freed from its chains, and marching with a firm tread on the
+road of truth and virtue and happiness'.
+
+Here is the gospel in its purest and simplest form, and when we are
+inclined to think that the crimes and the partial failure of the
+Revolution discredit its principles, it is well to remember that the man
+who believed in them most systematically, expounded his belief with
+perfect calmness and confidence as he lay under sentence of death from a
+revolutionary tribunal.
+
+If this enthusiasm is madness, we might all well wish to be possessed.
+The true line of criticism is different. At the Revolution, as before at
+the Renascence, the leaders of the new movement could not see all their
+debt to the past. Like the Renascence, they idealized certain features
+in classical antiquity, but they had not yet gained the notion of
+historical continuity; above all, they did not realize the value of the
+religious development of the Middle Ages. It was left for the nineteenth
+century and for us, its successors, to attempt the supreme task of
+seeing things steadily and seeing them whole.
+
+For in spite of the capital contributions of the Renascence to progress
+and the idea of progress, especially by its scientific constructions, it
+is undeniable that a bias was then given to the course of Western
+civilization from which it has suffered ever since, and which it is now
+our urgent duty to correct. Two aspects of this may be specified. The
+old international unity which Rome had achieved, at least superficially,
+in the Mediterranean world, and which the Catholic Church had extended
+and deepened, was broken up in favour of a system of sovereign and
+independent states controlling religion and influencing education on
+lines calculated to strengthen the national forces and the national
+forces alone. They even believed that, at any rate in trade and
+commerce, the interests of these independent states were rather rival
+than co-operative. The Revolution struck the note of human association
+clearly enough, but we have not yet learnt to set all our other tunes in
+accord with it. Another, and perhaps even more fundamental, weakness of
+the Renascence tradition was the stress it laid on the material,
+mechanical, external side of progress. On the one hand, the spiritual
+side of life tended to be identified with that system of thought and
+discipline which had been so rudely disrupted. On the other hand, the
+new advance in science brought quickly after it a corresponding growth
+of wealth and mechanical inventions and material comforts. The spirit of
+man was for the time impeded and half suffocated by its own productions.
+
+The present war seems to many of us the supreme struggle of our better
+nature to gain the mastery over these obstructions, and freedom for its
+proper growth.
+
+Now if this analysis be anywhere near the truth, it is clear that our
+task for the future is one of synthesis on the lines of social progress.
+Knowledge, power, wealth, increase of skill, increase of health, we have
+them all in growing measure, and Mr. Clutton Brock will tell us in his
+chapter in this volume that we may be able by an exercise of will to
+achieve even a new renascence in art. But we certainly do not yet
+possess these things fairly distributed or in harmony of mind.
+
+The connexion therefore between progress as we now envisage it, and
+unity, both in ourselves and in society at large, becomes apparent. At
+each of the previous great moments in the history of the West
+development has been secured by emphasis on one side of our nature at
+the expense of the rest. Visions of mankind in common progress have
+flashed on individual thinkers, a Roman Emperor, a Catholic Schoolman, a
+Revolutionary prophet. But the thing achieved has been one-sided, and
+the needed correction has been given by another movement more one-sided
+still. The greatest hope of the present day lies in the fact that in all
+branches of life, in government as well as in philosophy, in science as
+in social reform, in religion and in international politics, men are now
+striving with determination to bind the threads together.
+
+There is no necessary opposition between the rival forces which have so
+often led to conflict. In all our controversies harmony can be reached
+and has often been reached by the application of patience, knowledge,
+and goodwill. And goodwill implies here the readiness to submit the
+particular issue to the arbitration of the general good. The
+international question has been so fully canvassed in these days that it
+would be superfluous to discuss it here. The moral is obvious, and
+abundant cases throughout the world illustrate the truth that
+well-organized nationalities contain in themselves nothing contrary to
+the ideal of international peace.[3] Nor is the still more persistent
+and universal opposition of capital and labour really less amenable to
+reconciliation, because in this case also the two factors in the problem
+are equally necessary to social progress, and we shall not enter on the
+various practical solutions--co-operation, co-partnership, partial
+state-socialism, &c.--which have been proposed for a problem which no
+one believes to be insoluble. The conflict in our own souls between the
+things of matter and sense and the life of the spirit, is more closely
+germane to the present argument, because ultimately this has to be
+resolved, if not in every mind yet in the dominant mind of Europe,
+before the more practical questions can be generally settled. Harmony
+here is at the root of a sound idea of progress.
+
+When the concluding chapters of this volume are reached it will be seen
+how fully the recent developments both in science and philosophy
+corroborate the line which is here suggested for the reconciliation of
+conflicts and the establishment of a stronger and more coherent notion
+of what we may rightly pursue as progress. For both in science and still
+more in philosophy attention is being more and more closely concentrated
+on the meaning of life itself, which science approaches by way of its
+physical concomitants, and philosophy from the point of view of
+consciousness. And while science has been analysing the characteristics
+of a living organism, philosophy finds in our consciousness just that
+element of community with others which an organic conception of progress
+demands. The only progress of which we can be certain, the philosopher
+tells us, is progress in our own consciousness, which becomes constantly
+fuller, more knowing, and more social, as time unfolds. This, he tells
+us, must endure, though the storms of passion and nature may fall upon
+us.
+
+On such a firm basis we would all gladly build our faith. No unity can
+be perfect except that which we achieve in our own souls, and no
+progress can be relied on except that which we can know within, and can
+develop from, our own consciousness and our own powers. But we cannot
+rest in this. We are bound to look outside our own consciousness for
+some objective correspondence to that progress which our own nature
+craves; and history supplies this evidence. It is from history that we
+derive the first idea and the accumulating proofs of the reality of
+progress. Lucretius's first sketch is really his summary of social
+history up to that point. The Catholic thinker had a wider scope. He
+was able to see that the whole course of Greco-Roman civilization was,
+from his point of view, a preparation for the Church which had the care
+of the spiritual life of man while on earth. And in the next stage, that
+in which we now live, we see all the interests of life taken back again
+into the completeness of human progress, and can trace that complete
+being, labouring slowly but unmistakably to a higher state, outside us
+in the world, as well as within our own consciousness, which is ready to
+expand if we will give it range.
+
+On such lines we may sketch the historical aspect of progress on which
+the personal is based; and it is of the utmost importance to keep the
+two aspects before us concurrently, because reliance on the growing
+fullness of the individual life to the neglect of the social evolution
+is likely to empty that life itself of its true content, to leave the
+self-centred visionary absorbed in the contemplation of some ideal
+perfection within himself, while the world outside him from which he
+ultimately derives his notions, is toiling and suffering from the want
+of those very elements which he is best able to supply.
+
+The succeeding chapters of this book will, it is hoped, supply some
+evidence of the concrete reality of progress, as well as of the tendency
+to greater coherence and purity in the ideal itself. It would have been
+easy to accumulate evidence; some sides of life are hardly touched on at
+all. The collective and the intellectual sides are fully dealt with both
+in this and in the volume on _The Unity of Western Civilization_. But if
+we make our survey over a sufficient space, coming down especially to
+our own days, our conclusion as to the advance made in the physical and
+moral well-being of mankind, will be hardly less emphatic. Our average
+lives are longer and continue to lengthen, and they are unquestionably
+spent with far less physical suffering than was generally the case at
+any previous period. We are bound to give full weight to this, however
+much we rightly deplore the deadening effect of monotonous and
+mechanical toil on so large a part of the population. And even for these
+the opportunities for a free and improving life are amazingly enlarged.
+We groan and chafe at what remains to be done because of the unexampled
+size of the modern industrial populations with which we have to deal.
+But we know in some points very definitely what we want, and we are now
+all persuaded with John Stuart Mill that the remedy is in our own hands,
+'that all the great sources of human suffering are in a great degree,
+many of them entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.' This
+conviction is perhaps the greatest step of all that we have gained. In
+morality some pertinent and necessary questions are raised in Chap. VI,
+but the general progress would be doubted by very few who have had the
+opportunity of comparing the evidence as to any previous state of
+morals, say in the Middle Ages or in the Elizabethan age--the crown of
+the Renascence in England--with that of the present day. The capital
+advance in morality, which by itself would be sufficient to justify our
+thesis, is the increase in the consciousness and the obligation of the
+'common weal', that conception of which Government, increasingly better
+organized, is the most striking practical realization. It has its
+drawback in the spread of what we feel as a debasing 'vulgarity', but
+the general balance is overwhelmingly on the side of good. And in all
+such discussions we are apt to allow far too little weight to the change
+which the New World, and especially the United States, has brought
+about. In matters of personal prosperity and a high general standard of
+intellectual and moral competence, what has been achieved there would
+outweigh a good deal of our Old World defects when we come to drawing
+up a world's balance-sheet.
+
+It will be seen therefore that we dismiss altogether any doctrine of an
+'illusion of progress' as a necessary decoy to progressive action.
+Progress is a fact as well as an ideal, and the ideal, though it springs
+from an objective reality, will always be in advance of it. So it is
+with all man's activities when he comes to man's estate. In science he
+has always an ideal of a more perfect knowledge before him though he
+becomes scientific by experience. In art he is always striving to
+idealize fresh things, though he first becomes an artist from the pure
+spontaneous pleasure of expressing what is in him. The deliberate
+projection of the ideal into the future, seeing how far it will take us
+and whether we are journeying in the right direction, is a late stage.
+As to progress, the largest general ideal which can affect man's action,
+it is only recently that mankind as a whole has been brought to grips
+with the conception, also enlarged to the full. He was standing,
+somewhat bewildered, somewhat dazzled, before it, when the war, like an
+eclipse of the sun, came suddenly and darkened the view. But an eclipse
+has been found an invaluable time for studying some of the problems of
+the sun's nature and of light itself.
+
+One of the most acute critics of the mid-Victorian prophets of progress,
+Dr. John Grote, did very well in disentangling the ideal element which
+is inherent in every sound doctrine of progress as a guide to conduct.
+He took the theory of a continuous inevitable progress in human affairs,
+and showed how this by itself might lead to a weakening of the will, on
+which alone in his view progress in the proper sense depends. He took
+the mechanical theory of utilitarianism and subjected it to a similar
+analysis. We cannot evaluate progress as an increase in a sum-total of
+happiness. This is incapable of calculation, and if we aim directly at
+it, we are likely to lose the higher things on which it depends, and
+which are capable of being made the objects of that direct striving
+which is essential to progress. Dr. Grote's analysis has long since
+passed into current philosophical teaching, but he will always be well
+worth reading for his fresh and vigorous reasoning and for the way in
+which he builds up his own position without denying the solid
+contributions of those whom he criticizes. Complete truth in the matter
+seems to us to involve a larger share for the historical element than
+Dr. Grote explicitly allows. We grant fully the paramount necessity for
+an ideal of progress and for constantly revising, purifying, and
+strengthening it. But in its formation we should trace more than he does
+to the collective forces of mankind as expressed in history. These have
+given us the ideal and will carry us on towards it by a force which is
+greater than, and in one sense independent of, any individual will. This
+is the cardinal truth of sociology, and is obvious if we consider how in
+matters of everyday experience we are all compelled by some social force
+not ourselves, as for instance in actions tending to maintain the family
+or in a national crisis such, as the war. This general will is not, of
+course, independent of all the wills concerned, but it acts more or less
+as an outside compelling force in the case of every one. Moreover our
+selves are composite as well as wholes, and parts of us are active in
+forming the general will, parts acquiesce and parts are overborne. Thus
+it is clear that a general tendency to progress in the human race may be
+well established--as we hold it to be--and yet go on in ways capable of
+infinite variation and at very various speed. We are all, let us
+suppose, being carried onward by one mighty and irresistible stream. We
+may combine our strength and skill and make the best use of the
+surrounding forces. This is working and steering to the chosen goal. Or
+we may rest on our oars and let the stream take us where it will. This
+is drifting, and we shall certainly be carried on somewhere; but we may
+be badly bruised or even shipwrecked in the process, and in any case we
+shall have contributed nothing to the advance. Some few may even waste
+their strength in trying to work backwards against the stream. We seem
+to have reached the point in history when for the first time we are
+really conscious of our position, and the problem is now a possible and
+an urgent one to mark the goal clearly and unitedly and bend our common
+efforts to attaining it.
+
+If this be so, the work of synthesis may be thought to have a higher
+practical value for the moment than the analysis which has prevailed in
+European thought for the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part
+of the nineteenth century the great formative ideas which had been
+gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary period, took
+shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth--Kant,
+Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by a period of criticism
+which has left none of them whole, but on the other hand has produced a
+mass of contradictions and specialisms highly confusing and even
+hopeless to the public mind and veiling the more important and profound
+agreements which have been growing all the time beneath. There are now
+abundant signs of a reaction towards unity and construction of a broad
+and solid kind. In no respect is such a knitting up more desirable than
+in this idea of progress itself. Are we to say that there is no such
+thing as all-round continuous progress, but only progress in definite
+branches of thought and activity, progress in science or in particular
+arts, social progress, physical progress, progress in popular education
+and the like, but that any two or more branches only coincide
+occasionally and by accident, and that when working at one we can and
+should have no thought of working at them all? This is no doubt a
+prevalent view and we may hope that some things said in this book may
+modify it. Another school of critical thinkers, approaching the question
+from the point of view of the ultimate object of action, asks what is
+the one thing for which all others are to be pursued as means? Is
+increase of knowledge the absolute good or increase of happiness? Or if
+it is increase of love, is it quite indifferent what we love? A few
+words on this may fitly conclude this chapter.
+
+The task of mankind, and of every one of us so far as he is able to
+enter into it, is to bring together these various aspects of human
+excellence, to see them as parts of one ideal and labour to approach it.
+This approach is progress, and if you say 'progress of what, and to what
+end', the answer can only be, the progress of humanity, and the end
+further progress. Some of the writers in this book will indicate the
+point at which in their view this progress is in contact with the
+infinite, with something not given in history; but, whatever our view of
+the transcendental problem may be, it is of the utmost importance for
+all of us to realize that we have given to us in the actual process of
+time, in concrete history, a development of humanity, a growth from a
+lower to a higher state of being, which may be most perfectly realized
+in the individual consciousness, fully awake and fully socialized, but
+is also clearly traceable in the doings of the human race as a whole.
+Such is in fact the uniting thread of these essays, and when we proceed
+to the converse of this truth and apply this ideal which we have shown
+to be the course of realization, as a governing motive in our lives, it
+is even more imperative to strive constantly to keep the whole
+together, and not to regard either knowledge or power or beauty or even
+love as an ultimate and supreme thing to which all other ends are merely
+means. The end is a more perfect man, developed by the perfecting of all
+mankind.
+
+Such a conception embraces all the separate aspects of our nature each
+in its place, and each from its own angle supreme. Love and knowledge
+inseparable and fundamental, freedom and happiness essential conditions
+of healthy growth, personality developed with the development of the
+greater personality in which we all live and grow. This greater
+personality is at its highest immeasurably above us, and has no
+assignable limits in time or in capacity to know, to love, or to enjoy.
+We cannot fix its origin at any known point in the birth of planets, nor
+does the cooling of our sun nor of all the suns seem to put any limit in
+our imagination to the continuous unfolding of life like our own. While
+thus practically infinite, the ideal of human nature is revealed to us
+concretely in countless types of goodness and truth and beauty which we
+may know and love and imitate. To all it is open to study the lineaments
+of this ideal in the records and figures of the past; to most it is
+revealed in some fellow beings known in life. From these, the human
+spirits which embody the strivings, the hopes, the conquered failings of
+the past, we may form our better selves and build the humanity of the
+future.
+
+There is a famous and magnificent passage in Dante's _Purgatorio_ which
+Catholic commentators interpret in sacramental terms but we may well
+apply in a wider sense to the progress of the human spirit towards the
+ideal. It occurs at that crucial point where the ascending poet leaves
+the circles of sad repentance to reach the higher regions of growing
+light.
+
+     'And when we came there, to the first step, it was of white
+     marble, so polished that I could see myself just as I am.
+
+     'And the second was coloured dark, a rugged stone, cracked
+     lengthwise and across. And the third piled above it was
+     flaming porphyry, red like the blood from a vein.
+
+     'Above this one was the angel of God, sitting on the
+     threshold, bright as a diamond.
+
+     'Up the three steps my master led me with goodwill and then
+     he said, "Beg humbly that he unlock the door."'[4]
+
+Like this, the path man has to tread is not an easy progress. But he is
+rising all the time and he rises on steps of his own past. He sees
+reflected in them the image of himself, and he sees too the deep faults
+in his nature, and the rough surface of his path through time. The last
+step, tinged by his own blood, gives access to a higher dwelling, firm
+and bright and leading higher still. But it is open only after a long
+ascent, and to the human spirit that has worked faithfully, with love
+for his comrades and leaders, and reverence for the laws which bind both
+the world and him.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+John Grote, _Examination of Utilitarian Philosophy_.
+
+Kant, _Principles of Politics_ (translated by Hastie and published by
+Clark) contains his smaller works on Universal History, Perpetual Peace,
+and the Principle of Progress. See also the _Essay on Herder_.
+
+Comte's _Positive Polity_, vols. i. and ii, passim.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
+     paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientes.'
+
+[2] Comte, _Positive Polity_, ii 116.
+
+[3] See Delisle Burns, _Morality of Nations_, and _The Unity of Western
+Civilization_, passim.
+
+[4] _Purgatorio_, ix. 94-108.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+PROGRESS IN PREHISTORIC TIMES
+
+R. R. MARETT
+
+
+If I am unable to deliver this lecture in person, it will be because I
+have to attend in Jersey to the excavation of a cave once occupied by
+men of the Glacial Epoch. Now these men knew how to keep a good fire
+burning within their primitive shelter; their skill in the chase
+provided them with a well-assorted larder; their fine strong teeth were
+such as to make short work of their meals; lastly, they were clever
+artisans and one may even say artists in flint and greenstone, not only
+having the intelligence to make an economic use of the material at their
+disposal, but likewise having enough sense of form to endow their
+implements with more than a touch of symmetry and beauty. All this we
+know from what they have left behind them; and the rest is silence.
+
+And now let us imagine ourselves possessed of one of those time-machines
+of which Mr. H. G. Wells is the inventor. Transported by such means to
+the Europe of that distant past, could we undertake to beat the record
+of those cave-men?
+
+Clearly, all will depend on how many of us, and how much of the
+apparatus of civilization, our time-machine is able to accommodate. If
+it were simply to drop a pair of us, naked and presumably ashamed, into
+the midst of the rigours of the great Ice Age, the chances surely are
+that the unfortunate immigrants must perish within a week. Adam could
+hardly manage to kindle a fire without the help of matches. Eve would
+be no less sorely troubled to make clothes without the help of a needle.
+On the other hand, if the time-machine were as capacious as Noah's Ark,
+the venture would undoubtedly succeed, presenting no greater difficulty
+than, let us say, the planting of a settlement in Labrador or on the
+Yukon. Given numbers, specialized labour, tools, weapons, books,
+domesticated animals and plants, and so forth, the civilized community
+would do more than hold its own with the prehistoric cave-man, devoid of
+all such aids to life. Indeed, it is tolerably certain that, willingly
+or unwillingly, our colonists would soon drive the ancient type of man
+clean out of existence.
+
+On the face of it, then, it would seem that we, as compared with men of
+Glacial times, have decidedly 'progressed'. But it is not so easy to say
+off-hand in what precisely such progress consists.
+
+Are we happier? As well ask whether the wild wolf or the tame dog is the
+happier animal. The truth would seem to be that wolf and dog alike can
+be thoroughly happy each in its own way; whereas each would be as
+thoroughly miserable, if forced to live the life of the other. In one of
+his most brilliant passages Andrew Lang, after contrasting the mental
+condition of one of our most distant ancestors with yours or mine, by no
+means to our disadvantage, concludes with these words: 'And after all he
+was probably as happy as we are; it is not saying much.'[5]
+
+But, if not happier, are we nobler? If I may venture to speak as a
+philosopher, I should reply, confidently, 'Yes.' It comes to this, that
+we have and enjoy more soul. On the intellectual side, we see farther
+afield. On the moral side, our sympathies are correspondingly wider.
+Imaginatively, and even to no small extent practically, we are in touch
+with myriads of men, present and past. We participate in a world-soul;
+and by so doing are advanced in the scale of spiritual worth and dignity
+as members of the human race. Yet this common soul of mankind we know
+largely and even chiefly as something divided against itself. Not only
+do human ideals contradict each other; but the ideal in any and all of
+its forms is contradicted by the actual. So it is the discontent of the
+human world-soul that is mainly borne in upon him who shares in it most
+fully. A possibility of completed good may glimmer at the far end of the
+quest; but the quest itself is experienced as a bitter striving. Bitter
+though it may be, however, it is likewise ennobling. Here, then, I find
+the philosophic, that is, the ultimate and truest, touchstone of human
+progress, namely, in the capacity for that ennobling form of experience
+whereby we become conscious co-workers and co-helpers in an age-long,
+world-wide striving after the good.
+
+But to-day I come before you, not primarily as a philosopher, but rather
+as an anthropologist, a student of prehistoric man. I must therefore
+define progress, not in the philosophic or ultimate way, but simply as
+may serve the strictly limited aims of my special science. As an
+anthropologist, I want a workable definition--one that will set me
+working and keep me working on promising lines. I do not ask ultimate
+truth of my anthropological definition. For my science deals with but a
+single aspect of reality; and the other aspects of the real must
+likewise be considered on their merits before a final account can be
+rendered of it.
+
+Now anthropology is just the scientific history of man; and I suppose
+that there could be a history of man that did without the idea of human
+progress altogether. Progress means, in some sense, change for the
+better. But, strictly, history as such deals with fact; and is not
+concerned with questions of better or worse--in a word, with value.
+Hence, it must always be somewhat arbitrary on the part of an historian
+to identify change in a given direction with a gain or increase in
+value. Nevertheless, the anthropologist may do so, if he be prepared to
+take the risk. He sees that human life has on the whole grown more
+complex. He cannot be sure that it will continue to grow more complex.
+Much less has he a right to lay it down for certain that it ought to
+grow more complex. But so long as he realizes that he is thereby
+committing himself by implication to a prophetic and purposive
+interpretation of the facts, he need not hesitate to style this growth
+of complexity progress so far as man is concerned. For if he is an
+anthropologist, he is also a man, and cannot afford to take a wholly
+external and impartial view of the process whereby the very growth of
+his science is itself explained. Anthropologists though we be, we run
+with the other runners in the race of life, and cannot be indifferent to
+the prize to be won.
+
+Progress, then, according to the anthropologist, is defined as increase
+in complexity, with the tacit assumption that this somehow implies
+betterment, though it is left with the philosopher to justify such an
+assumption finally and fully. Whereas in most cases man would seem to
+have succeeded in the struggle for existence by growing more complex,
+though in some cases survival has been secured by way of simplification,
+anthropology concentrates its attention on the former set of cases as
+the more interesting and instructive even from a theoretical point of
+view. Let biology by all means dispense with the notion of progress, and
+consider man along with the other forms of life as subject to mere
+process. But anthropology, though in a way it is a branch of biology,
+has a right to a special point of view. For it employs special methods
+involving the use of a self-knowledge that in respect to the other forms
+of life is inevitably wanting. Anthropology, in short, like charity,
+begins at home. Because we know in ourselves the will to progress, we go
+on to seek for evidences of progress in the history of mankind. Nor need
+we cease to think of progress as something to be willed, something that
+concerns the inner man, even though for scientific purposes we undertake
+to recognize it by some external sign, as, for instance, by the sign of
+an increasing complexity, that is, such differentiation as likewise
+involves greater cohesion. All history, and more especially the history
+of early man, must deal primarily with externals. Thence it infers the
+inner life; and thereby it controls the tendency known as 'the
+psychologist's fallacy', namely, that of reading one's own mind into
+that of another man without making due allowance for differences of
+innate capacity and of acquired outlook. In what follows, then, let us,
+as anthropologists, be content to judge human progress in prehistoric
+times primarily by its external and objective manifestations; yet let us
+at no point in our inquiries forget that these ancient men, some of whom
+are our actual ancestors, were not only flesh of our flesh, but likewise
+spirit of our spirit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A rapid sketch such as this must take for granted on the part of the
+audience some general acquaintance with that succession of prehistoric
+epochs which modern research has definitely established. Pre-history, as
+distinguished from proto-history, may, in reference to Europe as a
+whole, be made coextensive with the Stone Age. This divides into the Old
+Stone Age and the New. The Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic Period, yields
+three well-marked subdivisions, termed Early, Middle, and Late. The New
+Stone Age, or Neolithic Period, includes two sub-periods, the Earlier or
+Transitional, and the Later or Typical. Thus our historical survey will
+fall naturally into five chapters.
+
+There are reasons, however, why it will be more convenient to move over
+the whole ground twice. The material on which our judgements must be
+founded is not all of one kind. Anthropology is the joint work of two
+departments, which are known as Physical Anthropology and Cultural
+Anthropology respectively. The former, we may say, deals with man as an
+organism, the latter with him as an organizer. Here, then, are very
+different standpoints. For, in a broad way of speaking, nature controls
+man through his physical organization, whereas through his cultural
+organization man controls nature. From each of these standpoints in
+turn, then, let us inquire how far prehistoric man can be shown to have
+progressed. First, did the breed improve during the long course of the
+Stone Age in Europe? Secondly, did the arts of life advance, so that by
+their aid man might establish himself more firmly in his kingdom?
+
+Did the breed improve during prehistoric times? I have said that,
+broadly speaking, nature controls man as regards his physical endowment.
+Now in theory one must admit that it might be otherwise. If Eugenics
+were to mature on its purely scientific side, there is no reason why the
+legislator of the future should not try to make a practical application
+of its principles; and the chances are that, of many experiments, some
+would prove successful. But that conscious breeding was practised in
+prehistoric times is out of the question. The men of those days were one
+and all what we are ourselves--nature's mongrels, now broken up into
+varieties by casual isolation, and now by no less casual intermixture
+recompounded in a host of relatively unstable forms. Whatever progress,
+therefore, may have occurred in this respect has been unconscious. Man
+cannot take the credit for it, except in so far as it is indirectly due
+to that increase and spread of the race which have been promoted by his
+achievements in the way of culture.
+
+The barest outline of the facts must suffice. For the Early Pleistocene,
+apart from the Java fossil, _Pithecanthropus erectus_, a veritable
+'missing link', whom we may here disregard as falling altogether outside
+our world of Europe, there are only two individuals that can with
+certainty be referred to this distant period. These are the Piltdown and
+the Heidelberg specimens. The former consists of a fragmentary
+brain-case, thick-boned and narrow-fronted, but typically human in its
+general characters, and of the greater part of a lower jaw, which, as
+regards both its own elongated and curiously flanged structure, and that
+of the teeth it contained, including an enormous pointed canine, is
+conversely more appropriate to an ape-like being than to a man. The
+latter consists only of a lower jaw, of which the teeth, even the
+canines, are altogether human, whereas the jaw itself is hardly less
+simian than that of the Sussex skull. If we add the Java example to the
+list of very primitive forms, it is remarkable to note how, though
+differing widely from each other, all alike converge on the ape.
+Nevertheless, even in Pithecanthropus, the brute is passing into the
+man. We note the erect attitude, to be inferred from his thigh-bone, and
+the considerably enlarged, though even so hardly human, brain. The
+Piltdown individual, on the other hand, has crossed the Rubicon. He has
+a brain-capacity entitling him to rank as a man and an Englishman. Such
+a brain, too, implies a cunning hand, which doubtless helped him greatly
+to procure his food, even if his massive jaw enabled him to dispose of
+the food in question without recourse to the adventitious aids of knife
+and fork. For the matter of that, if our knowledge made it possible to
+correlate these rare finds of bones more exactly with the innumerable
+flint implements ascribable to this period (and, indeed, not without
+analogies among the spoil from the Piltdown gravels), it might turn out
+that even the equivalent of knife and fork was not wanting to the Early
+Pleistocene supper-party, or, at any rate, that the human hand was
+already advanced from the status of labourer to the more dignified
+position of superintendent of the tool.
+
+The Middle Pleistocene Epoch belongs to the men of the Neanderthal type.
+Some thirty specimens, a few of them more or less complete, have come
+down to us, and we can form a pretty clear notion of the physical
+appearance of the race. Speaking generally, we may say that it marks a
+stage of progress as compared with the Piltdown type; though, if the
+jaw, heavy and relatively chinless as it is, has become less simian, the
+protruding brow-ridge lends a monstrous look to the face, while the
+forehead is markedly receding--a feature which turns out, however, to be
+not incompatible with a weight of brain closely approaching our own
+average. Whether this type has disappeared altogether from the earth, or
+survives in certain much modified descendants, is an open question. The
+fact remains that during the last throes of the Glacial Epoch this
+rough-hewn kind of man apparently had Northern Europe as his exclusive
+province; and it is by no means evident what _Homo Sapiens_, the
+supposed highly superior counterpart and rival of _Homo
+Neanderthalensis_, was doing with himself in the meantime. Moreover, not
+only in respect of space does the population of that frozen world show
+remarkable homogeneity; but also in respect of time must we allow it an
+undisputed sway extending over thousands of years, during which the race
+bred true. The rate of progress, whether reckoned in physical terms or
+otherwise, is so slow as to be almost imperceptible. A type suffices for
+an age. Whereas in the life-history of an individual there is rapid
+development during youth, and after maturity a steadying down, it is the
+other way about in the life-history of the race. Man, so to speak, was
+born old and accommodated to a jog-trot. We moderns are the juveniles,
+and it is left for us to go the pace.
+
+Yet Late Pleistocene Period introduces us to more diversity in the way
+of human types. Only one race, however, that named after the
+rock-shelter of Crô-Magnon in the Dordogne, is represented by a fair
+number of specimens, namely, about a dozen. At this point we come
+suddenly and without previous warning on as pretty a kind of man as
+ever walked this earth. In his leading characters he is remarkably
+uniform. Six feet high and long-legged, he likewise possessed a head
+well stocked with brains and a face that, if rather broad and short,
+was furnished by way of compensation with a long and narrow nose. If
+the present world can show nothing quite like him, it at least cannot
+produce anything more shapely in the way of the 'human form divine'.
+Apart from the Crô-Magnons, the remains of an old woman and a youth
+found at the lowest level of the Grotte des Enfants at Mentone are
+usually held to belong to a distinct stock known as the Grimaldi. The
+physical characters of the pair are regarded as negroid, verging on
+the Pygmy; but if we could study an adult male of the same stock, it
+might possibly turn out not to be so very divergent from the
+Crô-Magnon. Again, a single specimen does duty for the so-called
+Chancelade race. The skeleton is of comparatively low stature, and is
+deemed to show close affinities to the type of the modern Eskimo.
+Without being unduly sceptical, one may once more wonder if the
+Crô-Magnon stock may not have produced this somewhat aberrant form.
+Even on such a theory, however--and it is hardly orthodox--diversity
+of physical structure would seem to be on the increase. On the other
+hand, there are reasons of considerable cogency for referring to the
+end of this period skeletons of what Huxley termed the 'River-bed
+type', the peculiarity of which consists in the fact that they are
+more or less indistinguishable from the later Neolithic men and indeed
+from any of those slight-built, shortish, long-headed folk who form
+the majority in the crowded cities of to-day. Some authorities would
+ascribe a far greater antiquity to this type, but, I venture to think,
+on the strength of doubtful evidence. The notorious Galley Hill
+skeleton, for instance, found more or less intact in an Early
+Pleistocene bed in which the truly contemporary animals are
+represented by the merest battered remnants, to my mind reeks of
+modernity. Be these things as they may, however, when we come to
+Neolithic times a race of similar physical characters has Europe to
+itself, though it would seem to display minor variations in a way that
+suggests that the reign of the mongrel has at length begun. And here
+we may close our enumeration of the earliest known branches of our
+family tree, since the coming of the broad-heads pertains to the
+history of the Bronze Age, and hence falls outside the scope of the
+present survey.
+
+Now what is the bearing of these somewhat scanty data on the question of
+progress? It is not easy to extract from them more than the general
+impression that, as time went on, the breed made persistent headway as
+regards both the complexity of its organization and the profusion of its
+forms. After all, we must not expect too much from this department of
+the subject. For one thing, beyond the limits of North-western Europe
+the record is almost blank; and yet we can scarcely hope to discover the
+central breeding-place of man in what is, geographically, little more
+than a blind alley. In the next place, Physical Anthropology, not only
+in respect to human palaeontology, but in general, is as barren of
+explanations as it is fertile in detailed observations. The systematic
+study of heredity as it bears on the history of the human organism has
+hardly begun. Hence, it would not befit one who is no expert in relation
+to such matters to anticipate the verdict of a science that needs only
+public encouragement in order to come into its own. Suffice it to
+suggest here that nature as she presides over organic evolution, that
+is, the unfolding of the germinal powers, may be conceived as a kindly
+but slow-going and cautious liberator. One by one new powers, hitherto
+latent, are set free as an appropriate field of exercise is afforded
+them by the environment. At first divergency is rarely tolerated. A
+given type is extremely uniform. On the other hand, when divergency is
+permitted, it counts for a great deal. The wider variations occur
+nearest the beginning, each for a long time breeding true to itself.
+Later on, such uncompromising plurality gives way to a more diffused
+multiplicity begotten of intermixture. Mongrelization has set in. Not
+but what there may spring up many true-breeding varieties among the
+mongrels; and these, given suitable conditions, will be allowed to
+constitute lesser types possessed of fairly uniform characters. Such at
+least is in barest outline the picture presented by the known facts
+concerning the physical evolution of man, if one observe it from outside
+without attempting to explore the hidden causes of the process. Some
+day, when these causes are better understood, man may take a hand in the
+game, and become, in regard to the infinite possibilities still sleeping
+in the transmitted germ, a self-liberator. Nature is but a figurative
+expression for the chances of life, and the wise man faces no more
+chances than he needs must. Scientific breeding is no mere application
+of the multiplication table to a system of items. We must make
+resolutely for the types that seem healthy and capable, suppressing the
+defectives in a no less thorough, if decidedly more considerate, way
+than nature has been left to do in the past. Here, then, along physical
+lines is one possible path of human progress, none the less real because
+hitherto pursued, not by the aid of eyes that can look and choose, but
+merely in response to painful proddings at the tail-end.
+
+Our remaining task is to take stock of that improvement in the arts of
+life whereby man has come gradually to master an environment that
+formerly mastered him. For the Early Palaeolithic Period our evidence in
+respect of its variety, if not of its gross quantity, is wofully
+disappointing. Not to speak of man's first and rudest experiments in the
+utilization of stone, which are doubtless scattered about the world in
+goodly numbers if only we could recognize them clearly for what they
+are, the Chellean industry by its wide distribution leads one to suppose
+that mankind in those far-off days was only capable of one idea at a
+time--a time, too, that lasted a whole age. Yet the succeeding Acheulean
+style of workmanship in flint testifies to the occurrence of progress in
+one of its typical forms, namely, in the form of what may be termed
+'intensive' progress. The other typical form I might call 'intrusive'
+progress, as happens when a stimulating influence is introduced from
+without. Now it may be that the Acheulean culture came into being as a
+result of contact between an immigrant stock and a previous population
+practising the Chellean method of stone-work. We are at present far too
+ill-informed to rule out such a guess. But, on the face of it, the
+greater refinement of the Acheulean handiwork looks as if it had been
+literally hammered out by steadfastly following up the Chellean pattern
+into its further possibilities. Explain it as we will, this evolution of
+the so-called _coup-de-poing_ affords almost the sole proof that the
+human world of that remote epoch was moving at all. If we could see
+their work in wood, we might discern a more diversified skill or we
+might not. As it is, we can but conclude in the light of our very
+imperfect knowledge that in mind no less than in body mankind of Early
+Palaeolithic times displayed a fixity of type almost amounting to that
+of one of the other animal species.
+
+During Middle Palaeolithic times the Mousterian culture rules without a
+rival. The cave-period has begun; and, thanks to the preservation of
+sundry dwelling-places together with a goodly assortment of their less
+perishable contents, we can frame a fairly adequate notion of the
+home-life of Neanderthal man. I have already alluded to my excavations
+in Jersey, and need not enter into fuller details here. But I should
+like to put on record the opinion borne in upon me by such first-hand
+experience as I have had that cultural advance in Mousterian days was
+almost as portentously slow as ever it had been before. The human
+deposits in the Jersey cave are in some places about ten feet thick, and
+the fact that they fall into two strata separated by a sterile layer
+that appears to consist of the dust of centuries points to a very long
+process of accumulation. Yet though there is one kind of elephant
+occurring amid the bone refuse at the bottom of the bed, and another
+and, it would seem, later kind at the top, one and the same type of
+flint instrument is found at every level alike; and the only development
+one can detect is a certain gain in elegance as regards the Mousterian
+'point', the reigning substitute for the former _coup-de-poing_. Once
+more there is intensive progress only, so far at least as most of the
+Jersey evidence goes. One _coup-de-poing_, however, and that hardly
+Acheulean in conception but exactly what a hand accustomed to the
+fashioning of the Mousterian 'point' would be likely to make by way of
+an imitation of the once fashionable pattern, lay at lowest floor-level;
+as if to remind one that during periods of transition the old is likely
+to survive by the side of the new, and may even survive in it as a
+modifying element. As a matter of fact, the _coup-de-poing_ is frequent
+in the earliest Mousterian sites; so that we cannot but ask ourselves
+how it came to be in the end superseded. Whether the Mousterians were of
+a different race from the Acheuleans is not known. Certain it is, on the
+other hand, that the industry that makes its first appearance in their
+train represents a labour-saving device. The Mousterian had learned how
+to break up his flint-nodule into flakes, which simply needed to be
+trimmed on one face to yield a cutting edge. The Acheulean had been
+content to attain this result more laboriously by pecking a pebble on
+both faces until what remained was sharp enough for his purpose. Here,
+then, we are confronted with that supreme condition of progress, the
+inventor's happy thought. One of those big-brained Neanderthal men, we
+may suppose, had genius; nature, the liberator, having released some
+latent power in the racial constitution. Given such a culture-hero, the
+common herd was capable of carrying on more or less mechanically for an
+aeon or so. And so it must ever be. The world had better make the most
+of its geniuses; for they amount to no more than perhaps a single one in
+a million. Anyway, Neanderthal man never produced a second genius, so
+far as we can tell; and that is why, perhaps, his peculiar type of
+brow-ridge no longer adorns the children of men.
+
+Before we leave the Mousterians, another side of their culture deserves
+brief mention. Not only did they provide their dead with rude graves,
+but they likewise furnished them with implements and food for use in a
+future life. Herein surely we may perceive the dawn of what I do not
+hesitate to term religion. A distinguished scholar and poet did indeed
+once ask me whether the Mousterians, when they performed these rites,
+did not merely show themselves unable to grasp the fact that the dead
+are dead. But I presume that my friend was jesting. A sympathy stronger
+than death, overriding its grisly terror, and converting it into the
+vehicle of a larger hope--that is the work of soul; and to develop soul
+is progress. A religious animal is no brute, but a real man with the
+seed of genuine progress in him. If Neanderthal man belonged to another
+species, as the experts mostly declare and I very humbly beg leave to
+doubt, we must even so allow that God made him also after his own image,
+brow-ridges and all.
+
+The presence of soul in man is even more manifest when we pass on to the
+Late Palaeolithic peoples. They are cave-dwellers; they live by the
+chase; in a word, they are savages still. But they exhibit a taste and a
+talent for the fine arts of drawing and carving that, as it were,
+enlarge human existence by a new dimension. Again a fresh power has been
+released, and one in which many would seem to have participated; for
+good artists are as plentiful during this epoch as ever they were in
+ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. They must have married-in somewhat
+closely, one would think, for this special aptitude to have blossomed
+forth so luxuriantly. I cannot here dwell at length on the triumphs of
+Aurignacian and Magdalenian artistry. Indeed, what I have seen with my
+own eyes on the walls of certain French caves is almost too wonderful to
+be described. The simplicity of the style does not in the least detract
+from the fullness of the charm. On the contrary, one is tempted to doubt
+whether the criterion of complexity applies here--whether, in fact,
+progress has any meaning in relation to fine art--since, whether
+attained by simple or by complex means, beauty is always beauty, and
+cannot further be perfected. Shall we say, then, with Plato that beauty
+was revealed to man from the first in its absolute nature, so that the
+human soul might be encouraged to seek for the real in its complementary
+forms of truth and goodness, such as are less immediately manifest? For
+the rest, the soul of these transcendently endowed savages was in other
+respects more imperfectly illuminated; as may be gathered from the fact
+that they carved and drew partly from the love of their art, but partly
+also, and, perhaps, even primarily, for luck. It seems that these
+delineations of the animals on which they lived were intended to help
+them towards good hunting. Such is certainly the object of a like custom
+on the part of the Australian aborigines; there being this difference,
+however, that the art of the latter considered as art is wholly
+inferior. Now we know enough about the soul of the Australian native,
+thanks largely to the penetrating interpretations of Sir Baldwin
+Spencer, to greet and honour in him the potential lord of the universe,
+the harbinger of the scientific control of nature. It is more than half
+the battle to have willed the victory; and the picture-charm as a piece
+of moral apparatus is therefore worthy of our deepest respect. The
+chariot of progress, of which the will of man is the driver, is drawn by
+two steeds, namely, Imagination and Reason harnessed together. Of the
+pair, Reason is the more sluggish, though serviceable enough for the
+heavy work. Imagination, full of fire as it is, must always set the
+pace. So the soul of the Late Palaeolithic hunter, having already in
+imagination controlled the useful portion of the animal world, was more
+than half-way on the road to its domestication. But in so far as he
+mistook the will for the accomplished deed, he was not getting the value
+out of his second horse; or, to drop metaphor, the scientific reason as
+yet lay dormant in his soul. But his dream was to come true presently.
+
+The Neolithic Period marks the first appearance of the 'cibi-cultural'
+peoples. The food-seekers have become food-raisers. But the change did
+not come all at once. The earlier Neolithic culture is at best
+transitional. There may even have been one of those set-backs in culture
+which we are apt to ignore when we are narrating the proud tale of human
+advance. Europe had now finally escaped from the last ravages of an
+Arctic climate; but there was cruel demolition to make good, and in the
+meantime there would seem, as regards man, to have been little doing.
+Life among the kitchen-middens of Denmark was sordid; and the Azilians
+who pushed up from Spain as far as Scotland did not exactly step into a
+paradise ready-made. Somewhere, however, in the far south-east a higher
+culture was brewing. By steps that have not yet been accurately traced
+legions of herdsmen and farmer-folk overspread our world, either
+absorbing or driving before them the roving hunters of the older
+dispensation. We term this, the earliest of true civilizations,
+'neolithic', as if it mattered in the least whether your stone implement
+be chipped or polished to an edge. The real source of increased power
+and prosperity lay in the domestication of food-animals and food-plants.
+The man certainly had genius and pluck into the bargain who first
+trusted himself to the back of an unbroken horse. It needed hardly less
+genius to discover that it is no use singing charms over the
+seed-bearing grass in order to make it grow, unless some of the seed is
+saved to be sowed in due season. Society possibly brained the
+inventor--such is the way of the crowd; but, as it duly pocketed the
+invention, we have perhaps no special cause to complain.
+
+By way of appreciating the conditions prevailing in the Later Neolithic
+Age, let us consider in turn the Lake-dwellers of Switzerland and the
+Dolmen-builders of our Western coast-lands. I was privileged to assist,
+on the shore of the Lake of Neuchâtel, in the excavation of a site where
+one Neolithic village of pile-dwellings had evidently been destroyed by
+fire, and at some later date, just falling within the Stone Age, had
+been replaced by another. Here we had lighted on a crucial instance of
+the march of cultural progress. The very piles testified to it, those of
+the older settlement being ill-assorted and slight, whereas the later
+structure was regularly built and heavily timbered. It was clear, too,
+that the first set of inhabitants had lived narrow lives. All their
+worldly goods were derived from strictly local sources. On the other
+hand, their successors wore shells from the Mediterranean and amber
+beads from the Baltic among their numerous decorations; while for their
+flint they actually went as far afield as Grand Pressigny in
+West-Central France, the mines of which provided the butter-like nodules
+that represented the _ne plus ultra_ of Neolithic luxury. Commerce must
+have been decidedly flourishing in those days. No longer was it a case
+of the so-called 'silent trade', which the furtive savage prosecutes
+with fear and trembling, placing, let us say, a lump of venison on a
+rock in the stream dividing his haunts from those of his dangerous
+neighbours, and stealing back later on to see if the red ochre for which
+he pines has been deposited in return on the primitive counter. The
+Neolithic trader, on the other side, must have pushed the science of
+barter to the uttermost limits short of the invention of a circulating
+medium, if indeed some crude form of currency was not already in vogue.
+
+When we turn to the Dolmen-builders, and contemplate their hoary
+sanctuaries, we are back among the problems raised by the philosophic
+conception of progress as an advance in soul-power. Is any religion
+better than none? Does it make for soul-power to be preoccupied with the
+cult of the dead? Does the imagination, which in alliance with the
+scientific reason achieves such conquests over nature, give way at times
+to morbid aberration, causing the chill and foggy loom of an after-life
+to obscure the honest face of the day? I can only say for myself that
+the deepening of the human consciousnesses due to the effort to close
+with the mystery of evil and death, and to extort therefrom a message of
+hope and comfort, seems to me to have been worth the achievement at
+almost any cost of crimes and follies perpetrated by the way. I do not
+think that progress in religion is progress towards its ultimate
+abolition. Rather, religion, if regarded in the light of its earlier
+history, must be treated as the parent source of all the more spiritual
+activities of man; and on these his material activities must depend.
+Else the machine will surely grind the man to death; and his body will
+finally stop the wheels that his soul originally set in motion.
+
+The panorama is over. It has not been easy, at the rate of about a
+millennium to a minute, to present a coherent account of the prehistoric
+record, which at best is like a jig-saw puzzle that has lost most of the
+pieces needed to reconstitute the design. But, even on this hasty
+showing, it looks as if the progressive nature of man were beyond
+question. There is manifest gain in complexity of organization, both
+physical and cultural; and only less manifest, in the sense that the
+inwardness of the process cannot make appeal to the eye, is the
+corresponding gain in realized power of soul. In short, the men of the
+Stone Age assuredly bore their full share in the work of
+race-improvement; and the only point on which there may seem to be doubt
+is whether we of the age of metal are as ready and able to bear our
+share. But let us be optimistic about ourselves. As long as we do not
+allow our material achievements to blind us to the need of an education
+that keeps the spiritual well to the fore, then progress is assured so
+far as it depends on culture.
+
+Yet if we could likewise breed for spirituality, humanity's chances, I
+believe, would be bettered by as much again or more. But how is this to
+be done? Science must somehow find out. To leave it to nature is treason
+to the mind. Man may be an ass on the whole, but nature is even more of
+an ass, especially when it stands for human nature minus its saving
+grace of imaginative, will-directed intelligence. So let us hope that
+one day people will marry intelligently, and that the best marriages
+will be the richest in offspring. I believe that the spiritual is not
+born of the sickly; and at any rate should be prepared to make trial of
+such a working principle in my New Republic.
+
+So much for the practical corollaries suggested by our flying visit to
+Prehistoric Europe. But, even if any detailed lessons to be drawn from
+such fragmentary facts have to be received with caution, you need not
+hesitate to pursue this branch of study for its own sake as part of the
+general training of the mind. Accustom yourselves to a long perspective.
+Cultivate the eagle's faculty of spacious vision. It is only thus that
+one can get the values right--see right and wrong, truth and error,
+beauty and ugliness in their broad and cumulative effects. Analytic
+studies, as they are termed, involving the exploration of the meaning of
+received ideas, must come first in any scheme of genuine education. We
+must learn to affirm before we can go on to learn how to criticize. But
+historical studies are a necessary sequel. Other people's received ideas
+turn out in the light of history to have sometimes worked well, and
+sometimes not so well; and we are thereupon led to revise our own
+opinions accordingly. Now the history of man has hitherto stood almost
+exclusively for the history of European civilization. Being so limited,
+it loses most of its value as an instrument of criticism. For how can a
+single phase of culture criticize itself? How can it step out of the
+scales and assess its own weight? Anthropology, however, will never
+acquiesce in this parochial view of the province of history. History
+worthy of the name must deal with man universal. So I would have you all
+become anthropologists. Let your survey of human progress be age-long
+and world-wide. You come of a large family and an ancient one. Learn to
+be proud of it, and then you will seek likewise to be worthy of it.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+W. J. Sollas, _Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives_, 2nd
+edition, 1915.
+
+E. A. Parkyn, _Introduction to the study of Prehistoric Art_.
+
+R. R. Marett, _Anthropology_ (Home University Library).
+
+J. L. Myres, _Dawn of History_ (Home University).
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] Presidential Address to the International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891,
+p. 9.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+PROGRESS AND HELLENISM
+
+F. MELIAN STAWELL
+
+
+To speak the truth about national characteristics it is often necessary
+to speak in paradoxes, for of all unities on earth nothing contains so
+many contradictions as a nation. So it is here: it may be said quite
+truly that the Greeks had at once the most profound conceptions about
+Progress and no faith in it: that they were at once the most hopeful and
+the most despairing of peoples. Let me try to explain. When we speak of
+a faith in Progress, whatever else we mean, we must mean, I take it,
+that there is a real advance in human welfare throughout time from the
+Past to the Future, that 'the best is yet to be', and that the good wine
+is kept to the last. But if we are to have a philosophy underlying that
+faith we must be able to say something more. What, in the first place,
+do we mean by 'a real advance'? Or by 'human welfare'? Progress, yes,
+but progress towards what? What is the standard? And if we cannot
+indicate a standard, what right have we to say that one life is any
+better than another? The life of the scientific man any better than the
+life of the South Sea Islander--content if only he has enough bananas to
+eat? Or than the life of a triumphant conqueror, a Zenghis Khan or a
+Tamberlaine--exultant if he has enough human heads before him? Or,
+indeed, any of these rather than the blank of Nirvana or the life of a
+vegetable?
+
+Our first need, then, is the need of a standard for good over and above
+the conflicting opinions of men, and some idea as to what that standard
+implies.
+
+And the next question is, why we should hold that any of this good is
+going to be realized in human life at all? If it is, there must be some
+connexion of cause and effect between goodness and human existence. What
+is the nature of that connexion? Finally, why should we hope that this
+goodness is realized more and more fully as time goes on?
+
+The Greeks faced these questions, as they faced so many, with
+extraordinary daring and penetration and with an intimate mixture of
+sadness and hope.
+
+They themselves, of all nations known to us in history, had made the
+greatest progress in the shortest space of time. A long course of
+preparation, it is true, underlay that marvellous growth. The classical
+Greeks,--and when I speak of Hellenism I mean the flower of classical
+Greek culture,--the classical Greeks entered into the labours of the
+island peoples, who, whether kindred to them or not, had built up from
+neolithic times a great civilization, the major part of which they
+could, and did, assimilate. They found the soil already worked. None the
+less it is to their own original genius that we owe those great
+discoveries of the spirit which, to quote a recent writer, 'created a
+new world of science and art, established an ideal of the sane mind in
+the sane body and the perfect man in the perfect society, cut out a new
+line of progress between anarchy and despotism, and made moral ends
+supreme over national in the State.'[6]
+
+But these practical achievements of theirs have been already summed up
+by Professor J. A. Smith in his lecture[7] at this school last year, and
+it is to that lecture that I would refer you. I will take it as a basis
+and proceed for my own purposes to discuss the Greek conceptions about
+progress. Those conceptions were complex, and, speaking roughly, we may
+say this: if belief in real progress implies belief in three things,
+namely, (1) an absolute standard apprehended, however dimly, by man, (2)
+a causal connexion between existence and perfection, and (3) a
+persistent advance through time, then the Greeks held to the first two
+and doubted, or even denied, the third. Their two great thinkers, Plato
+and Aristotle, worked out systems based on the conviction that there
+really was an absolute standard of perfection, that man could really
+apprehend something of this perfection, and that the effort towards it
+was essential to the very existence of the world, part of the stuff, as
+it were, that made the universe. These systems have had an effect not to
+be exaggerated on the whole movement of thought since their day.
+Moreover, many of their fundamental conceptions are being revived in
+modern science and metaphysics. And the convictions that underlie them
+are calculated, one would say, to lead at once to a buoyant faith in
+progress. But with Plato, and Aristotle, and the Greeks generally, they
+did not so lead. The Greeks could not feel sure that this effort towards
+perfection, though it is part of existence, is strong enough to deliver
+man in this world from the web of evil in which also he is involved, nor
+even that he makes any approach on the whole towards the loosening of
+the toils. The spectre of world-destruction, as Whitman says of Carlyle,
+was always before them. And I wish to ask later on if we may not surmise
+definite reasons in their own history for this recurring note of
+discouragement. But let us first look at the positive side, and first in
+Plato. Plato came to his system by several lines of thought, and to
+understand it we ought to take account of all.
+
+1. In the first place no thinker, I suppose, ever felt more keenly than
+he felt the desire for an absolute standard of truth, especially in
+matters of right and wrong, if only to decide between the disputes of
+men. And, in Greece men disputed so boldly and so incessantly that there
+was no possibility of forgetting the clash of opinion in any 'dogmatic
+slumber'. Thus Plato is always asking, like Robert Browning in 'Rabbi
+Ben Ezra',--
+
+      Now, who shall arbitrate?
+      Ten men love what I hate,
+    Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
+      Ten who in ears and eyes
+      Match me: we all surmise,
+    They this thing, and I that; whom shall my soul believe?
+
+In one of his very earliest dialogues, the 'Euthyphro', Plato puts the
+question almost in so many words. What is it, he asks (7 A-E), that men
+quarrel over most passionately when they dispute? Is it not over the
+great questions of justice and injustice, of beauty, goodness, and the
+like? They do not quarrel thus over a question of physical size, simply
+because they can settle such a dispute by reference to an unquestioned
+standard, a standard measure, let us say.
+
+If there is no corresponding standard for right and wrong, if each man
+is really the judge and the measure for himself, then there is no sense,
+Plato feels, in claiming that one man is wiser than another in conduct,
+or indeed any man wiser than a dog-faced baboon (_Theaet._ 161 C-E).
+
+2. Again, Plato feels most poignantly the inadequacy of all the goodness
+and beauty we have ever actually seen in this world of space and time,
+compared with the ideal we have of them in their perfection. How can we
+have this sense of deficiency, he asks, unless somehow we apprehend
+something supreme, over and above all the approaches to it that have as
+yet appeared? (_Phaedo_, 74 E).
+
+This vision of an absolute perfection, as yet unrealized on earth, so
+dominates all his thinking, and has such peculiar features of its own,
+that even familiar quotations must be quoted here. You will find an
+exquisite translation of a typical passage in our Poet Laureate's
+Anthology, _The Spirit of Man_ (No. 37). Specially to be noted here is
+the stress on the unchanging character of this eternal perfection and
+the suggestion that it cannot be fully realized in the world. At the
+same time, Plato is equally sure that it is only through the study of
+this world that our apprehension of that perfection is awakened at
+all:--
+
+     'He who has thus been instructed in the science of Love, and
+     has been led to see beautiful things in their due order and
+     rank, when he comes toward the end of his discipline, will
+     suddenly catch sight of a wondrous thing, beautiful with the
+     absolute Beauty ... he will see a Beauty eternal, not
+     growing or decaying, not waxing or waning, nor will it be
+     fair here and foul there ... as if fair to some and foul to
+     others ... but Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and
+     everlasting; which lending of its virtue to all beautiful
+     things that we see born to decay, itself suffers neither
+     increase nor diminution, nor any other change' (_Symp._
+     211).
+
+All beautiful things remind man, Plato tells us in his mythological
+fashion, of this perfect Beauty, because we had seen it once before in
+another life, before our souls were born into this world, 'that blissful
+sight and spectacle' (_Phaedrus_, 250 B) when we followed Zeus in his
+winged car and all the company of the gods, and went out into the realm
+beyond the sky, a realm 'of which no mortal poet has ever sung or ever
+will sing worthily'.
+
+3. But, beside this passion for the ideal, Plato was intensely
+interested in our knowledge of the actual world of appearances around
+us. And one of the prime questions with which he was then concerned was
+the question, what we mean when we talk about the nature or character
+of the things we see, a plant, say, or an animal, or a man. We must mean
+something definite, otherwise we could not recognize, for example, that
+a plant _is_ a plant through all its varieties and all the different
+stages of its growth. Plato's answer was, that in all natural things
+there is a definite principle that copies, as it were, a definite Type
+or Form, and this Type he calls an Idea. Thus in some sense it is this
+Type, this Idea, this Form, that brings the particular thing into being.
+
+4. But it was not enough for Plato to say that every natural thing had
+in some sense a certain type for its basis, unless he could believe that
+this type was good, and that all the types were harmonious with each
+other. He could only be satisfied with the world, in short, if he could
+feel that it came about through a movement towards perfection. He makes
+his Socrates say that in asking about 'the causes of things, what it is
+that makes each thing come into being', it was not enough for him if he
+could only see that the thing was there because something had put it
+there: he also wanted to see that it was good for it to be there.
+Socrates tells us that what he needed he thought he had found in a book
+by Anaxagoras, which announced 'that Mind was the disposer and cause of
+all' because, 'I said to myself, If this be so--if Mind is the orderer,
+it will have all in order, and put every single thing in the place that
+is best for it'.[8]
+
+It is the same feeling as that which underlies the words of Genesis
+about the Creation, 'And God saw that it was good'. And there is no
+doubt that such a view of the world would be supremely satisfying if we
+could count it true. There may be considerable intellectual
+satisfaction, no doubt, in merely solving a puzzle as to how things come
+about, but it is as nothing compared to the joy there would be in
+contemplating their goodness.
+
+5. But is it true? Can we possibly say so in view of the hideous
+imperfection round us? The writers of Genesis spoke of a Fall. Plato, in
+his own way, speaks of a Fall himself. He never gives up the belief in
+an Absolute Perfection, a system of Perfect Types somehow--he does not
+say exactly how--influencing the structure of things in this world. But
+he holds that on earth this perfection is always thwarted by a medium
+which prevents its full manifestation. This medium is the medium of
+Space and Time, and therefore the medium of history--and therefore
+history is always and inevitably a record of failure. 'While we are in
+the body,' Plato writes, 'and while the soul is contaminated with its
+evils, our desire will never be thoroughly satisfied.'[9] 'The body is a
+tomb,' he writes elsewhere, quoting a current phrase.
+
+This is sad enough: yet if we put against it Plato's vision of what Man
+might be, we get as inspiring words as ever were written:
+
+'We have spoken of Man', he says at the end of the _Republic_, 'as he
+appears to us now, but now he looks as Glaucus looked after he had been
+cast into the sea, and his original nature was scarcely to be discerned,
+for his limbs were broken and crushed and defaced by the waters, and
+strange things had grown round him, shells and seaweed and stones, so
+that he was more like a beast than a man. That is how the soul looks to
+us now encompassed by all her evils. It is elsewhere, my friend, that we
+ought to look.' Where? asks Plato's friend, and Plato answers, 'We
+should look to her love of wisdom and realize what she clings to, what
+company she desires, for she is akin to the Divine and Immortal and
+Eternal, and we should understand what she would become if she followed
+after it, with all her strength, and were lifted by that effort out of
+the sea where she now lies.... Then we should understand her real
+nature.' (_Republic_, 611.)
+
+Somewhere, Plato believes, this true nature of man may be realized. The
+Principle of Good is something active, not a dead helpless thing, with
+no effect on the rest of the universe (_Sophist_, 248, 249); it is a
+living power, which desires that everything everywhere should be as
+glorious as possible (_Tim._ 29 D). There is no envy, Plato says, in the
+Divine, that grudging spirit has no part in the heavenly company. Only
+it is not on earth that the glory can be realized. It is towards the
+life after death that Plato's real hopes are directed.
+
+None the less, and this is important, this world does not cease to be
+significant for him. He does not turn aside,--as some souls, intoxicated
+with the Divine, have done,--from this world altogether.
+
+Because he holds that man can only advance by struggling to make this
+world better. Man's ordinary life may be like the life in a cave, as he
+says in his famous myth, but the true philosopher who has once risen out
+of the cave must go back into it again and teach the prisoners there
+what the universe really is (_Republic_, Book vi, _fin._; vii, _init._).
+The very passage that I quoted about man's real nature comes at the end
+of the _Republic_. Now the _Republic_ is a Utopia, and no one writes a
+Utopia unless he believes that the effort to reach it is of prime
+importance to man and helps him to advance.
+
+Only, for Plato, the advance is not marked in the successive stages of
+history, as the modern faith in progress asserts. The life on earth, for
+Plato, is like a school through which men pass and in which they may
+learn and grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is not
+that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope
+for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better
+and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at
+one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and
+then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it
+gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and
+from bad to worse, until at last God takes pity on it once more to save
+it from utter destruction (_Polit._ 269 ff.). No doubt in this idea of
+cycles Plato is influenced by the popular thought of his time: this
+feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age in the past was deeply
+rooted in Greek mythology. We get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and
+there are similar touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have
+sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever they recover it
+they will lose it again. And with Plato this dread is reinforced by his
+sense of something incurable in the world, the thwarting influence of
+spatial and temporal matter (_Theaet._ 176 A).
+
+It is strange that, though he is always thinking of the individual soul
+as learning through experience in its passage from one life to another,
+Plato does not seem to have the idea of mankind learning by the lessons
+of history, of knowledge being handed down from one age to another, and
+growing in the process. That is one of the most inspiring ideas in
+modern thought: a German writer has spoken of history as the long
+Odyssey of the human spirit, the common mind of Man coming at last
+through its wanderings to find out what it really wants, and where its
+true home lies.
+
+And here, significantly enough, we find we are brought back in our
+modern way to something very like Plato's own conception of an eternal
+unchanging Reality. There are endless problems in the whole conception
+of the Eternal that I am quite unable even to attempt; but this much at
+least seems clear to me, that the whole idea of mankind learning by the
+experience of History, implies something of permanent value running
+through that experience. The very thought of continued progress implies
+that man can look back at the successive stages of the Past and say of
+each: In that lay values which I, to-day and always, can recognize as
+good, although I believe we have more good now. Seeley speaks in a noble
+passage of how religion might conceive a progressive revelation which
+was, in a sense, the same through all its stages, and yet was a growing
+thing:--'each new revelation asserts its own superiority to those which
+went before,' but the superiority is 'not of one thing to another
+thing--but of the developed thing to the undeveloped'. 'It is thus', he
+writes, 'that the ages should behave to one another.' This is the true
+'understanding and concert with time'.[10] And though Plato does not
+live in the thought of historic progress, yet such a conception of
+progress which recognizes at different stages different expressions,
+more or less adequate, of one eternal value, such a way of thinking is
+entirely Platonic. When we look back at history in this mood we think
+not only of grasping the right principles for the Future, but of
+rejoicing in the definite achievements of the Past, and we feel this
+most poignantly, I think, of the achievements won by the spirit of
+Beauty. Great works of Art we are accustomed actually to call immortal,
+and we mean by this not merely that we think they will always be famous,
+but that there is something in them that makes it impossible for them
+ever to be superseded. In themselves they are inexhaustible: if they
+cease to interest us, it is our fault and not theirs. We may want more,
+we do want more, where they came from, but we never want to lose them,
+any more than we could bear to lose our old friends, though we may
+desire to make new ones. Of all the divine Ideas, said Plato, Beauty is
+the one that shows itself most plainly in the world of sense and speaks
+to us most plainly of the eternal realities.
+
+This, however, is perhaps trenching on the subject of Progress in Art,
+and I should like to return to the general Greek conception of the
+tendency in all nature towards the Good, the perfect realization of
+perfect types.
+
+Plato does not expressly insist that this tendency is of the nature of
+effort, though I think that is involved in his view. But Aristotle does.
+Following Plato in essentials, he makes bold to say outright that every
+natural thing in its own way longs for the divine and desires to share
+in the divine life, so far as it can.[11] Every such thing in this world
+of space and time has to cope with difficulties and is imperfect, but
+everything struggles towards the good. That good is in the life of God,
+a thinking life, an activity of thought, existing in some sense beyond
+this imperfect world; and this life is so supremely desirable that it
+makes everything else struggle to reach it. It moves the whole world,
+Aristotle says, in a famous passage, because it is loved. It is the
+world's desire.[12]
+
+Now this idea of effort--or of something analogous to
+effort--constituting the inner nature of every natural thing reappears,
+with pregnant consequences, in modern thought, though seldom with these
+vast theological consequences. The idea of an upward effort through
+nature lies at the base of our most hopeful theories of evolution, and
+forms the true support of our modern faith in progress. Broadly
+speaking, our evolutionists are now divided into two schools: the
+adherents of the one believe that variations are purely accidental, and
+may occur in any direction whatsoever, the useful ones being preserved
+only because they happen to be useful for the life of the species, while
+the adherents of the other--the school that I would call the school of
+hope--believe that accident, even with natural selection to aid it, is
+utterly inadequate to account for the ordered beauty and harmony that we
+do see in natural things. They admit, as Plato and Aristotle admit,
+imperfection and difficulty in the world, but they insist on a movement
+towards value: in short, they conceive an order emerging that is brought
+about, to quote a modern writer, both in nature and in society, by 'a
+principle of movement and progress conflicting with a principle of
+inertia.'[13]
+
+Aristotle, in words that are strikingly modern, raises the very question
+at issue here.[14] He asks whether we can suppose that nature does not
+aim at the good at all, but that variations arise by chance and are
+preserved just because they are useful, and he scouts the idea that
+chance could do more, as Zeller says, than 'bring about isolated and
+abnormal results'. He chooses instead the conception of purpose and
+effort, and this in spite of the difficulties in conceiving a purpose
+and an effort that are not definitely conscious. The sort of thing that
+is in Aristotle's mind when he speaks of nature aiming at the good,
+comes out in a passage by Edward Carpenter in his little book _The Art
+of Creation_. Carpenter plunges boldly and compares the principle that
+makes a tree grow and propagate its kind with the impulse that makes a
+man express himself. Man, he says,
+
+     has a Will and Purpose, a Character, which, do what you
+     will, tends to push outwards towards expression. You put
+     George Fox in prison, you flog and persecute him, but the
+     moment he has a chance he goes and preaches just the same as
+     before.... But take a Tree and you notice exactly the same
+     thing. A dominant Idea informs the life of the Tree;
+     persisting, it forms the tree. You may snip the leaves as
+     much as you like to a certain pattern, but they will only
+     grow in their own shape. Finally, you may cut the tree down
+     root and branch and burn it, but, if there is left a single
+     seed, within that seed ... lurks the formative ideal, which
+     under proper conditions will again spring into life and
+     expression.[15]
+
+Aristotle would have endorsed almost every word of this. In his pithy
+way, speaking of the distinction between natural and artificial objects,
+he says himself that if you planted a wooden bed and the wood could
+still grow, it would grow up, not a bed, but a tree.[16]
+
+He would not have gone so far as to talk about the _Will_ of a tree, but
+he would have admitted that what made the tree grow was the same sort of
+thing as Will. And in one respect he goes farther than Edward Carpenter
+does. For he considers that not only growth but even the movement of
+natural things through space is somehow an expression of a tendency
+towards the good and the divine, a tendency which, when consciousness
+supervenes, we can call effort, an activity, even though, at its best,
+only an imperfect activity. He looks up at the splendour of the circling
+stars and asks if it is possible that so glorious an order can be
+anything but a manifestation of something akin to the divine. Here
+indeed he is speaking of movements made by existences he reckoned among
+the highest in the world, for he thought the stars were living beings
+higher than man. But he recognized a rudimentary form of such activity
+even in what we now call inanimate matter. Here we come to a leading
+conception of Aristotle's, and one most important for our purpose: the
+conception of a hierarchy of natural existences, all of them with some
+value, less or more. When Aristotle is truest to himself, he will tell
+us not to be afraid of studying the meanest forms of natural existence,
+because in everything there is something marvellous and divine. He
+quotes with much satisfaction the story of Heracleitus, who welcomed
+his friends into the bakehouse with the saying that 'there were gods in
+the bakehouse too'.[17]
+
+Thus, at the lowest end of the scale, we have what we call inanimate
+matter, which Aristotle thinks of much as we do, namely, as something
+occupying space, the different parts of it being endowed with different
+powers of movement, and with different properties, such as warmth or
+coldness, wetness or dryness. A natural thing, he says, is a thing that
+has a principle of activity in itself, something that makes it act in a
+definite way, whenever it is not interfered with by anything else.[18]
+Aristotle speaks, for example, of fire having a natural tendency to
+mount up, much as we might speak of solids having a natural tendency to
+gravitate towards one another. Go back as far as we like, and, Aristotle
+thinks, we still find certain primitive differences which constitute
+what we call the primitive elements. This, I imagine, is much the point
+of view of modern science.
+
+And these primitive elements in Aristotle's view influence each other,
+unite with each other, or change into each other. As a rule, however,
+they exhibit no new powers. But given a happy concurrence of qualities,
+say a certain union of heat and cold, and a new power does become
+manifest: the power of life. Thus, in a sense, Aristotle does envisage
+the spontaneous generation of life; and he knows, roughly, what he means
+by life. The living thing can go through far more changes than the
+non-living, while yet remaining recognizably the same thing. For
+example, it shows in itself a greater advance to richness and also a
+decline, it uses other things to foster this advance, and it sends out
+fresh things, like itself, but independent of itself: in short, it
+grows, decays, feeds itself, and propagates its kind.[19]
+
+As I understand Aristotle, for him there is not an entire and absolute
+difference between ordinary matter and living things, and yet there is a
+real difference, and one not to be explained away, for there is a new
+manifestation of active energy. And if we consider life of more value
+than mere motion, then we are right in saying there is a higher energy.
+The quality of growth is a quality which could not be deduced from the
+quality of warmth or from the quality of mere movement in space, and yet
+all three qualities are alike in this, that they are all manifestations
+of an energy which is somehow inherent in things, and not merely imposed
+on them from without. The manifestations of life are started, in a
+sense, by the different movements, 'mechanical', if you like to call
+them so, in the rudimentary forms of matter, the elements meeting each
+other in space. The process of life could not have begun without such
+movements. But neither could it have begun if the elements, just as they
+appear, had been all there was. There had to be latent, that is, the
+possibility of a different and higher mode of action. This higher mode
+of action Aristotle calls a higher Form, a higher Idea. And I think it
+is true to him to say that he believes the lower Forms, the lower Ideas,
+do their most perfect work when they bring about the conditions under
+which the higher ones can operate. For when he speaks of that
+concurrence of elements that conditions life he speaks of the 'warmth
+and cold' as 'having mastered the matter'.[20]
+
+In any case he conceives a whole series of higher and lower Forms, the
+higher coming nearer and nearer to that full and glorious activity which
+he conceives to be the life of God. Above the power of the thing to grow
+as a plant grows appears the power of sensation as it is present in
+animals, and above that again the power, first seen in man, of living
+the life of thought, perceiving what is beautiful and true in the
+'forms', the characters, of all the things around him, and with this
+that further power of setting consciously before himself what he really
+wants to be and to do, the power of moral action strictly so-called.
+
+Throughout this series, in every higher stage the lower is present as a
+kind of basis. In the man who thinks there is active not only the power
+of thought, but also the power of sensation, the faculty of growth, and
+the physical properties of the body. It would seem that Aristotle has
+only to take one step, and he would be a thoroughgoing evolutionist. He
+has only to say that the different stages are successive in time, the
+lower regularly preceding the higher. But this step he hesitates to
+take.
+
+He often comes very near it. He speaks of nature passing gradually from
+inanimate things through living things to living animals. He speaks of
+what is first in itself, first inherently, 'prior' in the logical sense
+because it is the goal and the completion of the thing, as appearing
+later in time. For instance, he believes that man can only find his real
+happiness and develop his real nature in the State, but the State
+appears later in time than the primitive associations of the household
+and the family.[21] What came earlier in history were barbarous
+communities such as those of the Cyclopes, where 'each man laid down the
+law for his wife and children and obeyed no other law'.
+
+But Aristotle does not go on from this belief to the belief in a
+universal upward process throughout all history. The developed State, it
+is true, may always have been preceded by a lower form, but that lower
+form may itself have been preceded by a higher.
+
+Aristotle, in short, is haunted, like Plato, by the idea of cycles,
+alternations, decline and progress, progress and decline. He feels this
+both in the life of States and in the whole life of the world. He speaks
+of the same discoveries being made over and over again, an infinite
+number of times, in the history of civilization. And his words recall
+the sad passage in Plato's _Laws_ (676) referring to the numberless
+nations and states, ten thousand times ten thousand, that had risen and
+fallen all over the world, passing from worse to better and from better
+to worse. Similarly Aristotle will speak of degraded animal forms, and
+sometimes write as though the animal world could sink back into the
+vegetable altogether.
+
+Admitting, however, something like progress within the different cycles,
+we must ask a little more about the kind of progress which Aristotle
+would have desired. (I take Aristotle again as a typical Greek.) Man at
+his best, he clearly holds, in trying to realize his true nature should
+aim at a happiness which involves a harmony of all his faculties, a
+harmony inspired and led by the highest faculty of all, the Reason which
+rejoices in the contemplation of what is at once true and good and
+beautiful.
+
+Now in this aim, we must ask, does a man need other men and other
+creatures, and in what sense does he need them? Here, I think, we come
+on two inconsistent tendencies in Aristotle's thought, connected with
+two different ways of regarding the hierarchy of existences. We say that
+one existence is higher than another. Does this mean that what we call
+the lower are only so many blundering attempts to reach the higher? That
+every creature, for example, which is not a thinking man is, on the
+whole, a mistake? Aristotle often does speak like that. Woman, he says
+in one passage, is only a mutilated male.[22] The principle which ought
+to develop into the active power of thought could not, he explains, in
+women master the recalcitrant element which is always thwarting
+perfection, and thus woman is man _manqué_. On these lines of thought it
+is easy to slip into looking on all other forms of existence as merely
+valuable in so far as they serve the direct purposes of men, and indeed
+only of a few men, those namely who are able to think as philosophers.
+This is the kind of view according to which, as the satirist suggests,
+cork-trees only grow in order to make corks for champagne-bottles, and
+the inferior races of mankind only exist to furnish slaves for the
+higher. And Aristotle does, on occasion, lend himself to such a view: he
+justifies a slavery in which, as he says, some men are to be treated
+merely as living tools. And yet on his own principles every man ought to
+aim at realizing his own end, and not merely the ends of others.
+
+But there is a widely different view, also present in Aristotle, and
+truer to the essence of his thought. It is a view instinct with that
+reverence for all existence of which I spoke at first, and it holds that
+all the different natural types, high or low, could all be united in one
+harmony, like an ordered army, as Aristotle himself would say, in which
+the divine spirit was present even as the spirit of a general is present
+in his men. The greatest thing in man, Aristotle thinks, is the godlike
+power of apprehending the different characters of all the things around
+him, and this of itself suggests the belief that all these characters
+have a value of their own, unique and indispensable, each aiming at a
+distinct aspect of the Divine, each, if it fulfilled its inner nature,
+finding, as Plato might have said, the place where it was best for it to
+be. Again, it is clear from Aristotle's whole treatment of the State,
+that when he wrote his famous phrase, 'Man is by nature a political
+animal', he meant that man, as we should say, is essentially social. It
+is part of man's goal to live with others; it is not merely a means to
+the goal. His highest happiness lies in the contemplation of the good,
+and the good, Aristotle says, can be contemplated far better in others
+than in ourselves. This is a profound saying, and from this thought
+springs the deep significance of friendship in Aristotle's system. The
+crown of the civic life he takes to be the community of friends who
+recognize the good in each other, and enjoy each other through this. The
+wider this community, then, we must surely say, the better.
+
+For Aristotle then, man's perfection ought to mean the perfection of
+every individual, and progress, so far as he conceives it, involve
+progress towards this end. This should lead on to belief in the supreme
+importance of the individual soul, and to Kant's great principle that we
+should always treat each man as an end in himself.
+
+Thus, if we concentrate on the hopeful elements in Plato and Aristotle,
+we may fairly say, I think, that we can see outlined in their
+philosophies something like the following belief: every natural thing in
+this world, and every natural creature, so far as it is good,--and all
+are more or less good,--tends to express some distinct aspect of a
+perfect harmony: we human beings are the first on earth to be definitely
+conscious of such a tendency, the first to be able definitely to direct
+it to its true goal, and our business in life is therefore threefold: to
+make actual our own function in this harmony, to help other creatures to
+actualize theirs, and to contemplate every such manifestation, in men or
+in things, with reverence and rejoicing.
+
+The harmony, if complete, would be a manifestation of a divine reality,
+and thus the love of God, the love of our neighbour, the love of nature,
+self-development, political life, scientific study, poetic
+contemplation, and philosophic speculation, would all unite in one
+comprehensive and glorious task.
+
+This, surely, is hopeful enough. But the Greek hope faltered and sank.
+Could this harmony ever be realized? Would not the thwarting element in
+the world always drag it down again and again, and drag some men down
+always, so that after all progress was impossible, and for some men
+should not even be attempted? As a matter of fact, Plato and Aristotle
+do limit their exhortations to a narrow circle of cultured Greeks, and
+even with them they doubt of success.
+
+Now this despondency came partly, I think, through the very
+sensitiveness of the Hellenic nature. The spectacle of the ever-baffled
+struggle in Nature and Man they felt at times almost intolerable.
+Aristotle saw that this perpetual failure in the heart of glorious good
+made the very essence of tragedy. The tragic hero is the man of innate
+nobleness who yet has some one defect that lays him open to ruin. Man is
+set in a world full of difficulties, a world much of which is dark and
+strange to him: his action and those of others have results which he did
+not, and in his ignorance could not, foresee; he is not strong enough
+for his great task.
+
+All the Greek poets have this deep sadness. Homer has it, in and through
+his intense feeling for the beauty and energy of life. There has never
+been such war-poetry as Homer's, and yet there has never been any which
+felt more poignantly the senselessness in war. 'And I must come here',
+Achilles says to his noble enemy at the close, 'to torture you and your
+children.'
+
+In the next place, the sadness of the world could not be lightened for
+the Greeks by the vision that the modern theory of evolution has opened
+up to us of the long advance in the history of life on the planet. Even
+their knowledge of history in the strict sense was scanty, and it is
+only a long view of history that is likely to be comforting. What
+history they did know could bring them little comfort. In the first
+place it showed them a series of great civilizations, rising and
+falling, and those that had fallen seemed at least as good as those that
+followed them. A Greek like Plato knew of the Homeric civilization,
+simpler indeed, but fresher and purer than his own. And he believed,
+what we now know to be the fact, that even before the Homeric there had
+been a wonderful island-culture, what we call the Minoan, flourishing
+before the Homeric. 'There had been kings before Agamemnon.'
+
+And behind Minos and Agamemnon lay the great, and by that time the
+ossifying, kingdom of Egypt, compared to which the Greeks were, and felt
+themselves to be, but children. Plato had seen, finally, the
+degeneration of the Persian Empire--once so magnificent and mighty.
+
+This fact of recurrent decay is one of the heaviest that the human
+spirit can shoulder. Any theory of progress must come to terms with it,
+for Progress through history is certainly not an uninterrupted ascent; a
+spiral is the better image. And the weight must lie most heavily on a
+generation which feels its own self to be in peril of decay. Now Plato
+and Aristotle lived at such a period. Greece had gone through the bitter
+experiences of the Peloponnesian War, and the shadow of it lay on them,
+as on its historian Thucydides. In that fratricidal conflict Greece tore
+herself to pieces. It was a struggle between the two leaders of the then
+civilized world, and it has a terrible likeness to the struggle that is
+going on now. From its devastating influence Greece never recovered.
+Historians still dispute, and always will, as to the exact proportion of
+praise and blame between the two. But Thucydides himself, a true-hearted
+Athenian, brings out the tyrannical side in the Athenian temper. Not
+indeed towards her own people, but towards all who were not of her own
+immediate stock. Because Athens thought herself the fairest city in the
+world, as indeed she was, because she thought herself menaced by Sparta,
+and menaced she was, she allowed herself to tyrannize and lightly took
+up the burden of war between brethren. There are few passages in history
+more stately than the Funeral Oration of Pericles in which he calls
+Athens the School of Hellas, but even in it there is a certain deadly
+coldness of heart. And few things are more terrible than the coarsening
+of temper which Thucydides depicts as the war goes on and Pericles is
+succeeded by his caricature Cleon, the man who means to prosecute the
+war vigorously, and by vigour means ruthlessness. Nor was there ever a
+sterner indictment of aggression than that given in the dialogue between
+the spokesmen of Melos, the little island that desired to stand out of
+the conflict, and the Athenian representatives who were determined to
+force her into their policy. And after that dialogue comes, in
+Thucydides' great drama, the fall of Athens.
+
+The city recovered in some measure from her fall, but only to face
+another disaster. If she sinned in the Peloponnesian War through the
+spirit of aggression, she sinned in the struggle with Macedon through
+slackness and cowardice. In the one struggle she lost comradeship; in
+the other she lost liberty. And with the loss of the two she lost
+buoyancy. In a deeper sense than Pericles used the phrase, 'the
+springtime went out of her year'. Ultimately, perhaps, we cannot explain
+why this should be so. Other nations have had as disheartening
+experiences and yet risen above them. Some of the most inspired
+prophecies in the Hebrew writings came after the tiny state of Judaea
+had been torn in pieces by the insensate conflict between North and
+South, and after the whole people had been swept into captivity. But
+whatever the ultimate reason, Athens did not recover. We must not end,
+however, on a note of despair. Far from it. The work of Aristotle and
+Plato and of the Greeks generally, was cramped for lack of sympathy and
+lack of hope, and, strangely enough, it was after they had passed and
+their glory with them that sympathy grew in the world, and after
+sympathy grew, hope returned.
+
+For it is exactly in those failing years, when the Hellenic gave way to
+the Hellenistic, that men first grasped, and grasped so firmly that it
+could hardly be lost again, one of the fundamental principles on which
+the whole fabric of our later civilization has rested, or ought to rest,
+the great principle of personal equality, the claim of every individual
+to transcendent value, irrespective of race and creed and endowment. The
+conquering rule of Alexander, whatever else it did, broke down the
+barriers of the little city-states and made men of different races feel
+themselves members of mankind. There rose among the Stoics the
+conviction that all men do belong together and are all made for each
+other. And with the advent of Christianity came the belief that every
+man, however mean and unworthy, can receive a power that will make him
+all he ought to be. The highest is within his reach. There is no reason
+now why the glorious life that Hellenism conceived for a few should not
+lie open to all men.
+
+Finally, we might say, and truly, that the vast political organization
+built up by Rome gave us Europeans, once and for all, the vision of a
+united Europe.
+
+That dream has never left it. Even to-day, here and now, in spite of our
+disasters, our blunders, and our crimes, let us not forget it, that
+dream which is 'not all a dream', the dream of once again constructing a
+system in which we might, all of us, all nations and all men and women,
+make progress together in the common task.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+G. L. Dickinson, _The Greek View of Life_.
+
+Zeller, _Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics_.
+
+Edited by Evelyn Abbott, _Hellenica_.
+
+Bury, _History of Greece_.
+
+Davies and Vaughan, _Plato's Republic_.
+
+Welldon, _Aristotle's Politics_.
+
+Peters, _Aristotle's Ethics_.
+
+Bridges, _The Spirit of Man_.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] G. H. Perris, _History of War and Peace_, p. 54.
+
+[7] 'The Unity of Western Civilization,' c. III.
+
+[8] _The Spirit of Man_, 40; _Phaedo_, 96.
+
+[9] _The Spirit of Man_, 16; _Phaedo_, 66.
+
+[10] _Natural Religion_, part ii, c. 5.
+
+[11] _De An._ ii. 4, 415, p. 35.
+
+[12] _The Spirit of Man_, 39; Aristotle, _Met._ 10.
+
+[13] T. W. Rolleston, _Parallel Paths_.
+
+[14] _Phys._ ii. 8, 198 16-34.
+
+[15] Pp. 28-9.
+
+[16] _Phys._ ii, c. I.
+
+[17] _De Part. An._, Bk. i, c. 5.
+
+[18] _Phys._ ii. I, _init._
+
+[19] _De Anima_, _init._
+
+[20] _Meteor_, iv. 1. 378. See Zeller's _Aristotle_, vol. i, _fin._
+
+[21] _Polit._ 1253 a; _Eth._ 1162 a.
+
+[22] _Gen. An._ ii. 3. 737.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+PROGRESS IN THE MIDDLE AGES
+
+A. J. CARLYLE
+
+
+There still survives, not indeed among students of history, but among
+some literary persons, the notion that the civilization of the Middle
+Ages was fixed and unprogressive; that the conditions of these centuries
+were wholly different from those of the ancient world and of modern
+time; that there was little continuity with the ancient world, and
+little connexion with the characteristic aspects of progress in the
+modern world.
+
+The truth is very different. It may be doubted whether at any other
+time, except perhaps in those two marvellous centuries of the flower of
+Greek civilization, there has been a more rapid development of the most
+important elements of civilization than in the period from the end of
+the tenth to the end of the thirteenth centuries. While it is true that
+much was lost in the ruin of the ancient world, much also survived, and
+there was a real continuity of civilization; indeed some of the greatest
+conceptions of the later centuries of the ancient world are exactly
+those upon which mediaeval civilization was built. And again, it was in
+the Middle Ages that the foundations were laid upon which the most
+characteristic institutions of the modern world have grown.
+
+Indeed this notion that the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed
+and unprogressive is a mere literary superstition, and its origin is to
+be found in the ignorance and perversity of the men of the Renaissance;
+and hardly less, it must be added, in the foolishness of many of the
+conceptions of the Romantic revival.
+
+There are, indeed, excuses for these mistakes and confusions. The
+Renaissance represents, among other things, a great and necessary
+movement of revolt against a religious and intellectual civilization
+which had once been living and moving, but had tended from the latter
+years of the thirteenth century to grow stiff and rigid. It was probably
+a real misfortune that the great thinkers and scholars of the thirteenth
+century, like Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas, had embarked upon
+what was a premature attempt at the systematization of all knowledge;
+they made the same mistake as the Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth
+century or Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth, but with more disastrous
+results. For this work unhappily encouraged the mediaeval Church in its
+most fatal mistake, its tendency to suspect and oppose the apprehensions
+of new aspects of truth.
+
+The men of the Renaissance had to break the forms under which the
+schoolmen had thought to express all truth, they had to carry forward
+the great enterprise and adventure of the discovery of truth, and they
+had to do this in the teeth of a violent resistance on the part of those
+who thought themselves the representatives of the mediaeval
+civilization. There are, therefore, excuses for them in their contempt
+for the intellectual life of the past; but there is no real excuse for
+them in their contempt for mediaeval art and literature. When they
+turned their back upon the immediate past, and endeavoured pedantically
+to reproduce the ancient world, they were guilty of an outrageous
+ignorance and stupidity, a stupidity which is expressed in that unhappy
+phrase of Pope, the 'Gothic night'. Happily neither the great artists of
+the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nor the great poets of England
+and Spain were much affected by the classical pedantry of which
+unhappily Petrarch was the begetter.
+
+It is this foolishness of the Renaissance which is the best excuse for
+the foolishness of the Romantic revival; the new classical movement had
+in such a degree interrupted the continuity of European art that it was
+very difficult for men in the eighteenth century to recover the past,
+and we must make allowance for the often ludicrous terms and forms of
+the new mediaevalism. Indeed it is a strange and often absurd art--the
+half-serious, half-parodying imitations of Thomson and Walpole and
+Wieland, this ludicrous caricature Gothic of Strawberry Hill and All
+Souls, the notion of Gothic architecture as a mass of crockets,
+battlements, crypts, and dungeons--and all in ruins. Indeed, the
+Romantic conception of the Middle Ages was often as absurd as that of
+the Renaissance, and if we are to get at the truth, if we are to make
+any serious attempt to understand the Middle Ages, we must clear our
+minds of two superstitions; the one, which we derive from the
+Renaissance, that mediaeval civilization was sterile, ignorant, and
+content to be ignorant; the other, which survives from the Romantic
+movement, that it was essentially religious, chivalrous and adventurous,
+that men spent their time in saying their prayers, making reverent love
+to their ladies, or carving the heads of the infidel.
+
+What I should desire to do is to persuade you that the more you study
+the Middle Ages the more you will see that these men and women were
+really very much like ourselves, ignorant, no doubt, of much which is to
+us really or superficially important, gifted on the other hand with some
+qualities which for the time we seem to have in a large measure lost,
+but substantially very like ourselves, neither very much better nor very
+much worse. Let me illustrate this by considering for a moment the
+figure which to us is typical of the Middle Ages. What was the
+mediaeval knight? We think of him as a courteous, chivalrous person of a
+romantic and adventurous temper, whose business it was to fight for his
+lady or in the service of religion against the infidel. In reality he
+was usually a small landowner, who held his land on condition of
+military service to some lord; the title 'knight' means in its Latin
+form (_miles_), simply a soldier, in its Germanic form a servant, and
+distinguishes him from the older type of landowner who held his land in
+absolute ownership and free of all service except of a national kind. In
+virtue of his holding a certain amount of land he had to present himself
+for military service on those occasions and for those periods for which
+he could be legally summoned. But even this description implies a wholly
+wrong emphasis, for he was not primarily a soldier, but a small
+landowner and cultivator, very much what we should call a squireen. He
+was normally much more concerned about his crops, his cattle and pigs,
+than about his lord's affairs and his lord's quarrels. He was ignorant,
+often rather brutal, and turbulent, very ready for a quarrel with his
+neighbour, but with no taste for national wars, and the prolonged
+absence from his home which they might involve, unless indeed there was
+a reasonable prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact
+person, with very little sense of romance, and little taste for
+adventure unless there was something to be got out of it. We must
+dismiss from our minds the pretty superstitions of romance from Chaucer
+and Spenser to the time of the Romantic revival, and we must understand
+that the people of the Middle Ages were very much like ourselves; the
+times were rougher, more disorderly, there was much less security, but
+on the whole the character of human life was not very different.
+
+What was it, then, that happened with the end of the ancient world?
+Well, the civilization of the Roman Empire was overthrown by our
+barbarous ancestors, the old order, and tranquillity, and comfort
+disappeared, and the world fell back into discomfort and turbulence, and
+disorder; the roads fell into disrepair and were not mended, the drains
+were neglected, and the towns dwindled and shrank. We must remember,
+however, that this great civilization was dying out, was failing by some
+internal weakness, and that the barbarians only hastened the process.
+
+Much of the achievement of Greece and Rome was lost, much both material
+and intellectual, but not all, and the new civilization which began
+rapidly to grow up on the ruins of the old was in many respects
+continuous with it. In order, however, that we may understand this we
+must remember that the form of civilization with which the Middle Ages
+were continuous was the Graeco-Roman civilization of the later Empire,
+and not the great Hellenic civilization itself. What the Middle Ages
+knew was primarily that which the Christian Fathers like St. Augustine
+and St. Gregory the Great, St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus
+learned at their schools and universities. Some of these Fathers were
+educated at the great universities, like Athens, others at comparatively
+humble provincial institutions; some of them were men of powerful
+intellect, while others were more commonplace. What they learned was the
+general intellectual system of the late Empire, and what they learned
+they handed on to the Middle Ages; but it was not the great intellectual
+culture of Greece. We have still too strong an inclination to think of
+the ancient world as one and homogeneous; we have not yet sufficiently
+apprehended the great changes both in the form and in the temper of that
+world. And yet the varieties, the changes, are very diverse, the
+outlook, the artistic methods of the Homeric poetry are very different
+from the emotional and intellectual modernity of Euripides. The
+philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is very different from that of the
+Stoics and Neoplatonists. In that picturesque but perhaps not very
+felicitous phrase which Mr. Murray has borrowed from Mr. Cornford, there
+was a 'failure of nerve' which separates the earlier from the later
+stages of the moral and intellectual culture of the ancient world.
+However this may be, and we shall have more to say about this presently,
+the civilization of the Middle Ages was made up on the one hand of
+elements drawn from the later Empire, and on the other of
+characteristics and principles which seem to have belonged to the
+Barbarian races themselves.
+
+With the end of the sixth century the ancient world had passed away and
+the mediaeval world had begun, and we have to consider the nature and
+movement of the new order, or rather we have to consider some of its
+elements, and their development, especially during the period from the
+end of the tenth century to the end of the thirteenth, during which it
+reached its highest level. We have to pass over the great attempt of the
+ninth century, for we can only deal with a small part of a large
+subject, and we shall only deal with a few aspects of it, and chiefly
+with the development of the spiritual conception of life which we call
+religion, with the reconstruction of the political order of society,
+with the beginning of a new intellectual life and the pursuit of truth,
+and with the development under new forms of the passion for beauty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been compelled to warn you against the romantic superstition that
+the Middle Ages were specifically religious, and yet it is quite true
+that the first aspect of mediaeval life which compels our attention is
+exactly the development of the sense of the significance of the
+spiritual quality of life. This was the first great task of the men of
+the Middle Ages, and this was in a real sense their achievement; but not
+as contradicting the characteristic developments of the Hellenic
+civilization, but rather as completing and fulfilling it. It is indeed a
+singular superstition that the Hellenic world was lacking in spiritual
+insight, but I need only refer you to Miss Stawell's lecture, as serving
+to show you how great and how real this was. It really was not a mistake
+when an honest but rather stupid man like Justin Martyr, and the more
+acute and penetrating minds of the Alexandrian Fathers like Clement and
+Origen, thought that they heard the authentic accents of the 'Word' of
+God in the great philosophers of Greece, and especially in Plato.
+
+The apprehension of the spiritual element in human experience was not
+wanting in Hellenic civilization, but it needed a further development
+and especially in relation to those new apprehensions of personality and
+individuality, whose appearance we can trace both in the
+post-Aristotelian philosophy, and in the later Hebrew prophets and
+poets, which Christianity found in the world, and to which in its
+conception of the human in the Divine, and the Divine in the human, it
+gave a new force and breath. It is easy for us to smile at what may well
+be the over-rhetorical phrases of Seneca when he speaks of the
+self-sufficingness ([Greek: autarkeia]) of the wise man, or when he says
+that the wise man is, but for his mortality, like God himself; and yet
+these rhetorical phrases are, after all, the forms of an apprehension
+which has changed and is changing the world. And, it must be remembered
+that to understand the full significance of these phrases, we must bear
+in mind that the men of the Graeco-Roman civilization had put aside once
+and for all the 'natural' distinction between the 'Greek' and the
+'Barbarian', had recognized that men were equal and alike, not different
+and unequal, that all men were possessed of reason, and all were
+capable of virtue,[23] or, in the Christian terms, all men are the
+children of God and capable of communion with Him.
+
+It is this new apprehension of life for which the Middle Ages found a
+new form in the great organization of the Church, and it is this which
+justifies our sense of the great and permanent significance of the
+tremendous conflict of the Papacy and the Empire. It is true that at
+times some of the representatives of the Church seem to have fallen into
+the mistake of aiming at a tyranny of the Church over the State, which
+would have been in the end as disastrous to the Church itself as to the
+State. But the normal principle of the Church was that which was first
+fully stated by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century, that the two great
+authorities, the spiritual and the temporal, are each divine, each draws
+its authority ultimately from God himself, each is supreme and
+independent in its own sphere, while each recognizes the authority of
+the other within its proper sphere.
+
+It is, indeed, the freedom of the spiritual life which the mediaeval
+Church was endeavouring to defend; it was the apprehension that there
+was some ultimate quality in human nature which stands and must stand
+outside of the direct or coercive control of society, which lies behind
+all the confused clamour of the conflicts of Church and State.
+
+It is true that in this great and generous effort to secure the freedom
+of the human soul men in some measure lost their way. They demanded and
+in a measure they succeeded in asserting the freedom of the religious
+organization, as against the temporal organization, but in doing this
+they went perilously near to denying the freedom of the individual
+spiritual experience. They went perilously near to denying it, but they
+never wholly forgot it. The Church claimed and exercised an immense
+authority in religion, so immense an authority that it might easily seem
+as though there were no place left for the freedom of the individual
+judgement and conscience. And yet that was not the case. The theory of
+excommunication that is set out in the canonical literature of the
+Middle Ages has generally been carelessly studied and imperfectly
+understood. It was the greatest and most masterful of the Popes,
+Innocent III, who laid down in memorable phrases which are embodied in
+the great collection of the Decretals, that if a Christian man or woman
+is convinced in his own mind and conscience that it would be a mortal
+sin to do or to leave undone some action, he must follow his own
+conscience even against the command of the authorities of the Church,
+and must submit patiently to Church censures and even excommunication;
+for it may well happen that the Church may condemn him whom God
+approves, or approve him whom God condemns.[24] This is no isolated or
+exceptional opinion, but is the doctrine which is constantly laid down
+in the canonical literature.[25] It is, I think, profoundly true to say
+that when men at last revolted against what seemed to them the
+exaggerated claims of the Church, when they slowly fought their way
+towards toleration and religious freedom, they were only asserting and
+carrying out its one most vital principle, the principle of the
+independence or autonomy of the spiritual life; the modern world is only
+fulfilling the Middle Ages.
+
+I do not continue to develop this aspect of the progress of western
+civilization, not because it is unimportant, for indeed it is perhaps
+the greatest and most significant aspect of mediaeval life, but because
+it is well known to you, and indeed, it has generally been insisted on
+to such a degree as to obscure the other aspects of progress in the
+Middle Ages, with which we must deal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And first I would ask you to observe that it was in these centuries that
+there were laid over again the foundations of the social and political
+order of civilization, and that there were devised those forms of the
+political order upon which the structure of modern society is founded.
+
+We are familiar with the conception of the divine nature of political
+authority, the normal and fundamental mediaeval view of the State. If we
+translate this into more general terms we shall find that its meaning is
+that the State has an ethical or moral purpose or function; the State
+exists to secure and to maintain justice. You must not, indeed, confuse
+this great conception with that foolish perversion of it which was
+suggested, I think, by some characteristically reckless phrases of St.
+Augustine, stated in set terms by St. Gregory the Great, almost
+forgotten in the Middle Ages, and unhappily revived by the perversity of
+some Anglicans and Gallicans in the seventeenth century. This foolish
+perversion, which we know as the theory of the 'Divine Right of Kings',
+is indeed the opposite of the great Pauline and mediaeval conception of
+the divine nature of political authority, for to St. Paul, to the more
+normal Fathers like St. Ambrose, and to the political theory of the
+Middle Ages authority is divine just because, and only in so far as, its
+aim and purpose is the attainment and maintenance of justice. Indeed, it
+is not only the notion of the 'Divine Right' which was inconsistent with
+the mediaeval conception of the State, but the notion of an absolute
+sovereignty inherent in the State, that notion with which some eccentric
+or ignorant modern political theorists, ignorant of Rousseau as well as
+of Aristotle, have played, to the great danger of society; we have,
+indeed, got beyond the theory of the sovereignty of the king, but we are
+in some danger of being hag-ridden by the imposture of the sovereignty
+of the majority. Whatever mistakes the people of the Middle Ages may
+have made, they were, with rare exceptions, clear that there was no
+legitimate authority which was not just, and which did not make for
+justice.
+
+It is here that we find the real meaning of the second great political
+principle of the Middle Ages, that is the supremacy of law; that it is
+the law which is the supreme authority in the State, the law which is
+over every person in the State. When John of Salisbury, the secretary of
+Thomas à Becket, wishes to distinguish between the prince and the
+tyrant, he insists that the prince is one who rules according to law,
+while the tyrant is one who ignores and violates the law.[26] And in a
+memorable phrase, Bracton, the great English jurist of the latter part
+of the thirteenth century, lays it down dogmatically that the king has
+two superiors, God and the law.[27] There is an absurd notion still
+current among more ignorant persons--I have even heard some theologians
+fall into the mistake--that men in the Middle Ages thought of authority
+as something arbitrary and unintelligible, while the truth is that such
+a conception was wholly foreign to the temper of that time. It is quite
+true that the political life of the Middle Ages seems constantly to
+oscillate between anarchy and despotism, but this is not because the men
+of those days did not understand the meaning of law and of freedom, but
+because they were only slowly working out the organization through which
+these can be secured. The supreme authority in the mediaeval state was
+the law, and it was supreme because it was taken by them to be the
+embodiment of justice.
+
+It is again out of this principle that there arose another great
+conception which is still often thought to be modern, but which is
+really mediaeval, the conception that the authority of the ruler rests
+upon and is conditioned by an agreement or contract between him and the
+people. For this agreement was not an abstract conception, but was based
+upon the mutual oaths of the mediaeval coronation ceremony, the oath of
+the king to maintain the law, and to administer justice, and the oath of
+the people to serve and obey the king whom they had recognized or
+elected. The people do, indeed, owe the king honour and loyal service,
+but only on the condition that he holds inviolable his oath. The ruler
+who breaks this is a tyrant, and for him there was no place in mediaeval
+political theory. This conception was expressed in very plain and even
+crude terms by Manegold in the eleventh century when he said that the
+king was in the same relation to the community as the man who is hired
+to keep the pigs to his master. If the swineherd fails to do his work
+the master turns him off and finds another. And if the king or prince
+refuses to fulfil the conditions on which he holds his power he must be
+deposed.[28] John of Salisbury in the twelfth century expressed this in
+even stronger terms when he said that if the prince became a tyrant and
+violated the laws, he had no rights, and should be removed, and if there
+were no other way to do it, it was lawful for any citizen to slay
+him.[29]
+
+These are, no doubt, extreme forms of the mediaeval conception, but the
+principle that the authority of the ruler was conditioned by his
+faithful discharge of his obligations is the normal doctrine of the
+Middle Ages, is maintained by the compilers of the feudal law-books of
+the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by the great English jurist Bracton, by St.
+Thomas Aquinas, and even by some of the most representative of the Roman
+jurists of Bologna, like Azo.
+
+These were the fundamental principles of the conception of the nature of
+political authority whose development we can trace in the Middle Ages,
+and it is out of these conceptions that there grew the system of the
+control of the common affairs of the community by means of the
+representation of the community. For it should be more clearly
+understood than it is, that the representative system was the creation
+of the mediaeval political genius, it was these men--to whom even yet
+the more ignorant would deny the true political instinct--it was these
+men who devised that method upon which the structure of modern civilized
+government has been built up.
+
+There is, however, yet another aspect of the development of political
+civilization which deserves our attention if we are to understand the
+nature of political progress in the Middle Ages. It was in these
+centuries that there were created the elementary forms of the
+administrative system of government. And indeed, there is perhaps no
+clearer distinction between a barbarian and a civilized government than
+this, that while the barbarian government hangs precariously on the life
+of the capable king, the civilized government is carried on continuously
+by an organized civil service. It would be impossible here to discuss
+the earlier forms of this in the organization of government by Charles
+the Great, or the very interesting developments of the royal or imperial
+chapel as the nucleus of a civil service in Germany, it is enough here
+to remind ourselves that it is the creation of this organized
+administration by Henry I and Henry II of England which laid the
+foundations of our national order. Enough has, I think, been said to
+illustrate the reality and significance of the progressive
+reconstruction of the political order of Western society in the Middle
+Ages.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may, however, be said that this may all be true, but that in all this
+we have after all only an example of the preoccupation of the Middle
+Ages with conduct and religion. I must, therefore, ask you to consider
+the character and development of the intellectual movement of the Middle
+Ages. And here, fortunately, we can find the best of guidance in Dr.
+Rashdall's great work on _The Universities of Europe in the Middle
+Ages_, and in Dr. R. L. Poole's _Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought_.
+Indeed I could wish that a little more attention was given to the
+history and character of the intellectual movement which the
+Universities represent, and perhaps a little less to reading and
+discussing the great scholastic works of the thirteenth century, which
+are almost impossible to understand except in relation to the
+intellectual movements of the twelfth century.
+
+The new intellectual movement came very suddenly in the last years of
+the eleventh century; why it should have come then is hard to determine,
+but it seems reasonable to say that it represents the reawakening of the
+desire for knowledge which had been in abeyance during the stormy
+centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, when men had
+little leisure for anything but the constant labour to secure a little
+decent order and peace. For a few years, indeed, in the ninth century
+the genius of Charlemagne had almost restored the order of civilization,
+and even in those few years the human mind reasserted itself, and for a
+moment the learning and culture which had been preserved mainly by the
+Irish and their pupils in Britain, and in Central Europe, flowered and
+bore fruit; but with his death Western Europe plunged again into anarchy
+and misery, and it was only slowly that the genius of the great German
+emperors in Central Europe, and of the Norman settlers in France and
+England, rebuilt the commonwealth of European civilization. By the end
+of the eleventh century the work was not indeed done, but was being
+done, and men had again a little leisure, and the desire for knowledge
+reawakened, but indeed it was no mere gentle desire, but a veritable
+passion which possessed the men of the twelfth century, and it was this
+spontaneous passion which produced the universities.
+
+The first thing, indeed, which we must observe about the oldest
+universities of Europe, especially Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, is just
+this, that they were not made by any external authority, that they did
+not derive their being from Church or State, from pope or king, but that
+they were formed by the enthusiasm and passion which drew men from every
+quarter of Europe to sit at the feet of some man or another who could
+give them the knowledge which they desired, and, in their turn, to
+become teachers. It is quite true that as time went on, and they found
+that popes and kings were friendly and interested, these groups of
+students procured for themselves bulls and charters of recognition and
+protection, but while later universities may trace their foundation to
+these respectable patrons, the older universities recognize them indeed
+as benefactors and friends, but not as founders, but rather claim that
+they grew out of men's desire for knowledge, and that they were
+recognized by the general consent of the civilized world.
+
+In the second place it is important, and especially I think in these
+days, to understand that the men who thus created the universities in
+their eagerness to learn, were of every class and condition, rich and
+poor, noble and simple, and they lived as they could, in comfortable
+quarters if they were wealthy men, or in the garrets and cellars of the
+citizens if they were poor, and for the most part they were poor; but
+neither poverty nor riches could destroy their noble thirst for
+knowledge. The life of the universities was indeed turbulent and
+disorderly, the students were always at war with the citizens, and, when
+they were not breaking the heads of the citizens or having their heads
+broken by them, they were at war with each other, the men of the north
+with the southerners, the western with the eastern; for the universities
+were not local or national institutions, but were made up of a
+cosmopolitan crowd of men of every nation in Europe, intelligible to
+each other, as unhappily we are not, by the universal knowledge and use
+of that mediaeval Latin, which might distress the Ciceronian ears of a
+pedant of the Renaissance, but was a good, useful, and adaptable
+language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate, and
+drunken world, for the students were as hard drinkers as the citizens,
+but it was animated, it was made alive by a true passion for knowledge,
+by an unwearied and never satisfied intellectual curiosity.
+
+But it will be asked, what did they learn? Well, the only answer that
+one can give is that they learned whatever there was to learn. Our
+literary friends have often still the impression that in the Middle Ages
+men spent their whole time in learning theology, and were afraid of
+other forms of knowledge, but this is a singular delusion. As the
+universities developed a system, their studies were arranged in the main
+under four heads, the general studies of what came to be called the
+Faculty of Arts, and the professional studies of the three superior
+Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology, but the student was not
+normally allowed to study in the three superior Faculties until he had
+spent some years in the studies of the Faculty of Arts. It is therefore
+with this latter that we are primarily occupied. The studies in the
+Faculty of Arts consisted, to use our modern terminology, of literature,
+philosophy, and science, and the accomplished mediaeval student was
+expected to know whatever there was to know.
+
+And this means--what is strangely often forgotten--that the studies of
+the mediaeval universities were primarily based upon the literature
+which had survived from the ancient world. The Latin poets and orators
+were their models of literary art, the surviving treatises of the
+ancients their text-books in medicine, and the Greek philosophers in
+Latin translations, or in Latin works founded on them, their masters in
+thought. To understand the extent of the influence and the knowledge of
+antiquity of a twelfth-century scholar we need only turn again to John
+of Salisbury, and we shall find him as familiar as any Renaissance
+scholar with Latin literature, and possessing a very considerable
+acquaintance with Greek literature so far as it could be obtained
+through the Latin.[30] Indeed, so much is he possessed by the literature
+of antiquity that in works like the _Policraticus_ he can hardly write
+two lines together without a quotation from some classical author. This
+type of literary scholarship has been too much overlooked, and, as I
+said before, too exclusive an attention has been given to the
+thirteenth-century schoolmen, who are neither from a literary nor from a
+philosophical point of view as representative of mediaeval scholars, and
+philosophically they are often really unmediaeval, for the general
+quality of mediaeval thought is its Platonism: the Aristotelian logic
+was indeed known to the Middle Ages through Boethius, but the other
+Aristotelian works were not known till towards the middle of the
+thirteenth century.
+
+It would be impossible here, even if I were competent, which I am not,
+to discuss the character of mediaeval thought, but one thing we can
+observe, one aspect of the intellectual method which may serve to clear
+away some confusion. The great intellectual master of the Middle Ages
+was Abelard, and the method which he elaborated in his _Sic et Non_ is
+the method which imposed itself upon all aspects of mediaeval thought.
+
+It has often been supposed that mediaeval thinkers were in such a sense
+the creatures of authority that it was impossible for them to exercise
+any independent judgement; how far this may have been true of the
+decadent scholasticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries I do
+not pretend to say, but such a judgement is a ludicrous caricature of
+the living and active thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
+and a little consideration of the critical method which Abelard
+developed is sufficient to correct this. This is as follows: first some
+general principle is enunciated for consideration, then all the
+authorities which may seem to support it are cited, then all the
+authorities against, and finally the writer delivers his own judgement,
+criticizing and explaining the opinions which may seem contrary to it.
+The method has its defects and its limitations, but its characteristic
+is rather that of scepticism than of credulity. And it is on this method
+that the most important systems of knowledge of the Middle Ages are
+constructed. It was applied by Gratian in his _Decretum_, the first
+great reasoned treatise on Church law, and leads there often to somewhat
+unexpected conclusions, such as that even the legislative authority of
+the Pope is limited by the consenting custom of the Christian
+people;[31] and it is this method upon which the great systematic
+treatises, like the _Suma Theologica_ of St. Thomas Aquinas, were
+constructed in the thirteenth century. Whatever its defects may be the
+method cannot fairly be accused of ignoring difficulties and of a
+submission to authority which leaves no place for the critical reason.
+
+I have, I hope, said enough to make it clear that there was a real and
+living intellectual movement in the Middle Ages, and that even in those
+days men had resumed the great adventure of the pursuit of truth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We can only for a moment consider the significance and the character of
+mediaeval civilization as it expresses itself in Art, and we must begin
+by noticing a distinction between mediaeval art and mediaeval learning,
+which is of the first importance.
+
+The intellectual movement of the Middle Ages was related to the ancient
+world, both in virtue of that continuity which was mediated by the
+Christian Fathers, whose education was that of the later Empire, and
+also in virtue of the intense and eager care with which mediaeval
+scholars studied all that they possessed of ancient literature. The
+relation of the art of the Middle Ages to the ancient world was quite
+different. There was no continuity between the vernacular poetry of the
+Middle Ages and that of the ancient world, and while there was a certain
+continuity in architecture and in mosaic painting, this amounted to
+little more than that the mediaeval artists took the formal structure or
+method as the starting-point of their own independent and original work.
+For the western art of the third and fourth centuries was conventional
+and decadent, and had apparently lost its power of recovery, while the
+art of the centuries which followed was at first rude and imperfect, but
+was full of new life, determined in its reality and dominated by some
+intimate sense of beauty; it was in no sense imitative of ancient art,
+but grew and changed under the terms of its own inherent life and power.
+
+Mediaeval art, whatever else is to be said about it, was new and
+independent, and it had all the variety, the audacious experiments,
+characteristic of a living art. Nothing is so foolish as to imagine that
+it was uniform and unchanging. Indeed, from the historical point of
+view, the interest of the study of it is curiously contrasted with that
+of the art of the ancient world. There we have only an imperfect and
+fragmentary knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we
+know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth
+and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a
+long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as
+for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and
+perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain
+aspects of Latin literature on another. The history of mediaeval art is
+the history of the long development from what are generally rude forms
+to the highly developed art of the thirteenth century, a development
+full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have called the early
+form rude, but the phrase is not very happy, as those who know either
+the early mosaic or the early epic will understand.
+
+There are still some people, I suppose, who think that mediaeval poetry
+was all of one kind, cast in one mould, but the truth is that it is of
+every form and character. It ranges from the bold imaginative realism of
+the Epic of England, Iceland, Germany, and France, to the exquisite and
+gracious but somewhat artificial allegory of the _Romance of the Rose_.
+It includes the first great emotional poetry of the modern world--the
+sense of the greatness and tragedy of human passion has perhaps never
+been expressed in more moving terms than in the _Tristan and Iseult_ of
+Thomas or Beroul--but it also includes the mordant satire of the Renard
+poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the
+Fabliaux. The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development we have to
+trace many strands, probably represents in its oldest forms the coarse
+farcical buffoonery which may be related to the last fashions of the
+ancient world; it received a new impulse from the dramatization of
+scripture history in the twelfth century; but in the thirteenth and
+fourteenth centuries, at least in France, it had already become
+substantially a drama of romantic or contemporary life, as we can see in
+Jean Bodel's _Jeu de St. Nicholas_, in Adam de la Halle's _Jeu de la
+Feuillée_ and _Robin et Marion_, and in dramas like the _Empress of
+Rome_ or the _Otho_. Whatever criticism we might want to make on
+mediaeval literature, at least we cannot say that it was of one type and
+of one mood.
+
+It is hardly necessary to point out the movement and changes in the
+other forms of art in the Middle Ages; it is only necessary to remind
+ourselves that, while we can see that the artists were often hampered by
+inadequate technical knowledge, they were not conventional or merely
+imitative.
+
+It would be impossible here to consider the history of mosaic painting,
+and its development from the decadent Graeco-Roman work of Santa
+Pudenziana in Rome, to the magnificent and living decorations of St.
+Mark's in Venice, or of the cathedral of Monreale. It is enough to
+remind ourselves of the immense interval which lies between the rude but
+living sculpture of the ninth century, and the exquisite grace of
+Chester or Wells, and of that development of architecture which
+culminates in the majesty of Durham, and in the beauty of Chartres and
+Westminster Abbey.
+
+It is doubtful if we have yet at all fully or correctly appreciated the
+nature of mediaeval art; there has been a good deal of foolish talk
+about 'primitives', which usually goes with a singular ignorance of
+mediaeval civilization; the one thing which is already clear, and which
+grows clearer, is that the men of those ages had an instinct and a
+passion for beauty which expressed itself in almost every thing that
+they touched; and, whatever we have gained, we have in a large measure
+lost this.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mediaeval world was then a living growing world, neither cut off
+from the past, nor unrelated to the future. It was a rough and turbulent
+world, our ancestors were dogged, quarrelsome, and self-assertive, and
+the first task of civilization was to produce some sort of decent order.
+The world was a long way off from the firm urbanity of the English
+policeman. And yet the men of the Middle Ages never fell into that
+delusion which, as it would seem, has ruined other civilizations; the
+great effort for order was not in their mind to be fulfilled by any mere
+mechanical discipline, by any system imposed from outside, the only
+system of order which they were prepared to accept was one which should
+express the character, the tradition, and finally the will of the whole
+community. The great phrase of Edward I's summons to Parliament, 'Quod
+omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur' (That which concerns all, must be
+approved by all), was not a mere tag, as some foolish people have
+thought, but expressed the character and the genius of a living
+political civilization.
+
+And this rough turbulent world was inspired by a great breath of
+spiritual and intellectual and artistic life and freedom.
+
+It might well seem as though the Church and religion were merely a new
+bondage, and in part that is true, but it is not the whole truth. With
+all its mistakes the religion of the Middle Ages meant the growing
+apprehension of the reality of that 'love which moves the sun and other
+stars', it meant the growth of reverence for that which is beyond and
+above humanity and which is also within it. For it is the last truth of
+the Christian faith that we know God only under the terms of human life
+and nature. And with all the cruelty and brutality of the Middle Ages
+they taught men love as well as obedience.
+
+Again, it was in these ages, as soon as the confusion of the outer world
+was a little reduced, that the passion for knowledge awoke again in
+men's hearts. It is true that some were afraid lest the eager inquiry of
+men's minds should destroy the foundations of that order which men were
+slowly achieving, but still the passionate pursuit of knowledge has
+rarely been more determined. And once again the world was rough, but
+these men had an instinct, a passion for beauty which expressed itself
+in almost everything which they touched. They had not, indeed, the
+almost miraculous sense and mastery of the great artists of Greece, that
+did not come again till the time of the great Italian artists of the
+fifteenth century. But they were free from pedantry, from formalism,
+they left the dying art of the ancient world and made their own way.
+Their sense of colour was almost infallible, as those who have seen the
+mosaics of the older Roman basilicas and of St. Mark's in Venice will
+know; but, indeed, we have only to look at the illuminated manuscripts
+which are to be found in all our libraries. And in that great art in
+which, above all perhaps, they expressed themselves, in their great
+architecture, we see the growth of a constructive genius which is only
+overshadowed by the superb beauty of its form.
+
+A rough, disorderly, turbulent, greedy, cruel world, but it knew the
+human soul, and it knew the human heart. The ancient world had ended in
+a great destruction, but the sadness and emptiness of its last days
+compel us to feel that it was well that it should end. And the new world
+was a world of life, of crude force and restless energy, and from it we
+have received the principles and the forms of a great civilization, and
+the temper which is never satisfied, for there is no end to life.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+H. W. C. Davis, _Mediaeval Europe_ (Home University Library).
+
+Lord Bryce, _History of Roman Empire_.
+
+Rashdall, _Universities of Empire in the Middle Ages_.
+
+R. L. Poole, _Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought_.
+
+Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_.
+
+W. P. Ker, _Epic and Romance_.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[23] Cf. Cicero, _De Legibus_, i. 10-12; and Seneca, _De Beneficiis_,
+iii. 18.
+
+[24] Cf. Decretals, v. 39. 44, 28.
+
+[25] Cf. Carlyle, _Mediaeval Political Theory_, vol. ii. pp. 244-9.
+
+[26] Cf. John of Salisbury, _Policraticus_, iv. 1.
+
+[27] Cf. Bracton, _De Legibus et Consuetudinibus_, i. 8, 5.
+
+[28] Cf. Manegold, _Ad Gebehardum_, c. XXX.
+
+[29] Cf. John of Salisbury, _Policraticus_, iii. 15, viii. 17, 18, 20.
+
+[30] Cf. C. C. J. Webb's edition of John of Salisbury's _Policraticus_,
+introduction.
+
+[31] Cf. Gratian, _Decretum_, D. iv. c. 3.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+PROGRESS IN RELIGION
+
+BARON FRIEDRICH VON HÜGEL
+
+
+The difficulties are deep and delicate which confront any man at all
+well acquainted with the fuller significance of Religion and of
+Progress, who attempts clearly and shortly to describe or define the
+ultimate relations between these two sets of fact and conviction. It is
+plain that Religion is the deeper and richer of the two terms; and that
+we have here, above all, to attempt to fathom the chief elements and
+forces of Religion as such, and then to see whether Progress is really
+traceable in Religion at all. And again it is clear that strongly
+religious souls will, as such, hold that Religion answers to, and is
+occasioned by, the action, within our human life and needs, of great,
+abiding, living non-human Realities; and yet, if such souls are at all
+experienced and sincere, they will also admit--as possibly the most
+baffling of facts--that the human individuals, families, races, are
+relatively rare in whom this sense and need of Religion is strongly,
+sensitively active. Thus the religion of most men will either all but
+completely wither or vanish before the invasion of other great facts and
+interests of human life--Economics or Politics or Ethics, or again,
+Science, Art, Philosophy; or it will, more frequently, become largely
+assimilated, in its conception, valuation, and practice, to the quite
+distinct, and often subtly different, conceptions, valuations, and
+practices pertaining to such of these other ranges and levels of human
+life as happen here to be vigorously active. And such assimilations
+are, of course, effected with a particular Philosophy or Ethic, mostly
+some passing fashion of the day, which does not reach the deepest laws
+and standards even of its own domain, and which, if taken as Religion,
+will gravely numb and mar the power and character of such religious
+perception as may still remain in this particular soul.
+
+I will, then, first attempt some discriminations in certain fundamental
+questions concerning the functioning of our minds, feelings, wills. I
+will next attempt short, vivid descriptions of the chief stages in the
+Jewish and Christian Religions, with a view to tracing here what may
+concern their progress; and will very shortly illustrate the main
+results attained by the corresponding main peculiarities of
+Confucianism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism. And I will finally strive to
+elucidate and to estimate, as clearly as possible, the main facts in
+past and present Religion which concern the question of religious
+'Progressiveness'.
+
+
+I
+
+I begin with insisting upon some seven discriminations which, even only
+forty years ago, would have appeared largely preposterous to the then
+fashionable philosophy.
+
+First, then, our Knowledge is always wider and deeper than is our
+Science. I know my mother, I know my dog, I know my favourite rose-tree;
+and this, although I am quite ignorant of the anatomical differences
+between woman and man; of the psychological limits between dog and human
+being; or of the natural or artificial botanical order to which my
+rose-plant belongs. Any kind or degree of consciousness on my part as to
+these three realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge is not
+simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their resolution into
+abstract elements; since thus the unknowable would be found well within
+the facts of experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete
+character which refuses translation into abstract relations.' So
+Professor Aliotta urges with unanswerable truth.[32]
+
+And next, this spontaneous awareness of other realities by myself, the
+reality Man, contains always, from the first, both matter and form, and
+sense, reason, feeling, volition, all more or less in action. Sir Henry
+Jones insists finely: 'The difference between the primary and elementary
+data of thought on the one hand, and the highest forms of systematized
+knowledge on the other, is no difference in kind, analogous to a mere
+particular and a mere universal; but it is a difference of
+articulation.'[33]
+
+Thirdly, direct, unchallengeable Experience is always only experience of
+a particular moment; only by means of Thought, and trust in Thought, can
+such Experience be extended, communicated, utilized. The sceptic, to be
+at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his opponent.
+Thought, taken apart from Experience, is indeed artificial and arid; but
+Experience without Thought, is largely an orderless flux. Philosophers
+as different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do
+indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience
+and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist
+upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct
+Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of
+Thought--constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality
+with the non-realities repetition, uniformity, foreseeableness. Yet the
+amazing success of the application of such constructions to actual
+Nature stares us all in the face. 'It is, indeed, strange,' if that
+contention be right, 'that facts behave as if they too had a turn for
+mathematics.' Assuredly 'if thought, with its durable and coherent
+structure, were not the reflection of some order of stable relations in
+the nature of things, it would be worthless as an organ of life'.[34]
+
+Fourthly, both Space and Time are indeed essential constituents of all
+our perceptions, thoughts, actions, at least in this life. Yet Time is
+perhaps the more real, and assuredly the richer, constituent of the two.
+But this rich reality applies only to Concrete or Filled Time, Duration,
+in which our experiences, although always more or less successive,
+interpenetrate each other in various degrees and ways, and are thus more
+or less simultaneous. An absolutely even flow of equal, mutually
+exclusive moments, on the contrary, exists only for our theoretical
+thinking, in Abstract, Empty, or Clock time. Already, in 1886, Professor
+James Ward wrote: 'In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of
+intensity; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily an
+intensive magnitude.'[35] And in 1889 Professor Bergson, in his _Essai
+sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience_, gave us exquisite
+descriptions of time as we really experience it, of 'duration strictly
+speaking', which 'does not possess moments that are identical or
+exterior to each other'.[36] Thus all our real soul life, in proportion
+to its depth, moves in Partial Simultaneity; and it apprehends, requires
+and rests, at its deepest, in an overflowingly rich Pure Simultaneity.
+
+Fifthly, Man is Body as well as Soul, and the two are closely
+interrelated. The sensible perception of objects, however humble, is
+always necessary for the beginning, and (in the long run) for the
+persistence and growth, of the more spiritual apprehensions of man.
+Hence Historical Persons and Happenings, Institutions, affording
+Sensible Acts and Contacts, and Social Corporations, each different
+according to the different ranges and levels of life, can hardly fail to
+be of importance for man's full awakening--even ethical and spiritual.
+Professor Ernst Troeltsch, so free from natural prejudice in favour of
+such a Sense-and-Spirit position, has become perhaps the most adequate
+exponent of this great fact of life, which is ever in such danger of
+evaporation amidst the intellectual and leading minority of men.
+
+Sixthly, the cultivated modern man is still largely arrested and stunted
+by the spell of Descartes, with his insistence upon immediate unity of
+outlook and perfect clearness of idea as the sole, universal tests,
+indeed constituents, of truth. 'I judged that I could take for my
+general rule that the things which we conceive very clearly and very
+distinctly are all true'--these and these alone.[37] Thus thenceforth
+Mathematics and Mechanics have generally been held to be the only full
+and typical sciences, and human knowledge to be co-extensive with such
+sciences alone. Yet Biology and Psychology now rightly claim to be
+sciences, each with its own special methods and tests distinct from
+those of Mathematics and Mechanics. Indeed, the wisest and most fruitful
+philosophy is now coming to see that 'Reality generally eludes our
+thought, when thought is reduced to mathematical formulas'.[38] Concrete
+thought, contrariwise, finds full room also for History, Philosophy,
+Religion, for each as furnishing rich subject-matters for Knowledge or
+Science, of a special but true kind.
+
+Seventhly. Already Mathematics and Mechanics absolutely depend, for the
+success of their applications to actual Nature, upon a spontaneous
+correspondence between the human reason and the Rationality of Nature.
+The immensity of this success is an unanswerable proof that this
+rationality is not imposed, but found there, by man. But Thought without
+a Thinker is an absurd proposition. Thus faith in Science is faith in
+God. Perhaps the most impressive declaration of this necessary connexion
+between Knowledge and Theism stands at the end of that great work,
+Christoph Sigwart's _Logik_. 'As soon as we raise the question as to the
+real _right_', the adequate reason, 'of our demands for a
+correspondence, within our several sciences, between the principles and
+the objects of the researches special to each, there emerges the need
+for the Last and Unconditional Reason. And the actual situation is not
+that this Reason appears only on the horizon of our finite knowledge,'
+as Kant would have it. 'Not in thus merely extending our knowledge lies
+the significance of the situation, but in the fact that this
+Unconditional Reason constitutes the presupposition without which no
+desire for Knowledge (in the proper and strict sense of the word) is
+truly thinkable.'[39]
+
+And lastly, all this and more points to philosophical Agnosticism as an
+artificial system, and one hopelessly inadequate to the depths of human
+experience. Assuredly Bossuet is right: 'man knows not the whole of
+anything'; and mystery, in this sense, is also of the essence of all
+higher religion. But what man knows of anything is that thing
+manifested, not essentially travestied, in that same thing's
+appearances. We men are most assuredly realities forming part of a real
+world-whole of various realities; those other realities continuously
+affect our own reality; we cannot help thinking certain things about
+these other realities; and these things, when accepted and pressed home
+by us in action or in science, turn out, by our success in this their
+utilization, to be rightly apprehended by us, as parts of
+interconnected, objective Nature. Thus our knowledge of Reality is real
+as far as it goes, and philosophical Agnosticism is a _doctrinaire_
+position. We can say with Herbert Spencer, in spite of his predominant
+Agnosticism, that 'the error' committed by philosophers intent upon
+demonstrating the limits and conditions of consciousness 'consists in
+assuming that consciousness contains _nothing but_ limits and
+conditions, to the entire neglect of that which is limited and
+conditioned'. In reality 'there is some thing which alike forms the raw
+material of definite thought and remains after the definiteness, which
+thinking gave to it, has been destroyed'.[40]
+
+
+II
+
+Let us next consider five of the most ancient and extensively developed
+amongst the still living Religions: the Israelitish-Jewish and the
+Christian religions shall, as by far the best known to us and as the
+most fully articulated, form the great bulk of this short account; the
+Confucian, Buddhist, and Mohammedan religions will be taken quite
+briefly, only as contrasts to, or elucidations of, the characteristics
+found in the Jewish and Christian faiths. All this in view of the
+question concerning the relations between Religion and Progress.
+
+1. We can roughly divide the Israelitish-Jewish religion into three long
+periods; in each the points that specially concern us will greatly vary
+in clearness, importance, and richness of content.
+
+The first period, from the time of the founder Moses and the Jewish
+exodus out of Egypt to the appearance of the first great prophet Elijah
+(say 1300 B.C. to about 860 B.C.) is indeed but little known to us; yet
+it gives us the great historical figure of the initial lawgiver, the
+recipient and transmitter of deep ethical and religious experiences and
+convictions. True, the code of King Hammurabi of Babylon (in 1958 to
+1916 B.C.; or, according to others, in about 1650) anticipates many of
+the laws of the _Book of the Covenant_ (Exod. xx, 22-xxiii. 33), the
+oldest amongst the at all lengthy bodies of laws in the Pentateuch; and,
+again, this covenant appears to presuppose the Jewish settlement in
+Canaan (say in 1250 B.C.) as an accomplished fact. And, indeed, the Law
+and the books of Moses generally have undoubtedly passed through a long,
+deep, wide, and elaborate development, of which three chief stages, all
+considerably subsequent to the Covenant-Book, have, by now, been
+established with substantial certainty and precision. The record of
+directly Mosaic sayings and writings is thus certainly very small. Yet
+it is assuredly a gross excess to deny the historical reality of Moses,
+as even distinguished scholars such as Edward Meyer and Bernhard Stade
+have done. Far wiser here is Wellhausen, who finds, in the very
+greatness and fixity of orientation of the development in the Law and in
+the figure of the Lawgiver, a conclusive proof of the rich reality and
+greatness of the Man of God, Moses. Yet it is Hermann Gunkel, I think,
+who has reached the best balanced judgement in this matter. With Gunkel
+we can securely hold that Moses called God Yahweh, and proclaimed Him as
+the national God of Israel; that Moses invoked Him as 'Yahweh is my
+banner'--the divine leader of the Israelites in battle (Exod. xvii. 15);
+and that Yahweh is for Moses a God of righteousness--of the right and
+the law which he, Moses, brought down from Mount Sinai and published at
+its foot. Fierce as may now appear to us the figure of Yahweh, thus
+proclaimed, yet the soul's attitude towards Him is already here, from
+the first, a religion of the will: an absolute trust in God ('Yahweh
+shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace,' Exod. xiv. 14), and
+a terrible relentlessness in the execution of His commands--as when
+Moses orders the sons of Levi to go to and fro in the camp, slaying all
+who, as worshippers of the Golden Calf, had not been 'on Yahweh's side'
+(Exod. xxxii. 25-29); and when the chiefs, who had joined in the worship
+of Baal-Peor, are 'hung up unto Yahweh before the sun' (Num. xxv. 1-5).
+Long after Moses the Jews still believed in the real existence of the
+gods of the heathen; and the religion of Moses was presumably, in the
+first instance, 'Monolatry' (the adoration of One God among many); but
+already accompanied by the conviction that Yahweh was mightier than any
+other god--certainly Micah, 'Who is like Yahweh?,' is a very ancient
+Israelitish name. And if Yahweh is worshipped by Moses on a mountain
+(Sinai) and His law is proclaimed at a spring, if Moses perhaps himself
+really fashioned the brazen serpent as a sensible symbol of Yahweh,
+Yahweh nevertheless remains without visible representation in or on the
+Ark; He is never conceived as the sheer equivalent of natural forces;
+and all mythology is absent here--the vehement rejection of the
+calf-worship shows this strikingly. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of
+fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks.[41]
+
+The second period, from Elijah's first public appearance (about 860
+B.C.) to the Dedication of the Second Temple (516 B.C.), and on to the
+public subscription to the Law of Moses, under Ezra (in 444 B.C.), is
+surpassed, in spiritual richness and importance, only by the classical
+times of Christianity itself. Its beginning, its middle, and its end
+each possess distinctive characters.
+
+The whole opens with Elijah, 'the grandest heroic figure in all the
+Bible,' as it still breathes and burns in the First Book of Kings. 'For
+Elijah there existed not, in different regions, forces possessed of
+equal rights and equal claims to adoration, but everywhere only one Holy
+Power that revealed Itself, not like Baal, in the life of Nature, but
+like Yahweh, in the moral demands of the Spirit' (Wellhausen).
+
+And then (in about 750 B.C.) appears Amos, the first of the noble
+'storm-birds' who herald the coming national destructions and divine
+survivals. 'Yahweh was for these prophets above all the god of justice,
+and God of Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of
+justice. And yet the special relation of Yahweh to Israel is still
+recognized as real; the ethical truth, which now stood high above
+Israel, had, after all, arisen within Israel and could still only be
+found within it.' The two oldest lengthy narrative documents of the
+Pentateuch--the Yahwist (J) and the Ephraemite (E)--appear to have been
+composed, the first in Judah in the time of Elijah, the second in Israel
+in the time of Amos. J gives us the immortal stories of Paradise and the
+Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of
+Isaac; and the documents conjointly furnish the more naïve and
+picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs generally--the
+first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch. God here gives us some of
+His most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish
+peasant-soul. And Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well as
+deep seer, still vividly lives for us in some thirty-six chapters of
+that great collection the 'Book of Isaiah' (i-xii, xv-xx, xxii-xxxix).
+There is his majestic vocation in about 740 B.C., described by himself,
+without ambiguity, as a precise, objective revelation (chap. vi); and
+there is the divinely impressive close of his long and great activity,
+when he nerves King Hezekiah to refuse the surrender of the Holy City to
+the all-powerful Sennacherib, King of Assyria: that Yahweh would not
+allow a single arrow to be shot against it, and would turn back the
+Assyrian by the way by which he came--all which actually happens as thus
+predicted (chap. xxxvii).
+
+The middle of this rich second period is filled by a great
+prophet-priest's figure, and a great prophetical priestly reform.
+Jeremiah is called in 628 B.C., and dies obscurely in Egypt in about 585
+B.C.; and the Deuteronomic Law and Book is found in the Temple, and is
+solemnly proclaimed to, and accepted by, the people, under the
+leadership of the High Priest Hilkiah and King Josiah, 'the Constantine
+of the Jewish Church,' in 628 B.C. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy (D) are
+strikingly cognate in style, temper, and injunctions; and especially D
+contrasts remarkably in all this with the documents J and E. We thus
+have here the second great development of the Mosaic Law. Both Jeremiah
+and Deuteronomy possess a deeply interior, tenderly spiritual, kernel
+and a fiercely polemical husk--they both are full of the contrast
+between the one All-Holy God to be worshipped in the one Holy Place,
+Jerusalem, and the many impure heathen gods worshipped in so many places
+by the Jewish crowd. Thus in Jeremiah Yahweh declares: 'This shall be my
+covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: I will write my law
+in their hearts: and they shall all know me, from the least to the
+greatest: for I will remember their sin no more' (xxxi. 33, 34). And
+Yahweh exclaims: 'My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken
+me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn out cisterns that can
+hold no water.' 'Lift up thine eyes unto the high places ... thou hast
+polluted the land with thy wickedness.' 'Wilt thou not from this time
+cry unto me: My Father, thou art the guide of my youth?' (ii. 13, iii.
+2, 4). And Deuteronomy teaches magnificently: 'This commandment which I
+command you this day, is not too hard for thee, neither is it far off.
+It is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest
+say: Who shall go up for us to heaven or over the sea, and bring it unto
+us? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart,
+that thou mayest do it' (xxx. 11-14). And there are here exquisite
+injunctions--to bring back stray cattle to their owners; to spare the
+sitting bird, where eggs or fledglings are found; to leave over, at the
+harvest, some of the grain, olives, grapes, for the stranger, the
+orphan, the widow; and not to muzzle the ox when treading out the corn
+(xxii. 1, 6, 7; xxiv. 19; xxv. 4). Yet the same Deuteronomy ordains: 'If
+thine own brother, son, daughter, wife, or bosom friend entice thee
+secretly, saying, let us go and serve other gods, thine hand shall be
+first upon him to put him to death.' Also 'There shall not be found with
+thee any consulter with a familiar spirit ... or a necromancer. Yahweh
+thy God doth drive them out before thee.' And, finally, amongst the laws
+of war, 'of the cities of these people (Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite,
+Perizzite, Hivite, Jebusite) thou shalt save alive nothing that
+breatheth, as Yahweh thy God hath commanded thee' (xii. 2-5; xiii. 6, 9;
+xviii. 10-13; xx. 16, 17). Here we must remember that the immorality of
+these Canaanitish tribes and cults was of the grossest, indeed largely
+unnatural, kind; that it had copiously proved its terrible fascination
+for their kinsmen, the Jews; that these ancient Easterns, e.g. the
+Assyrians, were ruthlessly cruel at the storming of enemy cities; and
+especially that the morality and spirituality, thus saved for humanity
+from out of a putrid flood, was (in very deed) immensely precious. One
+point here is particularly far-sighted--the severe watchfulness against
+all animism, spiritualism, worship of the dead, things in which the
+environing world of the Jews' fellow Semites was steeped. The
+Israelitish-Jewish prophetic movement did not first attain belief in a
+Future Life, and then, through this, belief in God; but the belief in
+God, strongly hostile to all those spiritualisms, only very slowly, and
+not until the danger of any infusion of those naturalisms had become
+remote, led on the Jews to a realization of the soul's survival with a
+consciousness at least equal to its earthly aliveness. The Second Book
+of Kings (chaps. xxii, xxiii) gives a graphic account of King Josiah's
+rigorous execution of the Deuteronomic law.
+
+The end of this most full second period is marked by the now rapid
+predominance of a largely technical priestly legislation and a
+corresponding conception of past history; by the inception of the
+Synagogue and the religion of the Book; but also by writings the most
+profound of any in the Old Testament, all presumably occasioned by the
+probing experiences of the Exile. In 597 and 586 B.C. Jerusalem is
+destroyed and the majority of the Jews are taken captives to Babylon;
+and in between (in 593) occurs the vocation of the prophet-priest
+Ezekiel, and his book is practically complete by 573 B.C. Here the
+prophecies as to the restoration are strangely detailed and
+schematic--already somewhat like the apocalyptic writers. Yet Ezekiel
+reveals to us deathless truths--the responsibility of the individual
+soul for its good and its evil, and God Himself as the Good Shepherd of
+the lost and the sick (xviii. 20-32; xxxiv. 1-6); he gives us the grand
+pictures of the resurrection unto life of the dead bones of Israel
+(chap. xxxvii), and of the waters of healing and of life which flow
+forth, ever deeper and wider, from beneath the Temple, and by their
+sweetness transform all sour waters and arid lands that they touch
+(xlvii. 1-12). A spirit and doctrine closely akin to those of Ezekiel
+produced the third, last, and most extensive development of the
+Pentateuchal legislation and doctrinal history--in about 560 B.C., the
+Law of Holiness (Lev., chaps. xvii-xxvi); and in about 500 B.C., the
+Priestly Code. As with Ezekiel's look forward, so here with these
+Priests' look backward, we have to recognize much schematic precision of
+dates, genealogies, and explanations instinct with technical interests.
+The unity of sanctuary and the removal from the feasts and the worship
+of all traces of naturalism, which in Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, and the
+Second Book of Kings appear still as the subject-matters of intensest
+effort and conflict, are here assumed as operative even back to
+patriarchal times. Yet it can reasonably be pleaded that the life-work
+of Moses truly involved all this development; and even that Monotheism
+(at least, for the times and peoples here concerned) required some such
+rules as are assumed by P throughout.
+
+And P gives us the great six days' Creation Story with its splendid
+sense of rational order pervasive of the Universe, the work of the
+all-reasonable God--its single parts good, its totality very good; and
+man and woman springing together from the Creator's will. But the writer
+nowhere indicates that he means long periods by the 'days'; each
+creation appears as effected in an instant, and these instants as
+separated from each other by but twenty-four hours.
+
+In between Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code, or a little later still,
+lies probably the composition of three religious works full,
+respectively, of exultant thanksgiving, of the noblest insight into the
+fruitfulness of suffering, and of the deepest questionings issuing in
+childlike trust in God. For an anonymous writer composes (say, in 550
+B.C.) the great bulk of the magnificent chapters forty to fifty-five of
+our Book of Isaiah--a paean of spiritual exultation over the Jews'
+proximate deliverance from exile by the Persian King Cyrus. In 538 B.C.
+Cyrus issues the edict for the restoration to Judaea, and in 516 the
+Second Temple is dedicated. Within this great Consolation stand (xlii.
+1-4; xlix. 1-6; l. 4-9; lii. 13-liii. 12) the four poems on the
+Suffering Servant of Yahweh--the tenderest revelation of the Old
+Testament--apparently written previously in the Exile, say in 570-560
+B.C. The Old Law here reaches to the very feet of the New Law--to the
+Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. And the Book of Job,
+in its chief constituents (chaps. i-xxxi, xxxviii-xlii), was probably
+composed when Greek influences began--say in about 480 B.C., the year of
+the battle of Thermopylae. The canonization of this daringly speculative
+book indicates finely how sensitive even the deepest faith and holiness
+can remain to the apparently unjust distribution of man's earthly lot.
+
+Our second period ends in 444 B.C., when the priest and scribe Ezra
+solemnly proclaims, and receives the public subscription to, the Book of
+the Law of Moses--the Priestly Code, brought by him from Babylon.
+
+The Jewish last period, from Ezra's Proclamation 444 B.C. to the
+completion of the Fourth Book of Ezra, about A.D. 95, is (upon the
+whole) derivative. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah were absorbed in the realities
+of their own epoch-making times, and of God's universal governance of
+the world past and future; Daniel now, with practically all the other
+Apocalyptic writers in his train, is absorbed in those earlier
+prophecies, and in ingenious speculations and precise computations as to
+the how and the when of the world's ending. The Exile had given rise to
+the Synagogue, and had favoured the final development and codifying of
+the Mosaic law; the seventy years intermission of the Temple sacrifices
+and symbolic acts had turned the worship, which had been so largely
+visible, dramatic, social, into the praying, singing, reading, preaching
+of extant texts, taken as direct and final rules for all thought and
+action, and as incapable of additions or interpretations equal in value
+to themselves. Yet thus priceless treasures of spiritual truth and light
+were handed down to times again aglow with great--the greatest religious
+gifts and growths; and indeed this literature itself introduced various
+conceptions or images destined to form a largely fitting, and in the
+circumstances attractive, garment for the profound further realities
+brought by Christianity.
+
+In the Book of Daniel (written somewhere between 163 and 165 B.C.) all
+earthly events appear as already inscribed in the heavenly books (vii.
+10), and the events which have still really to come consist in the
+complete and speedy triumph of the Church-State Israel against King
+Antiochus Epiphanes. But here we get the earliest clear proclamation of
+a heightened life beyond death--though not yet for all (xii. 2). The
+noble vision of the four great beasts that came up from the sea, and of
+one like unto a Son of Man that came with the clouds of heaven (chap.
+vii), doubtless here figures the earthly kingdoms, Babel, Media, Persia,
+Greece (Alexander), and God's kingdom Israel. The Psalter appears to
+have been closed as late as 140 B.C.; some Psalms doubtless date back to
+701--a few perhaps to David himself, about 1000 B.C. The comminatory
+Psalms, even if spoken as by representatives of God's Church and people,
+we cannot now echo within our own spiritual life; any heightened
+consciousness after death is frequently denied (e.g. vi. 5: 'in the
+grave who shall give thee thanks?' and cxv. 17: 'the dead praise not the
+Lord')--we have seen the impressive reason of this; and perhaps a
+quarter of the Psalms are doubles, or pale imitations of others. But,
+for the rest, the Psalter remains as magnificently fresh and powerful as
+ever: culminating in the glorious self-commitment (Ps. lxxiii), 'I was
+as a beast before Thee. Nevertheless I am continually with Thee. Whom
+have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire
+beside Thee.' The keen sense, present throughout this amazingly rich
+collection, of the reality, prevenience, presence, protection--of the
+central importance for man, of God, the All-Abiding, finds thus its
+full, deathless articulation.
+
+Religiously slighter, yet interesting as a preparation for Christian
+theology, are the writings of Philo, a devout, Greek-trained Jew of
+Alexandria, who in A.D. 40 appeared before the Emperor Caligula in Rome.
+Philo does not feel his daringly allegorical sublimations as any
+departures from the devoutest Biblical faith. Thus 'God never ceases
+from action; as to burn is special to fire, so is action to God'--this
+in spite of God's rest on the seventh day (Gen. ii. 2). 'There exist two
+kinds of men: the heavenly man and the earthly man.'[42] The long Life
+of Moses[43] represents him as the King, Lawgiver, High Priest, Prophet,
+Mediator. The Word, the Logos (which here everywhere hovers near, but
+never reaches, personality) is 'the firstborn son of God', 'the image of
+God'[44]; its types are 'the Rock', the Manna, the High Priest's Coat;
+it is 'the Wine Pourer and Master of the Drinking Feast of God'.[45] The
+majority of the Jews, who did not accept Jesus as the Christ, soon felt
+they had no need for so much allegory, and dropped it, with advantage
+upon the whole, to the Jewish faith. But already St. Paul and the Fourth
+Gospel find here noble mental raiment for the great new facts revealed
+by Jesus Christ.
+
+2. The Christian Religion we will take, as to our points, at four stages
+of its development--Synoptic, Johannine, Augustinian, Thomistic.
+
+The Synoptic material here specially concerned we shall find especially
+in Mark i. 1 to xv. 47; but also in Matt. iii. 1 to xxvii. 56, and in
+Luke iii. 1 to xxiii. 56. Within the material thus marked off, there is
+no greater or lesser authenticity conferred by treble, or double, or
+only single attestation; for this material springs from two original
+sources--a collection primarily of doings and sufferings, which our Mark
+incorporates with some expansions; and a collection primarily of
+discourses, utilized especially by Matthew and Luke in addition to the
+original Mark. Both these sources contain the records of eyewitnesses,
+probably Saints Peter and Matthew.
+
+The chronological order and the special occasions of the growths in our
+Lord's self-manifestation, or in the self-consciousness of His human
+soul, are most carefully given by Mark and next by Luke. Matthew largely
+ignores the stages and occasions of both these growths, and assumes, as
+fully explicit from the beginning of the Ministry, what was manifested
+only later on or at the last; and he already introduces ecclesiastical
+and Christological terms and discriminations which, however really
+implicit as to their substance in Jesus's teaching, or inevitable (as to
+their particular form) for the maintenance and propagation of
+Christianity in the near future, are nevertheless still absent from the
+accounts of Mark and Luke.
+
+The chief rules for the understanding of the specific character of our
+Lord's revelation appear to be the following. The life and teaching must
+be taken entire; and, within this entirety, each stage must be
+apprehended in its own special peculiarities. The thirty years in the
+home, the school, the synagogue, the workshop at Nazareth, form a
+profoundly important constituent of His life and teaching--impressively
+contrasted, as they are, with the probably not full year of the Public
+Ministry, even though we are almost completely bereft of all details for
+those years of silent preparation.
+
+The Public Ministry, again, consists of two strongly contrasted stages,
+divided by the great scene of Jesus with the Apostles alone at Caesarea
+Philippi (Mark viii. 27-33; Luke ix. 18-22; Matt. xvi. 13-23). The stage
+before is predominantly expansive, hopeful, peacefully growing; the
+stage after, is concentrated, sad, in conflict, and in storm. To the
+first stage belong the plant parables, full of exquisite sympathy with
+the unfolding of natural beauty and of slow fruitfulness; to the second
+stage belong the parables of keen watchfulness and of the proximate,
+sudden second coming. Both movements are essential to the physiognomy of
+our Lord. And they are not simply differences in self-manifestation;
+they represent a growth, a relatively new element, in His human soul's
+experience and outlook.
+
+The central doctrine in the teaching is throughout the Kingdom of God.
+But in the first stage this central doctrine appears as especially
+upheld by Jesus's fundamental experience--the Fatherhood of God. In the
+second stage the central doctrine appears as especially coloured by
+Jesus's other great experience--of Himself as the Son of Man. In the
+earlier stage the Kingdom is presented more in the spirit of the ancient
+prophets, as predominantly ethical, as already come in its beginnings,
+and as subject to laws analogous to those obtaining in the natural
+world. In the second stage the coming of the Kingdom is presented more
+with the form of the apocalyptic writers, in a purely religious,
+intensely transcendent, and dualistic outlook--especially this also in
+the Parables of Immediate Expectation--as not present but future (Matt.
+xix. 28); not distant but imminent (Matt. xvi. 28; xxiv. 33; xxvi. 64);
+not gradual but sudden (Matt. xxiv. 27, 39, 43); not at all achieved by
+man but purely given by God (so still in Rev. xxi. 10).
+
+To the earlier stage belongs the great Rejoicing of Jesus (Matt. xi.
+25-30; Luke x. 21, 22). The splendid opening, 'I thank Thee, Father--for
+so it hath seemed good in Thy sight', and the exquisite close, special
+to Matthew, 'Come unto Me--and my burthen is light', raise no grave
+difficulty. But the intermediate majestic declaration, 'All things are
+delivered unto Me by the Father--neither knoweth any man the Father save
+the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him', causes critical
+perplexities.
+
+I take this declaration to be modelled upon actual words of Jesus, which
+genuinely implied rather than clearly proclaimed a unique relation
+between the Father and Himself. Numerous other words and acts involve
+such a relation and Jesus's full consciousness of it. His first public
+act, His baptism, is clearly described by Mark as a personal experience,
+'He saw the heavens opened' and heard a heavenly voice 'Thou art my
+beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased' (i. 10, 11). Already in the
+first stage Jesus declares the Baptist to be 'more than a prophet'
+(Matt. xi. 9), yet claims superiority over him and over Solomon (xi. 11;
+xii. 42). His doctrine is new wine requiring new bottles (Mark ii. 22);
+indeed His whole attitude towards the law is that of a superior, who
+most really exhorts all, 'Learn of Me'. And soon after Caesarea Philippi
+He insists to the people: 'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me in this
+generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when He cometh
+in the glory of the Father' (Mark viii. 38). The most numerous cures,
+physical, psychical, moral, certainly performed by Him, appear as the
+spontaneous effect of a unique degree and kind of spiritual authority;
+and the sinlessness attributed to Him throughout by the apostolic
+community (2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. iv. 15; John viii. 46; 1 John ii. 29)
+entirely corresponds to the absence, in the records of Him, of all
+traits indicating troubles of conscience and the corresponding fear of
+God. And this His unique Sonship is conjoined, in the earliest picture
+of Him, with an endless variety and combination of all the joys,
+admirations, affections, disappointments, desolations, temptations
+possible to such a stainless human soul and will. We thus find here a
+comprehensiveness unlike the attitude of the Baptist or St. Paul, and
+like, although far exceeding, the joy in nature and the peace in
+suffering of St. Francis of Assisi.
+
+The Second Stage opens with the great scene at Caesarea Philippi and its
+sequel (given with specially marked successiveness in Mark viii. 27-x.
+45), when, for the first time in a manner beyond all dispute, Mark
+represents Jesus as adopting the designation 'the Son of Man' in a
+Messianic and eschatological sense. For our Lord here promptly corrects
+Peter's conception of 'Messiah' by repeated insistence upon 'the Son of
+Man'--His glory yet also His sufferings. Thus Jesus adopts the term of
+Daniel vii. 13 (which already the Apocalypse of Enoch had understood of
+a personal Messiah) as a succinct description of His specific
+vocation--its heavenly origin and difference from all earthly
+Messianism; its combination of the depths of human weakness,
+dereliction, sufferings with the highest elevation in joy, power and
+glory; and its connexion of that pain with this triumph as strictly
+interrelated--only with and through the Cross, was there here the offer
+and acceptance of the Crown.
+
+As to the Passion and Death, and the Risen Life, four points appear to
+be central and secured. Neither the Old Testament nor Jewish Theology
+really knew of a Suffering Messiah. Jesus Himself clearly perceived,
+accepted, and carried out this profound new revelation. This suffering
+and death were conceived by Him as the final act and crown of His
+service--so in Mark x. 44, 45 and Luke xxii. 24-7. (All this remains
+previous to, and independent of, St. Paul's elaborated doctrine as to
+the strictly vicarious and juridical character of the whole.) And the
+Risen Life is an objectively real, profoundly operative life--the
+visions of the Risen One were effects of the truly living Jesus, the
+Christ.
+
+The Second Christian Stage, the Johannine writings, are fully
+understandable only as posterior to St. Paul--the most enthusiastic and
+influential, indeed, of all our Lord's early disciples, but a convert,
+from the activity of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly
+Jesus, of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the heavenly
+Spirit-Christ, whom he had so suddenly experienced. Saul, the man of
+violent passions and acute interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in
+a substantially _pneumatic_ manner, is henceforth absorbed, not in the
+past Jewish Messiah, but in the present universal Christ; not in the
+Kingdom of God, but in Pneuma, the Spirit. Christ, the second Adam, is
+here a life-giving Spirit, an element that surrounds and penetrates the
+human spirit; we are baptized, dipped, into Christ, Spirit; we can drink
+Christ, the Spirit. And this Christ-Spirit effects and maintains the
+universal brotherhood of mankind, and articulates in particular posts
+and functions the several human spirits, as variously necessary members
+of the one Christian society and Church.
+
+Now the Johannine Gospel indeed utilizes considerable Synoptic
+materials, and does not, as St. Paul, restrict itself to the Passion and
+Resurrection. Yet it gives us, substantially, the Spirit-Christ, the
+Heavenly Man; and the growth, prayer, temptation, appeal for sympathy,
+dereliction, agony, which, in the Synoptists, are still so real for the
+human soul of Jesus Himself, appear here as sheer condescensions, in
+time and space, of Him who, as all things good, descends from the
+Eternal Above, so that we men here below may ascend thither with Him.
+On the other hand, the Church and the Sacraments, still predominantly
+implicit in the Synoptists, and the subjects of costly conflict and
+organization in the Pauline writings, here underlie, as already fully
+operative facts, practically the entire profound work. The great
+dialogue with Nicodemus concerns Baptism; the great discourse in the
+synagogue at Capernaum, the Holy Eucharist--in both cases, the strict
+need of these Sacraments. And from the side of the dead Jesus flow blood
+and water, as those two great Sacraments flow from the everliving
+Christ; whilst at the Cross's foot He leaves His seamless coat, symbol
+of the Church's indivisible unity. The Universalism of this Gospel is
+not merely apparent: 'God so loved the world' (iii. 16), 'the Saviour of
+the world' (iv. 42)--this glorious teaching is traceable in many a
+passage. Yet Christ here condemns the Jews--in the Synoptists only the
+Pharisees; He is from above, they are from below; all those that came
+before Him were thieves and robbers; He will not pray for the world--'ye
+shall die in your sins' (xvii. 9; viii. 24); and the commandment,
+designated here by Jesus as His own and as new, to 'love one another',
+is for and within the community to which He gives His 'example' (xv. 12;
+xiii. 34)--in contrast with the great double commandment of love
+proclaimed by Him, in the Synoptists, as already formulated in the
+Mosaic Law (Mark xii. 28-34), and as directly applicable to every
+fellow-man--indeed, a schismatic Samaritan is given as the pattern of
+such perfect love (Luke x. 25-37).
+
+Deuteronomy gained its full articulation in conflict with Canaanite
+impurity; the Johannine writings take shape during the earlier battles
+of the long war with Gnosticism--the most terrible foe ever, so far,
+encountered by the Catholic Church, and conquered by her in open and
+fair fight. Also these writings lay much stress upon Knowing and the
+Truth: 'this is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God and Jesus
+Christ whom Thou hast sent' (xvii. 3); symbolism and mysticism prevail
+very largely; and, in so far as they are not absorbed in an Eternal
+Present, the reception of truth and experience is not limited to
+Christ's earthly sojourn--'the Father will give you another Helper, the
+spirit of truth who will abide with you forever' (xiv. 16). Yet here the
+knowing and the truth are also deeply ethical and social: 'he who doeth
+the truth cometh to the light' (iii. 21); and Christ has a fold, and
+other sheep not of this fold--them also He must bring, there will be one
+fold, one Shepherd; indeed, ministerial gradations exist in this one
+Church (so in xiii. 5-10; xx. 3-8; xxi. 7-19). And the Mysticism here is
+but an emotional intuitive apprehension of the great historical figure
+of Jesus, and of the most specifically religious of all facts--of the
+already overflowing operative existence, previous to all our action, of
+God, the Prevenient Love. 'Not we loved God (first), but He (first)
+loved us,' 'let us love Him, because He first loved us,' 'no man can
+come to Me, unless the Father draw him'--a drawing which awakens a
+hunger and thirst for Christ and God (1 John iv. 10, 19; John vi. 44;
+iv. 14; vi. 35).
+
+The Third Stage we can find in St. Augustine, who, born a North African
+Roman (A.D. 354) and a convert from an impure life and Manichaeism, with
+its spatially extended God (A.D. 386), wrote his _Confessions_ in 397,
+lived to experience the capture and sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth,
+410, composed his great work, _The City of God_, amidst the clear
+dissolution of a mighty past and the dim presage of a problematical
+future, and died at Hippo, his episcopal city, in 430, whilst the
+Vandals were besieging it. St. Augustine is more largely a convert and a
+rigorist even than St. Paul when St. Paul is most incisive. But here he
+shall testify only to the natures of Eternity and of real time, a matter
+in which he remains unequalled in the delicate vividness and balance of
+his psychological analysis and religious perception. 'Thou, O God,
+precedest all past times by the height of Thine ever-present Eternity;
+and Thou exceedest all future times, since they _are_ future, and, once
+they have come, will be past times. All thy years abide together,
+because they abide; but these our years will all be, only when they all
+will have ceased to be. Thy years are but One Day--not every day, but
+To-Day. This Thy To-Day is Eternity'.[46] The human soul, even in this
+life, has moments of a vivid apprehension of Eternity, as in the great
+scene of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia.[47] And this our
+sense of Eternity, Beatitude, God, proceeds at bottom from Himself,
+immediately present in our lives; the succession, duration of man is
+sustained by the Simultaneity, the Eternity of God: 'this day of ours
+_does_ pass within Thee, since all these things' of our deeper
+experience 'have no means of passing unless, somehow, Thou dost contain
+them all'. 'Behold, Thou wast within, and I was without ... Thou wast
+with me, but I was not with Thee.' 'Is not the blessed life precisely
+_that_ life which all men desire? Even those who only hope to be blessed
+would not, unless they in some manner already possessed the blessed
+life, desire to be blessed, as, in reality, it is most certain that they
+desire to be.'[48] Especially satisfactory is the insistence upon the
+futility of the question as to what God was doing in Time before He
+created. Time is only a quality inherent in all creatures; it never
+existed of itself.[49]
+
+And our fourth, last Christian Stage shall be represented by St. Thomas
+Aquinas (A.D. 1225-74), in the one great question where this
+Norman-Italian Friar Noble, a soul apparently so largely derivative and
+abstractive, is more complete and balanced, and penetrates to the
+specific genius of Christianity more deeply, than Saints Paul and
+Augustine with all their greater directness and intensity. We saw how
+the deepest originality of our Lord's teaching and temper consisted in
+His non-rigoristic earnestness, in His non-Gnostic detachment from
+things temporal and spatial. The absorbing expectation of the Second
+Coming, indeed the old, largely effete Graeco-Roman world, had first to
+go, the great Germanic migrations had to be fully completed, the first
+Crusades had to pass, before--some twelve centuries after Nazareth and
+Calvary--Christianity attained in Aquinas a systematic and promptly
+authoritative expression of this its root-peculiarity and power. No one
+has put the point better than Professor E. Troeltsch: 'The decisive
+point here is the conception, peculiar to the Middle Ages, of what is
+Christian as Supernatural, or rather the full elaboration of the
+consequences involved in the conception of the Supernatural. The
+Supernatural is now recognized not only in the great complicated miracle
+of man's redemption from out of the world corrupted by original sin. But
+the Supernatural now unfolds itself as an autonomous principle of a
+logical, religious and ethical kind. The creature, even the perfect
+creature, is only Natural--is possessed of only natural laws and ends;
+God alone is Supernatural. Hence the essence of Christian
+Supernaturalism consists in the elevation of the creature, above this
+creature's co-natural limitations, to God's own Supernature'. The
+distinction is no longer, as in the Ancient Church, between two kinds
+(respectively perfect and relative) of the one sole Natural Law; the
+distinction here is between Natural Law in general and Supernature
+generally. 'The Decalogue, in strictness, is not yet the Christian
+Ethic. "Biblical" now means revealed, but not necessarily Christian; for
+the Bible represents, according to Aquinas, a process of development
+which moves through universal history and possesses various stages. The
+Decalogue is indeed present in the legislation of Christ, but as a stage
+preliminary to the specifically Christian Ethic. The formula, on the
+contrary, for the specifically Christian Moral Law is here the
+Augustinian definition of the love of God as the highest and absolute,
+the entirely simple, Moral end--an end which contains the demand of the
+love of God in the stricter sense (self-sanctification, self-denial,
+contemplation) and the demand of the love of our neighbour (the active
+relating of all to God, the active interrelating of all in God, and the
+most penetrating, mutual self-sacrifice for God). This Ethic, a mystical
+interpretation of the Evangelical Preaching, forms indeed a strong
+contrast to the This-World Ethic of the Natural Law, Aristotle, the
+Decalogue and Natural Prosperity; but then this cannot fail to be the
+case, given the entire fundamental character of the Christian
+Ethic'.[50]
+
+Thus the widest and most primitive contrasts here are, not Sin and
+Redemption (though these, of course, remain) but Nature (however good in
+its kind) and Supernature. The State becomes the complex of that
+essentially good thing, Nature; the Church the complex of that
+different, higher good, Supernature; roughly speaking, where the State
+leaves off, the Church begins.
+
+It lasted not long, before the Canonists and certain ruling Churchmen
+helped to break up, in the consciousness of men at large, this noble
+perception of the two-step ladder from God to man and from man to God.
+And the Protestant Reformers, as a whole, went even beyond Saints Paul
+and Augustine in exclusive preoccupation with Sin and Redemption.
+Henceforth the single-step character of man's call now more than ever
+predominates. The Protestant Reformation, like the French Revolution,
+marks the existence of grave abuses, the need of large reforms, and,
+especially on this point, the all but inevitable excessiveness of man
+once he is aroused to such 'reforming' action. Certainly, to this hour,
+Protestantism as such has produced, within and for religion
+specifically, nothing that can seriously compare, in massive, balanced
+completeness, with the work of the short-lived golden Middle Ages of
+Aquinas and Dante. Hence, for our precise present purpose, we can
+conclude our Jewish and Christian survey here.
+
+3. Only a few words about Confucianism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, as
+these, in some of their main outlines, illustrate the points especially
+brought out by the Jewish Christian development.
+
+Confucianism admittedly consists, at least as we have it, in a greatly
+complicated system of the direct worship of Nature (Sun, Moon, Stars
+especially) and of Ancestors, and of a finely simple system of ethical
+rules for man's ordinary social intercourse. That Nature-worship closely
+resembles what the Deuteronomic reform fought so fiercely in Israel; and
+the immemorial antiquity and still vigorous life of such a worship in
+China indicates impressively how little such Nature-worship tends, of
+itself, to its own supersession by a definite Theism. And the Ethical
+Rules, and their very large observance, illustrate well how real can be
+the existence, and the goodness in its own kind, of Natural, This-World
+morality, even where it stands all but entirely unpenetrated or
+supplemented by any clear and strong supernatural attraction or
+conviction.
+
+Buddhism, in its original form, consisted neither in the Wheel of
+Reincarnation alone, nor in _Nirvana_ alone, but precisely in the
+combination of the two; for that ceaseless flux of reincarnation was
+there felt with such horror, that the _Nirvana_--the condition in which
+that flux is abolished--was hailed as a blessed release. The judgement
+as to the facts--that all human experience is of sheer, boundless
+change--was doubtless excessive; but the value-judgement--that if life
+be such pure shiftingness, then the cessation of life is the one end for
+man to work and pray for--was assuredly the authentic cry of the human
+soul when fully normal and awake. This position thus strikingly confirms
+the whole Jewish and Christian persistent search for permanence in
+change--for a Simultaneity, the support of our succession.
+
+And Mohammedanism, both in its striking achievements and in its marked
+limitations, indeed also in the presentations of it by its own
+spokesmen, appears as a religion primarily not of a special pervasive
+spirit and of large, variously applicable maxims, but as one of precise,
+entirely immutable rules. Thus we find here something not all unlike,
+but mostly still more rigid than, the post-Exilic Jewish
+religion--something doubtless useful for certain times and races, but
+which could not expand and adapt itself to indefinite varieties of
+growths and peoples without losing that interior unity and self-identity
+so essential to all living and powerful religion.
+
+
+III
+
+Let us now attempt, in a somewhat loose and elastic order, a short
+allocation and estimate of the facts in past and present religion which
+mainly concern the question of Religion and Progress.
+
+We West Europeans have apparently again reached the fruitful stage when
+man is not simply alive to this or that physical or psychic need, nor
+even to the practical interest and advantage of this or that Art,
+Science, Sociology, Politics, Ethics; but when he awakens further to the
+question as to why and how these several activities, all so costly where
+at all effectual, can deserve all this sacrifice--can be based in
+anything sufficiently abiding and objective. The history of all the past
+efforts, and indeed all really adequate richness of immediate outlook,
+combine, I think, to answer that only the experience and the conviction
+of an Objective Reality distinct from, and more than, man, or indeed
+than the whole of the world apprehended by man as less than, or as equal
+to, man himself, can furnish sufficiently deep and tenacious roots for
+our sense and need of an objective supreme Beauty, Truth, and
+Goodness--of a living Reality already overflowing that which, in lesser
+degrees and ways, we small realities cannot altogether cease from
+desiring to become. It is Religion which, from first to last, but with
+increasing purity and power, brings with it this evidence and
+conviction. Its sense of the Objective, Full Reality of God, and its
+need of Adoration are quite essential to Religion, although considerable
+systems, which are largely satisfactory in the more immediate questions
+raised by Aesthetics and even by Ethics, and which are sincerely anxious
+to do justice also to the religious sense, are fully at work to explain
+away these essential characteristics of all wideawake Religion. Paul
+Natorp, the distinguished Plato-scholar in Germany, the short-lived
+pathetically eloquent M. Guyau in France, and, above all, Benedetto
+Croce, the large encyclopaedic mind in Italy, have influenced or led
+much of this movement, which, in questions of Religion, has assuredly
+not reached the deepest and most tenacious teachings of life.
+
+The intimations as to this deepest Reality certainly arise within my own
+mind, emotion, will; and these my faculties cannot, upon the whole, be
+constrained by my fellow mortals; indeed, as men grow more manysidedly
+awake, all attempts at any such constraint only arrest or deflect the
+growth of these intimations. Yet the dispositions necessary for the
+sufficient apprehension of these religious intimations--sincerity,
+conscientiousness, docility--are not, even collectively, already
+Religion, any more than they are Science or Philosophy. With these
+dispositions on our part, objective facts and living Reality can reach
+us--and, even so, these facts reach us practically always, at first,
+through human teachers already experienced in these things. The need of
+such facts and such persons to teach them are, in the first years of
+every man, and for long ages in the history of mankind, far more
+pressing than any question of toleration. Even vigorous persecution or
+keen exclusiveness of feeling have--_pace_ Lord Acton--saved for
+mankind, at certain crises of its difficult development, convictions of
+priceless worth--as in the Deuteronomic Reform and the Johannine
+Writings. In proportion as men become more manysidedly awake, they
+acquire at least the capacity for greater sensitiveness concerning the
+laws and forces intrinsic to the various ranges and levels of life; and,
+where such sensitiveness is really at work, it can advantageously
+replace, by means of the spontaneous acceptance of such objective
+realities, the constraints of past ages--constraints which now, in any
+case, have become directly mischievous for such minds. None the less
+will men, after this change as before, require the corporate experience
+and manifestation of religion as, in varying degrees and ways, a
+permanent necessity for the vigorous life of religion. Indeed, such
+corporate tradition operates strongly even where men's spiritual sense
+seems most individual, or where, with the retention of some ethical
+nobility of outlook, they most keenly combat all and every religious
+institution. So with George Fox's doctrine of the Divine Enlightenment
+of every soul separately and without mediation of any kind, a doctrine
+derived by him from that highly ecclesiastical document, the Gospel of
+St. John; and with many a Jacobin's fierce proclamation of the rights of
+Man, never far away from reminiscences of St. Paul.
+
+This permanent necessity of Religious Institutions is primarily a need
+for men to teach and exemplify, not simply Natural, This-World Morality,
+but a Supernatural, Other-World Ethic; and not simply that abstraction,
+Religion in General or a Religious Hypothesis, but that rich concretion,
+this or that Historical Religion. In proportion as such an Historical
+Religion is deep and delicate, it will doubtless contain affinities with
+all that is wholesome and real within the other extant historical
+religions. Nevertheless, all religions are effectual through their
+special developments, where these developments remain true at all. As
+well deprive a flower of its 'mere details' of pistil, stamen, pollen,
+or an insect of its 'superfluous' antennae, as simplify any Historical
+Religion down to the sorry stump labelled 'the religion of every honest
+man'. We shall escape all bigotry, without lapsing into such most unjust
+indifferentism, if we vigorously hold and unceasingly apply the doctrine
+of such a Church theologian as Juan de Lugo. De Lugo (A.D. 1583-1660),
+Spaniard, post-Reformation Roman Catholic, Jesuit, Theological
+Professor, and a Cardinal writing in Rome under the eyes of Pope Urban
+VIII, teaches that the members of the various Christian sects, of the
+Jewish and Mohammedan communions, and of the heathen religions and
+philosophical schools, who achieve their salvation, do so, ordinarily,
+simply through the aid afforded by God's grace to their good faith in
+its instinctive concentration upon, and in its practice of, those
+elements in their respective community's worship and teaching, which are
+true and good and originally revealed by God.[51] Thus we escape all
+undue individualism and all unjust equalization of the (very variously
+valuable) religious and philosophical bodies; and yet we clearly hold
+the profound importance of the single soul's good faith and religious
+instinct, and of the worship or school, be they ever so elementary and
+imperfect, which environ such a soul.
+
+A man's religion, in proportion to its depth, will move in a Concrete
+Time which becomes more and more a Partial Simultaneity. And these his
+depths then more and more testify to, and contrast with, the Fully
+Simultaneous, God. Because man thus lives, not in an ever-equal chain of
+mutually exclusive moments, in Clock Time, but in Duration, with its
+variously close interpenetrations of the successive parts; and because
+these interpenetrations are close in proportion to the richness and
+fruitfulness of the durations he lives through; he can, indeed he must,
+conceive absolutely perfect life as absolutely simultaneous. God is thus
+not Unending, but Eternal; the very fullness of His life leaves no room
+or reason for succession and our poor need of it. Dr. F. C. S. Schiller
+has admirably drawn out this grand doctrine, with the aid of Aristotle's
+Unmoving Action, in _Humanism_, 1903, pp. 204-27. We need only
+persistently apprehend this Simultaneity as essential to God, and
+Succession as varyingly essential to all creatures, and there remains no
+difficulty--at least as regards the Time-element--in the doctrine of
+Creation. For only with the existence of creatures does Time thus arise
+at all--it exists only in and through them. And assuredly all finite
+things, that we know at all, bear traces of a history involving a
+beginning and an end. Professor Bernardino Varisco, in his great _Know
+Thyself_, has noble pages on this large theme.[52] In any case we must
+beware of all more or less Pantheistic conceptions of the simultaneous
+life of God and the successive life of creatures as but essential and
+necessary elements of one single Divine-Creaturely existence, in the
+manner, e.g., of Professor Josiah Royce, in his powerful work _The World
+and the Individual_, 2nd series, 1901. All such schemes break down under
+an adequate realization of those dread facts error and evil. A certain
+real independence must have been left by God to reasonable creatures.
+And let it be noted carefully: the great difficulty against all Theism
+lies in the terrible reality of Evil; and the deepest adequacy of this
+same Theism, especially of Christianity, consists in its practical
+attitude towards, and success against, this most real Evil. But
+Pantheism increases, whilst seeming to surmount, the theoretical
+difficulty, since the world as it stands, and not an Ultimate Reality
+behind it, is held to be perfect; and it entirely fails really to
+transmute Evil in practice. Theism, no more than any other outlook,
+really explains Evil; but it alone, in its fullest, Jewish-Christian
+forms, has done more, and better, than explain Evil: it has fully faced,
+it has indeed greatly intensified, the problem, by its noble insistence
+upon the reality and heinousness of Sin; and it has then overcome all
+this Evil, not indeed in theory, but in practice, by actually producing
+in the midst of deep suffering, through a still deeper faith and love,
+souls the living expression of the deepest beatitude and peace.
+
+The fully Simultaneous Reality awakens and satisfies man's deepest, most
+nearly simultaneous life, by a certain adaptation of its own intrinsic
+life to these human spirits. In such varyingly 'incarnational' acts or
+action the non-successive God Himself condescends to a certain
+successiveness; but this, in order to help His creatures to achieve as
+much simultaneity as is compatible with their several ranks and calls.
+We must not wonder if, in the religious literature, these condescensions
+of God largely appear as though they themselves were more or less
+non-successive; nor, again, if the deepest religious consciousness tends
+usually to conceive God's outward action, if future, then as proximate,
+and, if present, then as strictly instantaneous. For God in Himself is
+indeed Simultaneous; and if we try to picture Simultaneity by means of
+temporal images at all, then the instant, and not any period long or
+short, is certainly nearest to the truth--as regards the form and
+vehicle of the experience.
+
+The greater acts of Divine Condescension and Self-Revelation, our
+Religious _Accessions_, have mostly occurred at considerable intervals,
+each from the other, in our human history. After they have actually
+occurred, these several acts can be compared and arranged, according to
+their chief characteristics, and even in a series of (upon the whole)
+growing content and worth--hence the Science of Religion. Yet such
+Science gives us no power to produce, or even to foresee, any further
+acts. These great Accessions of Spiritual Knowledge and Experience are
+not the simple result of the conditions obtaining previously in the
+other levels of life, or even in that of religion itself; they often
+much anticipate, they sometimes greatly lag behind, the rise or decline
+of the other kinds of life. And where (as with the great Jewish
+Prophets, and, in some degree, with John the Baptist and Our Lord) these
+Accessions do occur at times of national stress, these several crises
+are, at most, the occasion for the demand, not the cause of the supply.
+
+The mostly long gaps between these Accessions have been more or less
+filled up, amongst the peoples concerned, by varyingly vigorous and
+valuable attempts to articulate and systematize, to apply in practice,
+and rightly to place (within the other ranges of man's total life) these
+great, closely-packed masses of spiritual fact; or to elude, to deflect,
+or directly to combat them, or some of their interpretations or
+applications. Now fairly steady improvement is possible, desirable, and
+largely actual, in the critical sifting and appraisement, as to the
+dates and the actual reality, of the historical documents and details of
+these Accessions; in the philosophical articulation of their doctrinal
+and evidential content; in the finer understanding and wider application
+of their ethical demands; and in the greater adequacy (both as to
+firmness and comprehensiveness) of the institutional organs and
+incorporations special to these same Accessions. All this can and does
+progress, but mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent
+paroxysms of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with
+one-sidedness, travesties, and--worst of all--with worldly indifference
+and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the Simultaneous Richness are
+here also always necessary; nor can these things ever really progress
+except through a deep religious sense--all mere scepticism and all
+levelling down are simply so much waste. Still, we can speak of progress
+in the Science of Religion more appropriately than we can of progress in
+the Knowledge of Religion.
+
+The Crusades, the Renaissance, the Revolution, no doubt exercised, in
+the long run, so potent a secularizing influence, because men's minds
+had become too largely other-worldly--had lost a sufficient interest in
+this wonderful world; and hence all those new, apparently boundless
+outlooks and problems were taken up largely as a revolt and escape from
+what looked like a prison-house--religion. Yet through all these violent
+oscillations there persisted, in human life, the supernatural need and
+call. In this God is the great central interest, love and care of the
+soul. We must look to it that both these interests and Ethics are kept
+awake, strong and distinct within a costingly rich totality of life: the
+Ethic of the honourable citizen, merchant, lawyer--of Confucius and
+Socrates; and the Ethic of the Jewish Prophets at their deepest, of the
+Suffering Servant, of our Lord's Beatitudes, of St. Paul's great eulogy
+of love, of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia, of Father
+Damian's voluntarily dying a leper amidst the lepers. The Church is the
+born incorporation of this pole, as the State is of the other. The
+Church indeed should, at its lower limit, also encourage the This-world
+Stage; the State, at its higher limit, can, more or less consciously,
+prepare us for the Other-World Stage. Both spring from the same God, at
+two levels of His action; both concern the same men, at two stages of
+their response and need. Yet the primary duty of the State is turned to
+this life; the primary care of the Church, to that life--to life in its
+deepest depths.
+
+Will men, after this great war, more largely again apprehend, love, and
+practise this double polarity of their lives? Only thus will the truest
+progress be possible in the understanding, the application, and the
+fruitfulness of Religion, with its great central origin and object, God,
+the beginning and end of all our true progress, precisely because He
+Himself already possesses immeasurably more than all He helps us to
+become,--He Who, even now already, is our Peace in Action, our Joy even
+in the Cross.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+I.   1. Oswold Külpe, _The Philosophy of the Present in Germany_,
+     English translation. London: George Allen, 1913, _3s. 6d._
+     net.
+
+     2. J. McKeller Stewart, _A Critical Exposition of Bergon's
+     Philosophy_. London: Macmillan, 1913, _6s._ net.
+
+II.  1. R. H. Charles, _A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future
+     Life_. London: A. & C. Black, 1899, _10s. 6d._ net.
+
+     2. Ernest T. Scott, _The Fourth Gospel_. Edinburgh: T. & T.
+     Clark, 1906, _6s._ net.
+
+III. 1. Aliotta, _The Idealistic Reaction against Science_. English
+     translation. Macmillan, 1914, _12s._ net.
+
+     2. F. C. Schiller, _Humanism_, Macmillan, 1903, _7s. 6d._ net.
+
+     3. C. C. J. Webb, _Group Theories of Religion and the Individual_,
+     Allen and Unwin, 1916, _5s._ net.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[32] _The Idealistic Reaction against Science_, Engl. tr. 1914, pp. 6,
+7.
+
+[33] _A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze_, 1895, p. 104.
+
+[34] Aliotta, op. cit., pp. 89, 187.
+
+[35] _Encyl. Brit._, 'Psychology,' 11th ed., p. 577.
+
+[36] Ed. 1898, p. 90.
+
+[37] _Discours sur la Méthode_, 1637, IVe Partie.
+
+[38] Aliotta, op. cit., p. 408.
+
+[39] Ed. 1893, vol. ii, p. 759.
+
+[40] _First Principles_, 6th ed., 1900, vol. i, p. 67.
+
+[41] Article, 'Moses,' in _Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart_,
+1913.
+
+[42] Ed. Mangey, vol. i, pp. 44, 49.
+
+[43] Ibid., pp. 80-179.
+
+[44] Ibid., pp. 308, 427.
+
+[45] Ibid., pp. 213, 121, 562, 691.
+
+[46] _Conf._ x, 13, 2.
+
+[47] Autumn, 387.
+
+[48] _Conf._ 1, 6, 3; x, 27; x, 20.
+
+[49] _Conf._ xi, 13.
+
+[50] _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen_, 1912, pp.
+263-5.
+
+[51] _De Fide_, Disp. xix, 7, 10; xx, 107, 194.
+
+[52] _Cognosci Te Stesso_, 1912, pp. 144-7.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+MORAL PROGRESS
+
+L. P. JACKS
+
+
+From the syllabus of all the lectures in this course I gather that every
+lecturer on the programme is dealing with the question of moral
+progress. This is inevitable. Each lecturer must show that the
+particular sort of progress he is dealing with is real or genuine
+progress, and this it cannot be unless it is moral. That is itself a
+significant fact and throws a valuable light on our subject. It shows
+that progress, as it is studied throughout the course, is not progress
+in the abstract, whatever that may mean, but progress _for us_
+constituted as we are; and since our constitution is essentially moral
+all progress that we can recognize as such must be moral also. Science,
+Industry, Government, might all claim progress on their own ground and
+in their own nature, but this would not prove progress as we understand
+the word, unless it could be shown further that these things contribute
+to human betterment in the highest sense of the word. _Their_ progress
+might conceivably involve _our_ regress.
+
+To believe in moral progress as an historical fact, as a process that
+has begun, and is going on, and will be continued--that is one thing,
+and it is my own position. To believe that this progress is far advanced
+is another thing, and is not my position. While believing in Moral
+Progress as a fact, I also believe that we are much nearer to the
+beginnings of it than the end. We should do well to accustom ourselves
+to this thought. Many of our despairs, lamentations, and pessimisms are
+disappointments which arise from our extravagant notions of the degree
+of progress already attained. There has been a great deal of what I have
+called philosophic pharisaism. Perhaps it would be better called aeonic
+pharisaism. I mean the spirit in the present age which seems to say 'I
+thank thee, O God, that I am not as former ages: ignorant, barbaric,
+cruel, unsocial; I read books, ride in aeroplanes, eat my dinner with a
+knife and fork, and cheerfully pay my taxes to the State; I study human
+science, talk freely about humanity, and spend much of my time in making
+speeches on social questions'. Now there is truth in all this, but not
+the kind of truth which should lead us to self-flattery. A good rule for
+optimists would be this: 'Believe in moral progress, but do not believe
+in too much of it.' I think there would be more optimists in the world,
+more cheerfulness, more belief in moral progress, if we candidly faced
+the fact that morally considered we are still in a neolithic age, not
+brutes indeed any longer, and yet not so far outgrown the brutish stage
+as to justify these trumpetings. One of the beneficent lessons of the
+present war has been to moderate our claims in this respect. It has
+revealed us to ourselves as nothing else in history has ever done, and
+it has revealed, among other things, that moral progress is not nearly
+so advanced as we thought it was. It has been a terrible blow to the
+pharisaism of which I have just spoken. It has not discredited science,
+nor philosophy, nor government, nor anything else that we value, but it
+has shown that these things have not brought us as far as we thought.
+That very knowledge, when you come to think of it, is itself a very
+distinct step in moral progress. Before the war we were growing morally
+conceited; we thought ourselves much better, more advanced in morality,
+than we really were, and this conceit was acting as a real barrier to
+our farther advance. A sharp lesson was needed to take this conceit out
+of us--to remind us that as yet we are only at the bare beginnings of
+moral advance--and not, as some of us fondly imagined, next door to the
+goal. This sudden awakening to the truth is full of promise for the
+future.
+
+And now what is the cause of these exaggerated notions which so many of
+us have entertained? I think they arise from our habit of letting
+ourselves be guided by words rather than by realities, by what men are
+_saying_ rather than by what they are _doing_, by what teachers are
+teaching than by what learners are learning. If you take your stand in
+the realm of words, of doctrines, of theories, of philosophies, of
+books, preachings, and uttered ideals, you might make out a strong case
+for a high degree of moral progress actually attained. But if you ask
+how much of this has been learnt by mankind at large, and learnt in such
+a way as to issue in practice, you get a different story. We have
+attached too much importance to the first story and too little to the
+second. There has been a great deal of false emphasis in consequence.
+This false emphasis is especially prominent in the education controversy
+which is now going on--and the question of moral progress, by the way,
+is the question of education in the widest and highest sense of the
+term. People seem quite content so long as they can get the right thing
+taught. They don't always see that unless the right thing is taught by
+the right people and in the right way it will not be _learnt_. Now
+education is ultimately a question of what is being _learnt_, not of
+what is being _taught_. The process of learning is a very curious and
+complicated one, and it often happens that what goes in at the teacher's
+end comes out at the pupil's end in a wholly different form and with a
+wholly different value; and we have the highest authority for believing
+that what really counts is not so much that which goeth into a man but
+that which cometh out of him. That applies to all education--especially
+moral education. So that if you argue from what has gone into the human
+race in the way of moral teaching you may be greatly surprised and
+perhaps disappointed when you compare it with what has come out of the
+human race in the meantime. What has been taught is not what has been
+learnt. It has suffered a sea change in the process. Nor is the question
+wholly one of learning. There is the further question of remembering. I
+believe that a candid examination of the facts would convince us that
+the human race has proved itself a forgetful pupil. It has not always
+retained what it has learnt. Emerson has said that no account of the
+Holy Ghost has been lost. But how did Emerson find that out? The only
+accents Emerson knew of were those which the world happened to have
+remembered. If any had been lost in the meantime Emerson naturally would
+not know of their existence. I have heard of a functionary, whose
+precise office I am not able to define, called 'the Lord's
+Remembrancer'. It would be a great help to Moral Progress if we had in
+modern life a People's Remembrancer. His place is occupied to some
+extent by the study of history, and for that reason one could wish for
+the sake of Moral Progress that the study of history were universal. For
+my own part I seldom open a book of history without recovering what for
+me is a lost account of the Holy Ghost. Next to conceit I reckon
+forgetfulness as the greatest enemy of Moral Progress. I suppose Rudyard
+Kipling had something of this in mind when he wrote his poem--
+
+    Lord God of Hosts be with us yet,
+    Lest we forget, lest we forget.
+
+Another cause of our over-estimate of Moral Progress is that we have
+thought too much of the abstract State and too little of the actual
+States now in being. Our devotion to 'the' State as an ideal has led us
+to overlook the fact that many actual States represent a form of
+morality so low that it is doubtful if it can be called morality at all.
+In their relations _with one another_ they display qualities which would
+disgrace the brutes. And the worst of it is that at times these States
+drag down to their own low level the morality of the individuals
+belonging to them. Thus at the present moment we see quite decent
+Englishmen and quite decent Germans tearing one another to pieces like
+mad dogs, a thing they would never dream of doing as between man and
+man, and which they do only because they are in the grip of forces alien
+to their own nature. We have overestimated Progress by thinking only of
+what is happening inside each of the States. We have forgotten to
+consider the bearing of the States to one another, which remains on a
+level lower than that of individuals.
+
+The impression has gone abroad that the nations of the world need to
+take _only one step_ from the position where they now stand to
+accomplish the final unity of all mankind. Taking any one of these
+nations--our own for example--we can trace the steps by which the
+warring elements within it have become reconciled, until finally there
+has emerged that vast unitary corporation--the British Empire. So with
+all the others. What more is required therefore than one step further in
+the same direction, to join up all the States into a single world State.
+But I am bound to think we are too hasty in treating the unity of
+mankind as needing only one step more. It is not so easy as all that.
+When you study the process by which unity has been brought about in the
+various European communities you find that motives of conquest and
+corresponding motives of defence have had a great deal to do with it.
+Germany, for example, was built up and now holds together as a fighting
+unit. Whether Germany and the other States would still maintain their
+cohesion when they were no longer fighting units, and when the motives
+of conquest and defence were no longer in operation, is a question on
+which I should not like to dogmatize either way. Certainly we have no
+right to assume offhand that the unifying process which has given the
+nations the mass cohesion and efficiency they require for holding their
+own against enemy States would still remain in full power when there
+were no longer any enemy States to be considered.
+
+But what do we mean by Progress?
+
+Progress may be defined as that process by which a thing advances from a
+less to a more complete state of itself. Now whether this process is a
+desirable one or not obviously depends on the nature of the thing which
+is progressing. Take the largest and most inclusive of all things--the
+whole world. And now suppose philosophy to have proved that the world,
+the whole world, is advancing from a less to a more complete state of
+itself--which as a matter of fact is what the doctrine of evolution
+claims to have proved. Ought I to rejoice in this discovery? Will it
+give me satisfaction? That clearly depends on the nature of the world.
+If I am antecedently assured that the world is good, I shall naturally
+rejoice on hearing that it is advancing from a less to a more complete
+state of itself. But if the nature of the world is evil, what reason can
+I possibly have for rejoicing in its evolution? Assuming the world to be
+evil in its essential nature, I for my part, if I were consulted in the
+matter, would certainly give my vote against its being allowed to
+advance from a less to a more complete state of itself. The less such a
+world progresses the easier it will be for moral beings to live in it.
+Our interest lies in its remaining as undeveloped as possible.
+
+Obvious as this seems there are some evolutionists who take a rather
+different view. They seem to think that any sort of world, no matter
+what its nature might be, would ultimately become a good world if it
+were allowed to develop its nature far enough. It is just the fact of
+its continually becoming more of itself that makes it good. But this
+would compel us to abandon our definition that progress is the advance
+of a thing from a less to a more complete state of _itself_. For if
+itself were a bad self to begin with all such advance of _itself_ would
+only make it worse. It is possible that an essentially bad man like Iago
+might be converted into a good one, but not by advancing from a less to
+a more complete state of _himself_ as he originally was--unless indeed
+we change the hypothesis and suppose that he was not essentially bad to
+begin with. So with the world at large. Our nature being what it is,
+namely moral, we must first be convinced that the world is in principle
+good before we can derive the least satisfaction from knowing that it is
+advancing from a less to a more complete state of _itself_. The
+alternative doctrine makes a breach in the doctrine of progress which is
+inconsistent with its original form. A thing develops by retaining its
+essential nature--that is the original form. But a bad world which
+develops into a good one doesn't retain its essential nature. There
+comes a point somewhere when the next step of progress can be achieved
+only by the thing dropping its original nature--a point at which the
+thing is no longer becoming more of its former self, which was bad, but
+is ceasing to be its former self altogether and becoming something else,
+which is good.
+
+Let us apply this to progress in three specific directions--Science, the
+Mechanical Arts, and Government.
+
+We find that the progress of science has enormously increased man's
+power over the forces of nature. Is it a good thing that man's power
+over the forces of nature should be increased? That surely depends on
+the manner in which this power is used, and this depends again on the
+moral nature of man. When we observe, as we may truly observe,
+especially at the present time, that of all the single applications
+which man has made of science, the most extensive and perhaps the most
+efficient is that of devising implements for destroying his brother man,
+it is at least permissible to raise the question whether the progress of
+science has contributed on the whole to the progress of humanity. Had it
+not been for the progress of science, which has enormously increased the
+wealth of the world, it is doubtful if this war, which is mainly a war
+about wealth, would have taken place at all. Or if a war had broken out,
+it would not have involved the appalling destruction of human life and
+property we are now witnessing--such that, within a space of two years,
+about six million human beings have been killed, thirty-five millions
+wounded, and wealth destroyed to the extent of about fifteen thousand
+millions sterling--though some say it is very much more. Science taught
+us to make this wealth: science has also taught us how to destroy it.
+When one thinks of how much of this is attributable to the progress of
+science, I say it is _permissible to raise the question_ whether man is
+a being who can safely be entrusted with that control over the forces of
+nature which science gives him. What if he uses this power, as he
+plainly can do, for his own undoing? To ask this, as we can hardly help
+asking, is to transfer the question of scientific progress into the
+sphere of morality. It is conceivable that the progress of science might
+involve for us no progress at all. It might be, and some have feared
+that it may become, a step towards the self-destruction of the human
+race.
+
+Take the mechanical arts. The chief effects of progress in the
+mechanical arts have been an enormous increase in the material wealth
+of mankind, and, partly consequent upon this, a parallel growth of
+population in the industrial countries of the world. It is by no means
+clear that either of these things constitutes a definite step in human
+progress. Consider the growth of population--the immense increase in the
+total bulk and volume of the human race. Whether this constitutes a
+clear gain to humanity obviously cannot be answered without reference to
+moral considerations. To increase the arithmetical quantity of life in
+the world can be counted a gain only if the general tendencies of life
+are in the right direction. If they are in the wrong direction, then the
+more lives there are to yield to these tendencies the less reason has
+the moralist to be satisfied with what is happening. No one, so far as I
+know, has ever seriously maintained that the end and aim of progress is
+to increase the number of human beings up to the limit which the planet
+is able to support; though some doctrines if pressed to their conclusion
+would lead to that, notably the doctrine that all morality rests
+ultimately on the instinct for the preservation and the reproduction of
+life. We have first to be convinced that the human race is not on the
+wrong road before we can look with complacency on the increase of its
+numbers. We may note in this connexion that mankind possesses no sort of
+collective control over its own mass or volume. The mass or total number
+of lives involved is determined by forces which are not subject to the
+unitary direction of any existing human will either individual or
+collective. This applies not only to the human race as a whole, but to
+particular communities. Their growth is unregulated. They just come to
+be what they are in point of size. This fact seems to me a very
+important one to bear in mind when we talk of the progress of science
+giving us control over the forces of nature. So far no state, no
+government, no community has won any effective control over that group
+of the forces of nature which determine the total size of the community
+in question. It is an aspect of human destiny which appears to be left
+to chance; and yet when we consider what it means, is there any aspect
+of human destiny on which such tremendous consequences depend? And ought
+we not to consider this before claiming, as we so often claim, that the
+progress of science has given us control of the forces of nature? It is
+strange that this point has not been more considered, especially by
+thinkers who are fond of the word 'humanity'--'the good of humanity'--or
+the 'greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Humanity has an
+arithmetical or quantitative side, and the good of humanity surely
+depends, to some extent, on how much humanity there is. I can imagine
+many things which might be good for a Greek city state of 10,000 souls
+which would not be good, or not good in the same sense, for a community
+of 100,000,000 souls. Surely it needs no reasoning to prove that our
+power to do our duty to others is affected by the number of others to
+whom duty has to be done--it makes a difference where there are 10,000
+of men or 100,000,000. Similarly with the greatest happiness of the
+greatest number. What is the _greatest_ number? A great deal that has
+been said about this would not have been said if we had considered that
+the _greatest number_ itself is left at the disposal of forces outside
+the present scope of our own will. Even the proposal to sell our goods
+and give the proceeds to the poor would surely be affected, from the
+moral point of view, by the number of the poor who were to receive the
+distribution. Were this so small that the poor would get five pounds
+apiece it would be one question; were it so large that they would
+receive a halfpenny apiece it would be another question. Thus we may
+conclude that the progress of the mechanical arts with the consequent
+increase in the bulk of the human race has not solved the problem of
+moral progress, but only placed that problem in a new and more
+perplexing context. A similar conclusion would meet us if we were to
+consider the parallel increase of the wealth of the world. The moral
+question is not about the amount of wealth the world possesses, but
+about the way men spend it and the use they make of it. Industrially
+speaking, the human race has made its fortune during the last hundred
+years. But has it made up its mind what to do with the fortune? And has
+its mind been made up in the right way? To raise these questions is to
+see that progress from the economic point of view may be the reverse of
+progress from the moral. But I shall not further enlarge upon this--the
+theme being too familiar.
+
+The third question which relates itself to moral progress is that of
+Government. Now Government, I need hardly say, is not an end in itself.
+It is a device which man has set up to help him in attaining the true
+end of his life. To make up our minds how we ought to be governed is
+therefore impossible unless we have previously made up our minds how we
+ought to live. What might be a good government for a people whose end is
+industrial success might be a very bad one for a people who had some
+other end in view. Well, then, are we well governed at the present time?
+Are we better governed than we were? Has progress taken place in this
+department? Plainly we cannot answer these questions unless we have
+chosen our end in life and are morally satisfied with it. In the history
+of modern states we discover a tendency, more strongly marked in some
+quarters than in others, towards that form of democracy which is called
+responsible self-government. Government of the people, for the people,
+by the people. The people are going to govern themselves. But they may
+do so in a thousand different ways--each of which has a different moral
+value. A people may go wrong just as fatally in governing itself as in
+being governed by some external authority. I confess that nothing I can
+learn from the history of government entirely reassures me on this
+point. I see everywhere progress towards organization, but then one is
+bound to ask on what ulterior end is this organization directed? I see
+everywhere a growing subordination of the individual to the State. This
+may or may not be a very good thing. What _kind of State_ is it to which
+the individual is becoming subordinated? There are great differences
+among them--some seem to me, one in particular at the present time,
+thoroughly bad, and I cannot see that the individual gains morally by
+being subordinated to such a State--at least if he gains in one
+direction he loses more in another.
+
+Even the social unity which Governments are capable of achieving must
+not be too hastily translated into moral progress. We are entitled to
+ask several questions before the one can be equated with the other. To
+begin with, do men know what they want to achieve by their unified life?
+And if they do know what they want, have we not still the right to
+criticize its moral value and say 'this is right' or this is wrong?
+Should the time ever come when the common will of mankind should get
+itself expressed by the decrees of a universal democracy, would moral
+criticism be at an end so far as the said decrees were concerned? For my
+part I cannot see that it would. Perhaps it were truer to say that only
+then would moral criticism effectively begin. As things now are, we are
+prevented from criticizing the common will because none of us knows what
+exactly the common will demands. But if it could get itself expressed
+and defined by the decrees of a perfect democracy we should know. Those
+decrees would reveal the human community to itself, and it is possible
+that the revelation would not be altogether agreeable to our moral
+sense. We might then discover that the common will is capable of being
+grossly immoral. So far it has been impossible for us to make this
+discovery because no organ exists for expressing the common will on the
+human scale, and even those which express it on the national scale are
+not perfect. I am far from saying the discovery would be made; but I
+know of no line of argument which rules it out as impossible. Meanwhile
+we are scarcely justified in regarding the common will as necessarily
+moral until we know more than we do of what precisely it is that the
+common will aims at and intends to achieve. To back the common will
+through thick and thin, as some of our philosophers seem disposed to do,
+is a dangerous speculation--it might perhaps be described as putting
+your money on a dark horse.
+
+This leads me to say a word concerning a phrase which has been much in
+use of late--the Collective Wisdom of Mankind, or the Collective Wisdom
+of the State. Progress is sometimes defined as a gradual approach to a
+state of things where this collective wisdom rules the course of events.
+And collective wisdom is sometimes represented as vastly wiser than that
+possessed by any individual, even the wisest.
+
+Now if this really is so it seems pretty obvious that, when the
+collective wisdom speaks, no individual can have the right of appeal.
+What are you, what am I, that either of us should set up our private
+intelligence against the intelligence of forty million of our fellow
+citizens? That surely would be a preposterous claim. The collective
+wisdom must know best: at least it knows much better than you or I.
+
+But is the collective wisdom of the State so immensely superior to that
+of the individual, and of necessity so? Have we any means of bringing
+the matter to the test? It is extremely difficult to do so. Not until
+we make the experiment do we find how rare are the occasions of which we
+can say that then and there the collective wisdom of the community
+fairly and fully expressed itself. Acts of Parliament are not good
+examples. They usually represent not the collective wisdom of the whole
+community, but the wisdom of the majority after it has been checked,
+modified, and perhaps nullified by the opposing wisdom of an almost
+equal minority. Take as an example the history of the Irish Question.
+How difficult it is to put one's finger on any moment in that tangled
+story and say that then and there the collective wisdom of the community
+knew what it wanted to do and did it! So with almost everything else.
+
+Now if there be such a thing as the collective wisdom of the State I
+suppose that the moment when we are most likely to find it in action is
+the moment when one State has dealings with another State. That surely
+is a fair test. If States possess collective wisdom they ought to show
+its existence and measure when they confront one another _as
+States_--when State calls to State across the great deeps of
+international policy. What should we say of any State which claimed
+collective wisdom only when dealing with its own individual
+members--with you and me--but dropped the claim when the question was
+one of reasonable intercourse with another State similarly endowed? This
+we should say is a very dubious claim.
+
+Well, how stands the matter when this test is applied? The present war
+provides the answer. The war arose out of a type of quarrel which, had
+it occurred between half a dozen individuals of average intelligence,
+would have been amicably settled, by reasonable human intercourse, in
+twenty minutes. Does not this afford a rough measure of the collective
+wisdom of such States as at present exist in this world? Does it not
+suggest that they have little faculty of reasonable intercourse with
+one another? And when you say _that_ of any being, or any collection of
+beings, do you not put it pretty low down in the scale of intelligence?
+It is literally true that these States do not understand one another.
+Thus we are driven back upon a plain alternative; either the States do
+not represent collective wisdom, or else this collective wisdom is one
+of the lowest forms of wisdom now extant on this planet. In either case
+we must be very cautious in our use of the phrase. We must not infer
+moral progress from the reign of collective wisdom until we are assured
+that collective wisdom is really as wise as some of its devotees assume
+it to be.
+
+About the idea of moral progress, which is only another name for the
+idea of progress in its widest form, I need say little, the question
+having been adequately treated by other lecturers. But I will add this.
+Belief in moral progress is a belief which no man can live without, and,
+at the same time, a belief which cannot be proved by any appeal to human
+experience. We cannot live without it, because life is just the process
+of reaching forward to a better form of itself. Were a man to say that
+since the world began no moral progress has taken place he would thereby
+show his latent belief in moral progress. For no man would take the
+trouble to deny moral progress unless he believed that the world would
+in some way be made better by his denial. He would not even trouble to
+come to a private conclusion in the matter unless he believed that his
+private conclusion was something to the good. In that sense perhaps we
+may say that moral progress is proved, for the best proof of any belief
+is that it remains indispensable to the life we have to live. But the
+appeal to experience would not prove it--and for this reason. A
+progressive world is a world which not only makes gains, but _keeps_ its
+gains when they are made. If the Kingdom of Heaven were to become a
+fact to-morrow, that of itself would not prove progress, if you admit
+the possibility that the world might hereafter retreat from the position
+it had won. That possibility you could never rule out--except by an
+appeal to faith. A world which attained the goal and then lost it would
+be a greater failure, from the point of view of moral progress, than one
+which never attained the goal at all. The doctrine that the gains of
+morality can never be lost is widely held; but it does not rest on a
+philosophic or a scientific basis. As Hume taught long ago, you cannot
+infer an infinite conclusion from finite data--and in this case the
+conclusion is infinite and the data are finite. They are not only finite
+but various: some pointing one way, some another.
+
+Finally we cannot prove moral progress by appeal to any objective
+standard, such as the amount of happiness existing in the world at
+successive dates. Suppose you were able to show that, up to date, the
+amount of happiness in the world has shown a steady increase until it
+has reached the grand sum total now existing. Now suppose that you were
+transferred to another planet where the conditions were the exact
+opposite: where the inhabitants ages ago started with the happiness we
+now possess, and gradually declined until, at the present moment, they
+are no happier than the human race was at the first stage of its career.
+Now add together the totals of happiness for both your worlds, the
+ascending world which starts with the minimum and ends with the maximum,
+the declining world which starts with the maximum and ends with the
+minimum. The grand totals in both cases are exactly the same. So far as
+the total result is concerned, the declining world has just as much to
+show for itself as the ascending. Valued in terms of happiness, the one
+world would be worth as much as the other.
+
+And yet we know that the value of these two worlds is not the same. The
+ascending is worth a lot more than the descending. Why? I leave you with
+that conundrum. Answer it, and you have the key to the meaning of Moral
+Progress.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, Book III, ch. 3.
+
+Lecky, _History of European Morals_, ch. 1.
+
+Spencer, _Data of Ethics_, ch. 13 to 14.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+PROGRESS IN GOVERNMENT
+
+A. E. ZIMMERN
+
+
+When I was asked to speak to you on the subject of Progress in
+Government I gladly accepted, for it is a subject on which I have
+reflected a good deal. But when I came to think over what I should say,
+I saw that you had asked me for the impossible. For what is Government?
+I do not know whether there are any here for whom Government means no
+more than a policeman, or a ballot-box, or a list of office-holders. The
+days of such shallow views are surely over. Government is the work of
+ordering the external affairs and relationships of men. It covers all
+the activities of men as members of a community--social, industrial, and
+religious as well as political in the narrower sense. It is concerned,
+as the ancients had it, with 'that which is public or common', what the
+Greeks called [Greek: to koinon] and the Romans _res publica_. The Old
+English translation of these classical terms is 'The Commonwealth' or
+Common Weal; and I do not see that we can do better than adopt that
+word, with its richness of traditional meaning and its happy association
+of the two conceptions, too often separated in modern minds, of Wealth
+and Welfare.
+
+Our subject then is the Progress of the Commonwealth or, in other words,
+the record of the course of the common life of mankind in the world. It
+is a theme which really underlies all the other subjects of discussion
+at this week's meetings: for it is only the existence of the
+Commonwealth and its organized efforts to preserve and sustain the life
+of the individuals composing it, which have made possible the
+achievements of mankind in the various separate fields of effort which
+are claiming your attention. Lord Acton spent a lifetime collecting
+material for a History of Liberty. He never wrote it: but, if he had, it
+would have been a History of Mankind. A History of Government or of the
+Commonwealth would be nothing less. Such is the nature of the invitation
+so kindly given to me and so cheerfully accepted. If you could wait a
+lifetime for the proper treatment of the subject I would gladly give the
+time; for, in truth, it is worth it.
+
+What is the nature of this common life of mankind and with what is it
+concerned? The subjects of its concern are as wide as human nature
+itself. We cannot define them in a formula: for human nature overleaps
+all formulas. Whenever men have tried to rule regions of human activity
+and aspiration out of the common life of mankind, and to hedge them
+round as private or separate or sacred or by any other kind of taboo,
+human nature has always ended by breaking through the hedges and
+invading the retreat. Man is a social animal. If he retires to a
+monastery he finds he has carried problems of organization with him, as
+the promoters of this gathering would confess you have brought with you
+here. If he shuts himself up in his home as a castle, or in a workshop
+or factory as the domain of his own private power, social problems go
+with him thither, and the long arm of the law will follow after. If he
+crosses the seas like the Pilgrim Fathers, to worship God unmolested in
+a new country, or, like the merchant-venturers, to fetch home treasure
+from the Indies, he will find himself unwittingly the pioneer of
+civilization and the founder of an Empire or a Republic. In the life of
+our fellows, in the Common Weal, we live and move and have our being.
+Let us recall some wise words on this subject from the Master of
+Balliol's book on the Middle Ages. 'The words "Church" and "State"', he
+writes,
+
+     represent what ought to be an alliance, but is, in modern
+     times, at best a dualism and often an open warfare.... The
+     opposition of Church and State expresses an opposition
+     between two sides of human nature which we must not too
+     easily label as good and evil, the heavenly and the earthly,
+     the sacred and the profane. For the State, too, is divine as
+     well as the Church, and may have its own ideals and
+     sacramental duties and its own prophets, even its own
+     martyrs. The opposition of Church and State is to be
+     regarded rather as the pursuit of one great aim, pursued by
+     contrasted means. The ultimate aim of all true human
+     activity must be in the noble words of Francis Bacon 'the
+     glory of God and the relief of man's estate'.[53]
+
+Bacon's words form a fitting starting-point for our reflections: for
+they bring vividly before us both the idealism which should inspire all
+who labour at the task of government and the vastness and variety of the
+field with which they are concerned. Looked at in this broad light, the
+history of man's common life in the world will, I think, show two great
+streams of progress--the progress of man over Nature, or, as we say
+to-day, in the control of his environment, and the progress of man in
+what is essentially a moral task--the art of living together with his
+fellows. These two aspects of human activity and effort are in constant
+contact and interaction. Studied together, they reveal an advance which,
+in spite of man's ever-present moral weakness, may be described as an
+advance from Chaos to Cosmos in the organization of the world's common
+life; yet they are so distinct in method and spirit that they can best
+be described separately.
+
+Let us first, then, consider the history of Government, as a record of
+the progress of man's power over Nature.
+
+Human history, in this sphere, is the story of man making himself at
+home in the world. When human history begins we find men helpless,
+superstitious, ignorant, the plaything of blind powers in the natural
+and animal world. Superstitious because he was helpless, helpless
+because he was ignorant, he eked out a bare existence rather by avoiding
+than controlling the forces in the little world by which he found
+himself surrounded. Human life in its earliest stages is, as Hobbes
+described it, nasty, brutish, and short. Man was the slave of his
+environment. He has risen to become its master. The world, as the
+prophetic eye of Francis Bacon foretold, has become 'The Kingdom of
+Man'.
+
+How complete this conquest is, can best be realized perhaps by
+considering man's relation to the lower animals. When history opens, the
+animals are in their element; it is man who is the interloper. Two
+thousand years ago it was not the Society of Friends but wolves and wild
+boars who felt themselves at home on the site of Bournville Garden
+Village. To-day we are surprised when we read that in remote East Africa
+lions and giraffes venture occasionally to interfere in the murderous
+warfare between man and man. Man has imposed himself on the animals, by
+dint of his gradual accumulation of knowledge and his consequent power
+of organization and government. He has destroyed the conditions under
+which the animals prospered. He has, as we might say, destroyed their
+home life, exposing them to dangers of his own making against which they
+are now as powerless as he was once against them. 'It is a remarkable
+thing,' writes Sir E. Ray Lankester,
+
+     which possibly may be less generally true than our present
+     knowledge seems to suggest--that the adjustment of organisms
+     to their surroundings is so severely complete in Nature
+     apart from Man, that diseases are unknown as constant and
+     normal phenomena under those conditions. It is no doubt
+     difficult to investigate this matter, since the presence of
+     Man as an observer itself implies human intervention. But it
+     seems to be a legitimate view that every disease to which
+     animals (and probably plants also) are liable, excepting as
+     a transient and very exceptional occurrence, is due to Man's
+     interference. The diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs, and
+     horses are not known except in domesticated herds and those
+     wild creatures to which Man's domesticated productions have
+     communicated them. The trypanosome lives in the blood of
+     wild game and of rats without producing mischief. The hosts
+     have become tolerant of the parasite. It is only when man
+     brings his unselected, humanly-nurtured races of cattle and
+     horses into contact with the parasite, that it is found to
+     have deadly properties. The various cattle-diseases which in
+     Africa have done so much harm to native cattle, and have in
+     some regions exterminated big game, have _per contra_ been
+     introduced by man through his importation of diseased
+     animals of his own breeding from Europe. Most, if not all,
+     animals in extra-human conditions, including the minuter
+     things such as insects, shellfish, and invisible aquatic
+     organisms, have been brought into a condition of
+     'adjustment' to their parasites as well as to the other
+     conditions in which they live: it is this most difficult and
+     efficient balance of Nature which Man everywhere upsets.[54]
+
+And Sir E. Ray Lankester goes on to point out the moral to be drawn from
+this development. He points out that
+
+     civilized man has proceeded so far in his interference with
+     extra-human nature, has produced for himself and the living
+     organisms associated with him such a special state of things
+     by his rebellion against natural selection and his defiance
+     of Nature's pre-human dispositions, that he must either go
+     on and acquire firmer control of the conditions, or perish
+     miserably by the vengeance certain to fall on the
+     half-hearted meddler in great affairs. We may indeed compare
+     civilized man to a successful rebel against Nature, who, by
+     every step forward, renders himself liable to greater and
+     greater penalties, and so cannot afford to pause or fail in
+     one single step. Or again we may think of him as the heir to
+     a vast and magnificent kingdom, who has been finally
+     educated so as to take possession of his property, and is at
+     length left alone to do his best; he has wilfully abrogated,
+     in many important respects, the laws of his mother Nature by
+     which the kingdom was hitherto governed; he has gained some
+     power and advantage by so doing, but is threatened on every
+     hand by dangers and disasters hitherto restrained: no
+     retreat is possible--his only hope is to control, as he
+     knows that he can, the sources of these dangers and
+     disasters.
+
+The time will come, not too long hence, as I believe, when men have
+realized, with the scientists, that the world is one kingdom not many,
+and these problems of man's relation to his non-human environment will
+be the first concern of statesmen and governors. In some of our tropical
+colonies they have, perforce, become so already. If you live on the Gold
+Coast, the war against malaria cannot help seeming more important to you
+than the war against German trade: and in parts of Central Africa the
+whole possibility of continued existence centres round the presence or
+absence of the tsetse fly which is the carrier of sleeping sickness.
+Some day, when means have been adopted for abating our fiercer
+international controversies, we shall discover that in these and kindred
+matters lies the real province of world-politics. When that day comes
+the chosen representatives of the human race will see their
+constituents, as only philosophers see them now, as the inheritors of a
+great tradition of service and achievement, and as trustees for their
+successors of the manifold sources of human happiness which the advance
+of knowledge has laid open to us.
+
+If the first and most important of these sources is the discovery of
+the conditions of physical well-being, the second is the discovery of
+means of communication between the widely separate portions of man's
+kingdom. The record of the process of bringing the world under the
+control of the organized government of man is largely the record of the
+improvement of communications. Side by side with the unending struggle
+of human reason against cold and hunger and disease we can watch the
+contest against distance, against ocean and mountain and desert, against
+storms and seasons. There can be few subjects more fascinating for a
+historian to study than the record of the migrations of the tribes of
+men. He might begin, if he wished, with the migrations of animals and
+describe the westward progress of the many species whose course can be
+traced by experts along the natural highways of Western Europe. Some of
+them, so the books tell us, reached the end of their journey while
+Britain was still joined to the continent. Others arrived too late and
+were cut off by the straits of Dover. I like to form an imaginary
+picture, which the austerity of the scientific conscience will, I know,
+repudiate with horror, of the unhappy congregation, mournfully assembled
+bag and baggage on the edge of the straits and gazing wistfully across
+at the white cliffs of England, which they were not privileged to
+reach--_tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore_, 'stretching out
+their paws in longing for the further bank.'
+
+Our historian would then go on to describe the early 'wanderings of
+peoples' (_Völkerwanderungen_) how whole tribes would move off in the
+spring-time in the search for fresh hunting-grounds or pasture. He would
+trace the course of that westward push which, starting from somewhere in
+Asia, brought its impact to bear on the northern provinces of the Roman
+Empire and eventually loosened its whole fabric. He would show how
+Europe, as we know it, was welded into unity by the attacks of
+migratory warriors on three flanks--the Huns and the Tartars, a host of
+horsemen riding light over the steppes of Russia and Hungary: the Arabs,
+bearing Islam with them on their camels as they moved westward along
+North Africa and then pushing across into Spain: and the Northmen of
+Scandinavia, those carvers of kingdoms and earliest conquerors of the
+open sea, who left their mark on England and northern France, on Sicily
+and southern Italy, on the Balkan Peninsula, on Russia, on Greenland,
+and as far as North America. Then, passing to Africa and Asia, he would
+describe the life of the pack-saddle and the caravan, the long and
+mysterious inland routes from the Mediterranean to Nubia and Nigeria, or
+from Damascus with the pilgrims to Medina, and the still longer and more
+mysterious passage through the ancient oases of Turkestan, now buried in
+sand, along which, as recent discoveries have shown us, Greece and
+China, Christianity and Buddhism, exchanged their arts and ideas and
+products. Then he would tell of the great age of maritime discovery, of
+the merchant-adventurers and buccaneers, of their gradual transformation
+into trading companies, in the East and in the West, from companies to
+settlements, from settlements to colonies. Then perhaps he would close
+by casting a glimpse at the latest human migration of all, that which
+takes place or took place up to 1914, at the rate of a million a year
+from the Old World into the United States. He would take the reader to
+Ellis Island in New York harbour, where the immigrants emerge from the
+steerage to face the ordeal of the Immigration Officer. He would show
+how the same causes, hunger, fear, persecution, restlessness, ambition,
+love of liberty, which set the great westward procession in motion in
+the early days of tribal migration, are still alive and at work to-day
+among the populations of Eastern Europe. He would look into their minds
+and read the story of the generations of their nameless fore-runners;
+and he would ask himself whether rulers and statesmen have done all that
+they might to make the world a home for all its children, for the poor
+as for the rich, for the Jew as for the Gentile, for the yellow and
+dark-skinned as for the white.
+
+Let us dwell for a moment more closely on one phase of this record of
+the conquest of distance. The crucial feature in that struggle was the
+conquest of the sea. The sea-surface of the world is far greater than
+its land-surface, and the sea, once subdued, is a far easier and more
+natural means of transport and communication. For the sea, the
+uncultivable sea, as Homer calls it, is itself a road, whereas on earth,
+whether it be mountain or desert or field, roads have first painfully to
+be made. Man's definitive conquest of the sea dates from the middle of
+the fifteenth century when, by improvements in the art of sailing and by
+the extended use of the mariner's compass, it first became possible to
+undertake long voyages with assurance. These discoveries are associated
+with the name of Prince Henry of Portugal, whose life-long ambition it
+was, to quote the words engraved on his monument at the southern
+extremity of Portugal, 'to lay open the regions of West Africa across
+the sea, hitherto not traversed by man, that thence a passage might be
+made round Africa to the most distant parts of the East.'
+
+The opening of the high seas which resulted from Prince Henry's
+activities is one of the most momentous events in human history. Its
+effect was, sooner or later, to unite the scattered families of mankind,
+to make the problems of all the concern of all: to make the world one
+place. Prince Henry and his sailors were, in fact, the pioneers of
+internationalism, with all the many and varied problems that
+internationalism brings with it. 'In 1486,' says the most recent history
+of this development,
+
+     Bartholomew Dias was carried by storm beyond the sight of
+     land, round the southern point of Africa, and reached the
+     Great Fish River, north of Algoa Bay. On his return journey
+     he saw the promontory which divides the oceans, as the
+     narrow waters of the Bosphorus divide the continents, of the
+     East and West. As in the crowded streets of Constantinople,
+     so here, if anywhere, at this awful and solitary headland
+     the elements of two hemispheres meet and contend. As Dias
+     saw it, so he named it, 'The Cape of Storms'. But his
+     master, John II, seeing in the discovery a promise that
+     India, the goal of the national ambition, would be reached,
+     named it with happier augury 'The Cape of Good Hope'. No
+     fitter name could have been given to that turning-point in
+     the history of mankind. Europe, in truth, was on the brink
+     of achievements destined to breach barriers, which had
+     enclosed and diversified the nations since the making of the
+     World, and commit them to an intercourse never to be broken
+     again so long as the World endures. That good rather than
+     evil may spring therefrom is the greatest of all human
+     responsibilities.[55]
+
+The contrast between Constantinople and the Cape, so finely drawn in
+these lines, marks the end of the age when land-communications and
+land-power were predominant over sea-power. The Roman Empire was, and
+could only be, a land-power. It is no accident that the British
+Commonwealth is, as the American Commonwealth is fast becoming,
+predominantly a sea-power.
+
+How was 'the greatest of all human responsibilities', arising from this
+new intercourse of races, met? Knowledge, alas, is as much the devil's
+heritage as the angels': it may be used for ill, as easily as for good.
+The first explorers, and the traders who followed them, were not
+idealists but rough adventurers. Breaking in, with the full tide of
+western knowledge and adaptability, to the quiet backwaters of primitive
+conservatism, they brought with them the worse rather than the better
+elements of the civilization, the control of environment, of which they
+were pioneers. To them Africa and the East represented storehouses of
+treasure, not societies of men; and they treated the helpless natives
+accordingly.
+
+     England and Holland as well as the Latin monarchies treated
+     the natives of Africa as chattels without rights and as
+     instruments for their own ends, and revived slavery in a
+     form and upon a scale more cruel than any practised by the
+     ancients. The employment of slaves on her own soil has
+     worked the permanent ruin of Portugal. The slave trade with
+     America was an important source of English wealth, and the
+     philosopher John Locke did not scruple to invest in it.
+     There is no European race which can afford to remember its
+     first contact with the subject peoples otherwise than with
+     shame, and attempts to assess their relative degrees of
+     guilt are as fruitless as they are invidious. The question
+     of real importance is how far these various states were able
+     to purge themselves of the poison, and rise to a higher
+     realization of their duty towards their races whom they were
+     called by the claims of their own superior civilization to
+     protect. The fate of that civilization itself hung upon the
+     issue.[56]
+
+The process by which the Western peoples have risen to a sense of their
+duty towards their weaker and more ignorant fellow citizens is indeed
+one of the chief stages in that progress of the common life of mankind
+with which we are concerned.
+
+How is that duty to be exercised? The best way in which the strong can
+help the weak is by making them strong enough to help themselves. The
+white races are not strong because they are white, or virtuous because
+they are strong. They are strong because they have acquired, through a
+long course of thought and work, a mastery over Nature and hence over
+their weaker fellow men. It is not virtue but knowledge to which they
+owe their strength. No doubt much virtue has gone to the making of that
+knowledge--virtues of patience, concentration, perseverance,
+unselfishness, without which the great body of knowledge of which we are
+the inheritors could never have been built up. But we late-born heirs of
+the ages have it in our power to take the knowledge of our fathers and
+cast away any goodness that went to its making. We have come into our
+fortune: it is ours to use it as we think best. We cannot pass it on
+wholesale, and at one step, to the more ignorant races, for they have
+not the institutions, the traditions, the habits of mind and character,
+to enable them to use it. Those too we must transmit or develop together
+with the treasure of our knowledge. For the moment we stand in the
+relation of trustees, teachers, guides, governors, but always in their
+own interest and not ours, or rather, in the interest of the
+commonwealth of which we and they, since the opening of the high seas,
+form an inseparable part.
+
+It has often been thought that the relation of the advanced and backward
+races should be one purely of philanthropy and missionary enterprise
+rather than of law and government. It is easy to criticize this by
+pointing to the facts of the world as we know it--to the existing
+colonial empires of the Great Powers and to the vast extension of the
+powers of civilized governments which they represent. But it may still
+be argued that the question is not Have the civilized powers annexed
+large empires? but Ought they to have done so? Was such an extension of
+governmental authority justifiable or inevitable? Englishmen in the
+nineteenth century, like Americans in the twentieth, were slow to admit
+that it was; just as the exponents of _laissez-faire_ were slow to
+admit the necessity for State interference with private industry at
+home. But in both cases they have been driven to accept it by the
+inexorable logic of facts. What other solution of the problem, indeed,
+is possible? 'Every alternative solution', as a recent writer
+remarks,[57]
+
+     breaks down in practice. To stand aside and do nothing under
+     the plea that every people must be left free to manage its
+     own affairs, and that intervention is wicked, is to repeat
+     the tragic mistake of the Manchester School in the economic
+     world which protested against any interference by the State
+     to protect workmen ... from the oppression and rapacity of
+     employers, on the ground that it was an unwarranted
+     interference with the liberty of the subject and the freedom
+     of trade and competition. To prevent adventurers from
+     entering the territory is impossible, unless there is some
+     civilized authority within it to stop them through its
+     police. To shut off a backward people from all contact with
+     the outside world by a kind of blockade is not only
+     unpracticable, but is artificially to deny them the chances
+     of education and progress. The establishment of a genuine
+     government by a people strong enough and liberal enough to
+     ensure freedom under the law and justice for all is the only
+     solution.... They must undertake this duty, not from any
+     pride of dominion, or because they wish to exploit their
+     resources, but in order to protect them alike from
+     oppression and corruption, by strict laws and strict
+     administration, which shall bind the foreigner as well as
+     the native, and then they must gradually develop, by
+     education and example, the capacity in the natives to manage
+     their own affairs.
+
+Thus we see that the progress in knowledge and in the control of their
+environment made by the civilized peoples has, in fact and inevitably,
+led to their leadership in government also, and given them the
+predominant voice in laying down the lines along which the common life
+of mankind is to develop. If we are to look for the mainspring of the
+world's activities, for the place where its new ideas are thought out,
+its policies framed, its aspirations cast into practical shape, we must
+not seek it in the forests of Africa or in the interior of China, but in
+those busy regions of the earth's surface where the knowledge, the
+industries, and all the various organizations of government and control
+find their home. Because organization is embodied knowledge, and because
+knowledge is power, it is the Great Powers, as we truly name them,[58]
+who are predominantly responsible for the government of the world and
+for the future of the common life of mankind.
+
+In the exercise of this control the world has already, in many respects,
+become a single organism. The conquest of distance in the fifteenth
+century was the beginning of a process which led, slowly but inevitably,
+to the widening of the boundaries of government. Two discoveries made
+about the same time accentuated the same tendency. By the invention of
+gunpowder the people of Europe were given an overwhelming military
+superiority over the dwellers in other continents. By the invention of
+printing, knowledge was internationalized for all who had the training
+to use it. Books are the tools of the brain-worker all the world over;
+but, unlike the file and the chisel, the needle and the hammer, books
+not only create, but suggest. A new idea is like an electric current set
+running throughout the world, and no man can say into what channels of
+activity it may not be directed.
+
+But neither travel nor conquest nor books and the spread of ideas caused
+so immense a transformation in the common life of mankind as the process
+beginning at the end of the eighteenth century which is known to
+historians as the Industrial Revolution. As we have spoken of the
+conquest of distance perhaps a better name for the Industrial
+Revolution would be the Conquest of Organization. For it was not the
+discovery of the steam-engine or the spinning-jenny which constituted
+the revolution: it was the fact that men were now in a position to apply
+these discoveries to the organization of industry. The ancient Greeks
+played with the idea of the steam-engine: it was reserved for
+eighteenth-century England to produce a generation of pioneers endowed
+with the knowledge, the power, the foresight, and the imagination to
+make use of the world-transforming potentialities of the idea. The
+Industrial Revolution, with its railways and steamships, telegraphs and
+telephones, and now its airships and submarines and wireless
+communication, completed the conquest of distance. Production became
+increasingly organized on international lines. Men became familiar with
+the idea of an international market. Prices and prospects, booms and
+depressions, banking and borrowing, became international phenomena. The
+organization of production led to an immensely rapid increase of wealth
+in Western Europe. The application of that wealth to the development of
+the world's resources in and outside Europe led to a correspondingly
+huge advance in trade and intercourse. The breakfast-table in an
+ordinary English home to-day is a monument to the achievements of the
+Industrial Revolution and to the solid reality of the economic
+internationalism which resulted from it. There is still poverty in
+Western Europe, but it is preventable poverty. Before the Industrial
+Revolution, judged by a modern standard, there was nothing but poverty.
+The satisfying physical and economic condition which we describe by the
+name of comfort did not exist. The Italian historian Ferrero, in one of
+his essays, recommends those who have romantic yearnings after the good
+old times to spend one night on what our forefathers called a bed. Mr.
+Coulton, in his books on the Middle Ages, has used some very plain
+language on the same text. And Professor Smart, in his recently
+published posthumous work, pointing a gentle finger of rebuke at certain
+common Socialist fantasies, remarks:
+
+     There never was a golden age of equality of wealth: there
+     was rather a leaden one of inequality of poverty.... We
+     should speak more guardedly of the riches of the old world.
+     A careful examination of any old book would show that the
+     most splendid processions of pomp and luxury in the Middle
+     Ages were poor things compared to the parade of a modern
+     circus on its opening day.[59]
+
+Such prosperity as we enjoy to-day, such a scene as we can observe on
+these smiling outskirts of Birmingham, is due to man's Conquest of
+Organization and to the consequent development and linking-up, by mutual
+intercourse and exchange, of the economic side of the world's life.
+
+So far we have been watching the progress of man in his efforts to 'make
+himself at home' in the world. We have seen him becoming more skilful
+and more masterful century by century, till in these latter days the
+whole world is, as it were, at his service. He has planted his flag at
+the two poles: he has cut a pathway for his ships between Asia and
+Africa, and between the twin continents of America: he has harnessed
+torrents and cataracts to his service: he has conquered the air and the
+depths of the sea: he has tamed the animals: he has rooted out
+pestilence and laid bare its hidden causes: and he is penetrating
+farther and ever farther in the discovery of the causes of physical and
+mental disease. He has set his foot on the neck of Nature. But the last
+and greatest conquest is yet before him. He has yet to conquer himself.
+Victorious against Nature, men are still at war, nay, more than ever at
+war, amongst themselves. How is it that the last century and a half,
+which have witnessed so unparalleled an advance in the organization of
+the common life of man on the material side, should have been an age of
+wars and rumours of wars, culminating in the vastest and most
+destructive conflict that this globe of ours has ever witnessed? What
+explanation could we give of this to a visitor from the moon or to those
+creatures of inferior species whom, as Sir E. Ray Lankester has told us,
+it is our function, thanks to our natural superiority, to command and
+control?
+
+This brings us to the second great branch of our subject--the progress
+of mankind in the art of living together in the world.
+
+Government, as we have seen, covers the whole social life of man: for
+the principles that regulate human association are inherent in the
+nature of man. But in what follows we shall perforce confine ourselves
+mainly to the sphere of what is ordinarily called politics, that is to
+the recognized and authoritative form of human association called the
+State, as opposed to the innumerable subordinate or voluntary bodies and
+relationships, which pervade every department of man's common life.
+
+The progress of Government in this second sphere may be defined as the
+deepening and extension of man's duty towards his neighbour. It is to be
+reckoned, not in terms of knowledge and organization, but of character.
+The ultimate goal of human government, in the narrower sense, as of all
+social activity--let us never forget it--is liberty, to set free the
+life of the spirit. 'Liberty,' said Lord Acton, who could survey the
+ages with a wealth of knowledge to which no other man, perhaps, ever
+attained, 'Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is
+itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good
+public administration that it is required but for security in the
+pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private
+life.'[60] Government is needed in order to enable human life to become,
+not efficient or well-informed or well-ordered, but simply good; and
+Lord Acton believed, as the Greeks and generations of Englishmen
+believed before him, that it is only in the soil of liberty that the
+human spirit can grow to its full stature, and that a political system
+based upon any other principle than that of responsible self-government
+acts as a bar at the outset to the pursuit of what he called 'the
+highest objects of civil society or of private life'. For though a
+slave, or a man living under a servile political system, may develop
+many fine qualities of character: yet such virtues will, in Milton's
+words, be but 'fugitive and cloistered', 'unexercised and unbreathed'.
+For liberty, and the responsibilities that it involves, are the school
+of character and the appointed means by which men can best serve their
+neighbours. A man deprived of such opportunities, cut off from the
+quickening influence of responsibility, has, as Homer said long ago
+'lost half his manhood'. He may be a loyal subject, a brave soldier, a
+diligent and obedient workman: but he will not be a full-grown man.
+Government will have starved and stunted him in that which it is the
+supreme object of government to develop and set free.
+
+It is idle, then, to talk in general terms about the extension of
+government as a good thing, whether in relation to the individual
+citizen or to the organization of the world into an international State.
+We have always first to ask: What kind of Government? On what principles
+will it be based? What ideal will it set forth? What kind of common life
+will it provide or allow to its citizens? If the whole world were
+organized into one single State, and that State, supreme in its control
+over Nature, were armed with all the knowledge and organization that
+the ablest and most farseeing brains in the world could supply, yet
+mankind might be worse off under its sway, in the real essentials of
+human life, than if they were painted savages. 'Though I have the gift
+of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge: and though I
+have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity,
+I am nothing.' Government may be the organization of goodness, or the
+organization of evil. It may provide the conditions by which the common
+life of society can develop along the lines of man's spiritual nature:
+or it may take away the very possibility of such a development. Till we
+know what a Government stands for, do not let us judge it by its
+imposing externals of organization. The Persian Empire was more imposing
+than the Republics of Greece: Assyria and Babylon than the little tribal
+divisions of Palestine: the Spanish Empire than the cities of the
+Netherlands. There is some danger that, in our new-found sense of the
+value of knowledge in promoting happiness, we should forget what a
+tyrant knowledge, like wealth, can become. No doubt, just as we saw that
+moral qualities, patience and the like, are needed for the advancement
+of knowledge, so knowledge is needed, and greatly needed, in the task of
+extending and deepening the moral and spiritual life of mankind. But we
+cannot measure that progress in terms of knowledge or organization or
+efficiency or culture. We need some other standard by which to judge
+between Greece and Persia, between Israel and Babylon, between Spain and
+the Netherlands, between Napoleon and his adversaries, and between
+contending powers in the modern world. What shall that standard be?
+
+It must be a similar standard--let us boldly say it--to that by which we
+judge between individuals. It must be a standard based on our sense of
+right and wrong. But right and wrong in themselves will not carry us
+very far, any more than they will carry the magistrate on the bench or
+the merchant in his counting-house. Politics, like business, is not the
+whole of life--though some party politicians and some business men think
+otherwise--but a department of life: both are means, not ends; and as
+such they have developed special rules and codes of their own, based on
+experience in their own special department. In so far as they are framed
+in accordance with man's spiritual nature and ideals these rules may be
+considered to hold good and to mark the stage of progress at which
+Politics and Business have respectively arrived in promoting the common
+weal in their own special sphere. With the rules of business, or what is
+called Political Economy, we have at the moment no concern. It is the
+rules of politics, or the working experience of rulers, crystallized in
+what is called Political Science or Political Philosophy, to which we
+must devote a few moments' attention.
+
+We are all of us, of course, political philosophers. Whether we have
+votes or not, whether we are aware of it or not, we all have views on
+political philosophy and we are all constantly making free use of its
+own peculiar principles and conceptions. Law, the State, Liberty,
+Justice, Democracy are words that are constantly on our lips. Let us try
+to form a clear idea of the place which these great historic ideals
+occupy in the progress of mankind.
+
+The great political thinkers of the world have always been clear in
+their own minds as to the ultimate goal of their own particular study.
+Political thought may be said to have originated with the Jewish
+prophets, who were the first to rebuke kings to their faces and to set
+forth the spiritual aims of politics--to preach Righteousness and Mercy
+as against Power and Ambition and Self-interest. Their soaring
+imagination, less systematic than the Greek intellect, was wider in its
+sweep and more farseeing in its predictions. 'As the earth bringeth
+forth her bud and as the garden causeth the things sown in it to spring
+forth', says Isaiah, in magnificent anticipation of the doctrine of
+Natural Law, 'so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to
+spring forth before all the nations.' 'Peace, peace, to him that is far
+off, and to him that is near, saith the Lord, and I will heal him: but
+the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters
+cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, for the wicked.'
+'Out of Zion shall go forth the Law and the word of the Lord from
+Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations and shall reprove many
+peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their
+spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against
+nation, neither shall they learn war any more.'[61]
+
+It was, however, Plato and Aristotle who first made politics a branch of
+separate study: and, unlike many of their modern successors, they
+pursued it throughout in close connexion with the kindred studies of
+ethics and psychology. Their scope was, of course, confined to the field
+of their own experience, the small self-contained City-States of Greece,
+and it did not fall within their province to foreshadow, like the Jewish
+Prophets, the end of warfare, or to speculate on the ultimate unity of
+mankind. Their task was to interpret the work of their own
+fellow-countrymen on the narrow stage of Greek life. Their lasting
+achievement is to have laid down for mankind what a State is, as
+compared with other forms of human association, and to have proclaimed,
+once and for all, in set terms, that its object is to promote the 'good
+life' of its members. 'Every State', says Aristotle in the opening
+words of his _Politics_, 'is a community of some kind.' That is to say,
+States belong to the same _genus_, as it were, as political parties,
+trade unions, cricket clubs, business houses, or such gatherings as
+ours. What, then, is the difference between a State and a political
+party? 'If all communities', he goes on, 'aim at some good, the State or
+political community, which is the highest of all and which embraces all
+the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest
+good.'
+
+Why is the State the highest of all forms of association? Why should our
+citizenship, for instance, take precedence of our trade unionism or our
+business obligations? Aristotle replies, and in spite of recent critics
+I think the reply still holds good: because, but for the existence of
+the State and the reign of law maintained by it, none of these
+associations could have been formed or be maintained. 'He who first
+founded the State was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when
+protected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and
+righteousness, he is the worst of all.' Or, to put it in the resounding
+Elizabethan English of Hooker: 'The public power of all societies is
+above every soul contained in the same societies. And the principal use
+of that power is to give laws to all that are under it; which laws, in
+such case, we must obey, unless there be reason showed which may
+necessarily enforce that the law of Reason or of God doth enjoin the
+contrary. Because except our own private and probable resolutions be by
+the law of public determinations overruled, we take away all possibility
+of social life in the world.'[62] The Greeks did not deny, as the
+example of Socrates shows, the right of private judgement on the
+question of obedience to law, or the duty of respect for what Hooker
+calls the Law of Reason or of God. Against the authentic voice of
+conscience no human authority can or should prevail. But Aristotle
+held, with Hooker, that obedience to law and faithful citizenship are
+themselves matters normally ordained by the law of Reason or of God and
+that, as against those of any other association ([Greek: koinônia]), the
+claims of the State are paramount. In other words, he would deny what is
+sometimes loosely called the _right_ of rebellion, whilst not closing
+the door to that _duty_ of rebellion which has so often advanced the
+cause of liberty. When Aristotle speaks of the State, moreover, he does
+not mean a sovereign authority exercising arbitrary power, as in Persia
+or Babylon: he means an authority administering Law and Justice
+according to recognized standards: and he is thinking of Law and
+Justice, not simply as part of the apparatus of government but as based
+upon moral principles. 'Righteousness', he says, 'is the bond of men in
+States and the administration of Justice, which is the determination of
+what is righteous, is the principle of order in political society.' 'Of
+Law', says Hooker,[63] here as elsewhere echoing the ancients, 'there
+can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her
+voice the harmony of the world.' The State takes precedence of the party
+or the trade union because, however idealistic in their policy these
+latter may be, the State covers all, not merely a section of the
+community, and is able not merely to proclaim but to enforce the rule of
+law and justice. Put in modern language, one might define the Greek idea
+of the State as the Organization of Mutual Aid.
+
+The Greek States did not remain true to this high ideal. Faced with the
+temptations of power they descended almost to the level of the oriental
+monarchies with which they were contrasted. But even had they remained
+faithful to their philosophers' ideal of public service they would not
+have survived. Unable to transcend the limits of their own narrow
+State-boundaries and to merge their ideals with those of their
+neighbours, they were helpless in the face of the invader. First
+Macedonia and then Rome swept over them, and political idealism
+slumbered for many centuries. Rome gave the world, what it greatly
+needed, centuries of peace and order and material prosperity: it built
+up an enduring fabric of law on principles of Reason and Humanity: it
+did much to give men, what is next to the political sense, the social
+sense. It made men members of one another from Scotland to Syria and
+from Portugal to Baghdad. But it did not give them 'the good life' in
+its fullness: for it did not, perhaps it could not, give them liberty.
+Faced with the choice between efficiency and the diffusion of
+responsibility, the rulers of the Roman Empire unhesitatingly chose
+efficiency. But the atrophy of responsibility proved the canker at the
+heart of the Empire. Deprived of the stimulus that freedom and the habit
+of responsibility alone can give, the Roman world sank gradually into
+the morass of Routine. Life lost its savour and grew stale, flat and
+unprofitable, as in an old-style Government office. 'The intolerable
+sadness inseparable from such a life', says Renan, 'seemed worse than
+death.' And when the barbarians came and overturned the whole fabric of
+bureaucracy, though it seemed to educated men at the time the end of
+civilization, it was in reality the beginning of a new life.
+
+Amid the wreckage of the Roman Empire, one governing institution alone
+remained upright--the Christian Church with its organization for
+ministering to the spiritual needs of its members. With the conversion
+of the barbarians to Christianity the governing functions and influence
+of the Church became more and more important; and it was upon the basis
+of Church government that political idealism, so long in abeyance, was
+reawakened. The thinkers who took up the work of Plato and Aristotle on
+the larger stage of the Holy Roman Empire boldly looked forward to the
+time when mankind should be united under one government and that
+government should embody the highest ideals of mankind. Such an ideal
+seemed indeed to many one of the legacies of the Founder of
+Christianity. The familiar petition in the Lord's Prayer: _thy kingdom
+come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven_ sounded, in the ears
+of Dante and Thomas Aquinas and innumerable theologians and canonists,
+as a prayer and a pledge for the ultimate political unity of mankind on
+the basis of Christian Law. Such a belief was indeed the bedrock of
+mediaeval political thought. To devout Christians, brought up in the
+oecumenical traditions of the Roman Empire,
+
+     'every ordering of a human community must appear as a
+     component part of that ordering of the world which exists
+     because God exists, and every earthly group must appear as
+     an organic member of that _Civitas Dei_, that God-State,
+     which comprehends the heavens and the earth.[1] ... Thus the
+     Theory of Human Society must accept the divinely created
+     organization of the Universe as a prototype of the first
+     principles which govern the construction of human
+     communities.... Therefore, in all centuries of the Middle
+     Age, Christendom, which in destiny is identical with
+     Mankind, is set before us as a single, universal Community,
+     founded and governed by God Himself. Mankind is one
+     "mystical body"; it is one single and internally connected
+     "people" or "folk"; it is an all-embracing corporation,
+     which constitutes that Universal Realm, spiritual and
+     temporal, which may be called the Universal Church, or, with
+     equal propriety, the Commonwealth of the Human Race.
+     Therefore, that it may attain its one purpose, it needs One
+     Law and One Government.'[64]
+
+
+But the mediaeval ideal, like the Greek, broke down in practice. 'Where
+the Middle Ages failed', says the Master of Balliol, continuing a
+passage already quoted, 'was in attempting ... to make politics the
+handmaid of religion, to give the Church the organization and form of a
+political State, that is, to turn religion from an indwelling spirit
+into an ecclesiastical machinery.' In other words, the mediaeval attempt
+broke down through neglecting the special conditions and problems of the
+political department of life, through declining, as it were, to
+specialize. While men were discussing the Theory of the Two Swords,
+whether the Emperor derived his power directly from God or indirectly
+through the Pope, or whether the sword should be used at all, the actual
+work of government in laying the foundations of the good life was
+neglected. Not only Liberty but Justice and Order were largely in
+abeyance and the range of State action which we to-day describe as
+'social legislation' was not even dreamed of. Absorbed in theory or
+wrapped in ignorance, men forget the practical meaning of Statehood and
+its responsibilities. Central Europe languished for centuries, under a
+sham Empire, in the unprogressive anarchy of feudalism. 'The feudal
+system', it has been said,[65] 'was nothing more nor less than the
+attempt of a society which had failed to organize itself as a State, to
+make contract do the work of patriotism.' It is the bitter experience
+which Germany went through under the anarchy of feudalism and petty
+governments, lasting to well within living memory, which by a natural
+reaction has led the German people, under Prussian tutelage, to cling to
+the conception of the State as Power and nothing more.
+
+The study of politics had to become secular before it could once more
+become practical, and, by being practical, ministering to practical
+ideals and enlisting practical devotion, become, as it were, sacred
+once more. Where the well-being of our fellow men is concerned it is not
+enough to be well-meaning. Government is an art, not an aspiration: and
+those who are concerned with it, whether as rulers or voters, should
+have studied its problems, reflected on its possibilities and
+limitations, and fitted themselves to profit by its accumulated
+experience.
+
+Since the close of the Middle Ages, when politics became secular, the
+art of government has advanced by giant strides. Invention has followed
+invention, and experiment experiment, till to-day skilled specialists in
+the Old World and the New are at hand to watch and to record the latest
+devices for dealing with a hundred difficult special problems--whether
+it be the administration of justice or patronage, the organization of
+political parties, the fixing of Cabinet responsibility, the
+possibilities and limits of federalism, the prevention of war. There
+has, indeed, been as great an advance in the political art in the last
+four centuries and particularly in the last century, as in the very
+kindred art of medicine. The wonderful concentration of energy which the
+various belligerent powers have been able to throw into the present war
+is at once the best and the most tragic illustration of this truth.
+Man's common life in the State is more real, more charged with meaning
+and responsibility, more potent for good or for ill than it has ever
+been before--than our predecessors even in the time of Napoleon could
+have dreamed of.
+
+The greatest inventors and most skilful practitioners of the political
+art in the modern world have been the English, for it is the English
+who, of all nations, have held closest to the ideal of freedom in its
+many and various manifestations. Superficially regarded, the English are
+a stupid people, and so their continental neighbours have often
+regarded them. But their racial heritage and their island situation seem
+to have given them just that combination of experience and natural
+endowment necessary to success in the task of government. Taken as a
+whole, the English are not brilliant, but they are clear-headed: they
+are not far-sighted, but they can see the fact before their eyes: they
+are ill equipped with theoretical knowledge, but they understand the
+working of institutions and have a good eye for judging character: they
+have little constructive imagination of the more grandiose sort, but
+they have an instinct for the 'next step' which has often set them on
+paths which have led them far further than they dreamed; above all, they
+have a relatively high standard of individual character and public duty,
+without which no organization involving the free co-operation of man and
+man can hope to be effective. It is this unique endowment of moral
+qualities and practical gifts, coupled with unrivalled opportunities,
+which has made the English the pioneers in modern times in the art of
+human association. Englishmen, accustomed to what eighteenth-century
+writers used to call 'the peculiar felicity of British freedom', do not
+always remember how far their own experience has carried them on the
+road of political progress. They do not realize how many problems they
+have solved and abolished, as the art of medicine has abolished
+diseases. When they hear speak of the eternal conflict between
+Nationality and Nationality, they often forget that a war between
+England and Scotland has long since become unthinkable and that the
+platitudes of St. Andrew's Day are still paradoxes in Central and
+Eastern Europe. When they are told of States where the spontaneous
+manifestations of group-life, non-conforming sects, workmen's
+associations, and ordinary social clubs, are driven underground and
+classed as dangerous secret societies, they should realize how precious
+a thing is that freedom of association which is one of the dearest
+attributes of English liberty. So too when they read of monarchical and
+military supremacy in a country like Germany, which is still politically
+speaking in the stage of England under the Tudors, or of Russian
+autocracy, or of the struggle over the King's prerogative which has been
+taking place in Greece. If we believe, as we must, in the cause of
+liberty, let us not be too modest to say that nations which have not yet
+achieved responsible self-government, whether within or without the
+British Commonwealth, are politically backward, and let us recall the
+long stages of political invention by which our own self-government has
+been achieved. Representation, trial by jury, an independent judiciary,
+equality before the law, habeas corpus, a limited monarchy, the practice
+of ministerial responsibility, religious toleration, the freedom of
+printing and association, colonial autonomy--all these are distinctly
+English inventions, but time has shown that most of them are definite
+additions to the universal art of government. We can survey the Balkans,
+for instance, and say with confidence that one thing, amongst others,
+that those nations are in need of is toleration, both in the sphere of
+nationality and of religion: or declare of the United States that their
+industrial future will be menaced till they have freed Trade Unionism
+from the threat of the so-called law of Conspiracy: or ask of our own
+so-called self-governing Dominions whether they are content with a
+system that concedes them no responsible control over the issues of
+peace and war. This is not to say that our own governmental machinery is
+perfect. Far from it. It was never in greater need of overhauling. It is
+only to reaffirm the belief, which no temporary disillusionment can
+shake, that it is founded on enduring principles which are not political
+but moral. To compare a system which aims at freedom and seeks to
+attain that aim through the working of responsible self-government with
+systems, however logically perfect or temporarily effective, which set
+no value on either, is, as it were, to compare black with white. It is
+to go back on the lessons of centuries of experience and to deny the
+cause, not of liberty alone, but of that progress of the spirit of man
+which it is the highest object of liberty to promote.
+
+We have no time here to discuss in detail the various English inventions
+in the art of politics, but we must pause to consider two of the most
+important, because they are typical of British methods. The first is the
+invention called the Principle of Representation. Representation is a
+device by which, and by which alone, the area of effective government
+can be extended without the sacrifice of liberty. It is a device by
+which the scattered many can make their will prevail over the few at the
+centre. Under any non-representative system, whether in a State or a
+Church or a Trade Union or any other association, men always find
+themselves set before the inexorable dilemma between freedom and
+weakness on the one hand and strength and tyranny on the other. Either
+the State or the association has to be kept small, so that the members
+themselves can meet and keep in touch with all that goes on. Or it is
+allowed to expand and grow strong, in which case power becomes
+concentrated at the centre and the great body of members loses all
+effective control. The ancient world saw no way out of this dilemma. The
+great Oriental monarchies never contemplated even the pretence of
+popular control. The city-states of Greece, where democracy originated,
+set such store in consequence by the personal liberty of the individual
+citizen, that they preferred to remain small, and suffered the
+inevitable penalty of their weakness. Rome, growing till she
+overshadowed the world, sacrificed liberty in the process. Nor was the
+Christian Church, when it became a large-scale organization, able to
+overcome the dilemma. It was not till thirteenth-century England that a
+way out was found. Edward I in summoning two burgesses from each borough
+and two knights from each shire to his model Parliament in 1295, hit on
+a method of doing business which was destined to revolutionize the art
+of government. He stipulated that the men chosen by their fellows to
+confer with him must come, to quote the exact words of the summons,
+armed with 'full and sufficient power for themselves and for the
+community of the aforesaid county, and the said citizens and burgesses
+for themselves and the communities of the aforesaid cities and boroughs
+separately, there and then, for doing what shall then be ordained
+according to the Common Council in the premises, so that the aforesaid
+business shall not remain unfinished in any way for defect of this
+power'. In other words, the members were to come to confer with the king
+not as individuals speaking for themselves alone, but as
+representatives. Their words and acts were to bind those on whose behalf
+they came, and those who chose them were to do so in the full knowledge
+that they would be so bound. In choosing them the electors deliberately
+surrendered their own share of initiative and sovereignty and combined
+to bestow it on a fellow citizen whom they trusted. In this way, and in
+this way alone, the people of Cornwall and of Northumberland could bring
+their wishes to bear and play their part, together with the people at
+the centre, in the government of a country many times the size of a
+city-state of ancient Greece. There had been assemblies before in all
+ages of history: but this was something different. It was a Parliament.
+
+Representation seems to us such an obvious device that we often forget
+how comparatively modern it is and what a degree of responsibility and
+self-control it demands both in the representative and in those whom he
+represents. It is very unpleasant to hear of things done or acquiesced
+in by our representatives of which we disapprove, and to have to
+remember that it is our own fault for not sending a wiser or braver man
+to Westminster in his place. It is still more unpleasant for a
+representative to feel, as he often must, that his own honest opinion
+and conscience draw him one way on a matter of business and the opinions
+of most of his constituents another. But these are difficulties inherent
+in the system, and for which there is no remedy but sincerity and
+patience. It is part of the bargain that a constituency should not be
+able to disavow a representative: and that a representative should feel
+bound to use his own best judgement on the issues put before him. To
+turn the representative, as there is a tendency to do in some quarters,
+into a mere mouthpiece with a mandate, is to ignore the very problem
+which made representation necessary, and to presume that a local
+mass-meeting can be as well informed or take as wide a view as those who
+have all the facts before them at the centre. The ancient Greeks, who
+had a strong sense of individuality, were loth to believe that any one
+human being could make a decision on behalf of another. In the deepest
+sense of course they were right. But government, as has been said, is at
+best a rough business. Representation is no more than a practical
+compromise: but it is a compromise which has been found to work. It has
+made possible the extension of free government to areas undreamed of. It
+has enabled the general sense of the inhabitants of the United States,
+an area nearly as large as Europe, to be concentrated at Washington, and
+it may yet make it possible to collect the sense of self-governing
+Dominions in four continents in a Parliament at London. All this lay
+implicit in the practical instructions sent by the English king to his
+sheriffs; but its development would only have been possible in a
+community where the general level of character was a high one and where
+men were, therefore, in the habit of placing implicit trust in one
+another. The relationship of confidence between a member of Parliament
+and his constituents, or a Trade Union leader and his rank and file, is
+a thing of which public men are rightly proud: for it reflects honour on
+both parties and testifies to an underlying community of purpose which
+no passing disagreement on details can break down.
+
+Representation paved the way for the modern development of responsible
+self-government. But it is important to recognize that the two are not
+the same thing. Responsible self-government, in its modern form, is a
+separate and more complex English invention in the art of government. A
+community may be decked out with a complete apparatus of representative
+institutions and yet remain little better than an autocracy. Modern
+Germany is a case in point. The parliamentary suffrage for the German
+Reichstag is more representative than that for the British House of
+Commons. The German workman is better represented in his Parliament than
+the British workman is in ours. But the German workman has far less
+power to make his will effective in matters of policy than the British,
+because the German constitution does not embody the principle of
+responsible self-government. Sovereignty still rests with the Kaiser as
+it rested in the thirteenth century with Edward I. The Imperial
+Chancellor is not responsible to the Reichstag but to the Kaiser, by
+whom he is appointed and whose personal servant he remains. The
+Reichstag can discuss the actions of the Chancellor: it can advise him,
+or protest to him, or even pass votes of censure against him; but it
+cannot make its will effective. We can observe the working of similar
+representative institutions in different parts of the British
+Commonwealth. The provinces of India and many British Colonies have
+variously composed representative assemblies, but in all cases without
+the power to control their executives. The self-governing Dominions, on
+the other hand, do enjoy responsible self-government, but in an
+incomplete form, because the most vital of all issues of policy are
+outside their control. On questions of foreign policy, and the issues of
+war and peace, the Parliaments of the Dominions, and the citizens they
+represent, are, constitutionally speaking, as helpless as the most
+ignorant native in the humblest dependency. Representative institutions
+in themselves thus no more ensure real self-government than the setting
+up of a works committee of employees in a factory would ensure that the
+workmen ran the factory. The distinction between representation and
+effective responsibility is so simple that it seems a platitude to
+mention it. Yet it is constantly ignored, both in this country by those
+who speak of Colonial self-government as though the Dominions really
+enjoyed the same self-government as the people of these islands, and by
+the parties in Germany whose programme it is, not to make Germany a
+truly constitutional country, but to assimilate the retrograde Prussian
+franchise to the broader representation of the Reichstag.
+
+Wherein does the transition from representation to full responsibility
+consist? It came about in England when Parliament, instead of merely
+being consulted by the sovereign, felt itself strong enough to give
+orders to the sovereign. The sovereign naturally resisted, as the Kaiser
+and the Tsar will resist in their turn; but in this country the battle
+was fought and won in the seventeenth century. Since that time, with a
+few vacillations, Parliament has been the sovereign power. But once this
+transfer of sovereignty has taken place, a new problem arises. A
+Parliament of several hundred members, even though it meets regularly,
+is not competent to transact the multitudinous and complex and highly
+specialized business of a modern State. The original function of
+Parliament was to advise, to discuss, and to criticize. It is not an
+instrument fit for the work of execution and administration. Having
+become sovereign, its first business must be to create out of its own
+members an instrument which should carry out its own policy and be
+responsible to itself for its actions. Hence arose the Cabinet. The
+Cabinet is, as it were, a distillation of Parliament, just as Parliament
+itself is a distillation of the country. It consists of members of
+Parliament and it is in constant touch with Parliament; but its methods
+are not the methods of Parliament but of the older, more direct, organs
+of government which Parliament superseded. It meets in secret: it holds
+all the strings of policy: it has almost complete control of political
+and legislative initiative: it decides what is to be done and when and
+how: it has its own staff of agents and confidential advisers in the
+Departments and elsewhere whose acts are largely withdrawn from the
+knowledge and criticism of Parliament. A modern Cabinet in fact is open
+to the charge of being autocracy in a new guise. Such a charge would, of
+course, be a gross overstatement. But there is no doubt that the
+increasing complexity in the tasks of government has led to a
+corresponding growth of power and organization at the centre which has
+strengthened the Cabinet immeasurably of recent years at the expense of
+the direct representatives of the people. There are, however, powerful
+influences at work in the opposite direction, towards decentralization
+and new forms of representation, which there is no space to touch on
+here. Suffice it to say that here, as elsewhere, the price of liberty is
+eternal vigilance.
+
+England, then, and all who enjoy the full privileges of British
+citizenship have been placed by the progress of events in a position of
+peculiar responsibility. The twentieth century finds us the centre of
+the widest experiment of self-government which the world has ever seen;
+for the principles of liberty, first tested in this island, have
+approved themselves on the soil of North America, Australasia, and South
+Africa. It finds us also responsible for the government and for the
+training in responsibility of some 350,000,000 members of the more
+politically inexperienced and backward races of mankind, or about
+one-fifth of the human race. The growth of the British Commonwealth,
+about which so astonishingly little is known either by ourselves or by
+other peoples, is not a mere happy or unhappy accident. It is one of the
+inevitable and decisive developments in the history of mankind. It is
+the direct result of that widening of intercourse, that
+internationalizing of the world, to which reference has already been
+made. It represents the control of law and organized government over the
+blind and selfish forces of exploitation. In the exercise of this
+control we have often ourselves been blind and sometimes selfish. But
+'the situation of man', as Burke finely said of our Indian Empire, 'is
+the preceptor of his duty'. The perseverance of the British character,
+its habit of concentration on the work that lies to hand, and the
+influence of our traditional social and political ideals, have slowly
+brought us to a deeper insight, till to-day the Commonwealth is becoming
+alive to the real nature of its task--the extension and consolidation of
+liberty. If it has thus taken up, in part, the work of the mediaeval
+Empire and has had a measure of success where the other failed, it is
+because of the character of its individual citizens, because despite
+constant and heart-breaking failures in knowledge and imagination, we
+are a people who, in the words of a stern, if friendly, critic, 'with
+great self-assertion and a bull-dog kind of courage, have yet a
+singular amount of gentleness and tenderness'.[66]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have come to the end of our long survey. Some of you may feel that I
+have fetched too wide a compass and given too wide an extension to the
+meaning of government. But if I have sinned I have sinned of set
+purpose. I refuse to confine government within the limits of what is
+ordinarily called politics, or to discuss the association called the
+State in isolation from other sides of man's community life. To do so, I
+feel, is to lay oneself open to one of two opposite errors: the error of
+those for whom the State is the Almighty, and who invest it with a
+superhuman morality and authority of its own; and the error of those who
+draw in their skirts in horror from the touch of what Nietzsche called
+this 'cold monster' and take refuge in monastic detachment from the
+political responsibilities of their time. We must be able to see
+politics as a part of life before we can see it steadily and see it
+whole. We must be able to see it in relation to the general ordering of
+the world and to connect it once more, as in the Middle Ages, with
+religion and morality. No thinking man can live through such a time as
+this and preserve his faith unless he is sustained by the belief that
+the clash of States which is darkening our generation is not a mere
+blind collision of forces, but has spiritual bearings which affect each
+individual living soul born or to be born in the world. It is not for us
+to anticipate the verdict of history. But what we can do is to bear
+ourselves worthily, in thought and speech, like our soldiers in action,
+of the times in which we live--to testify, as it were, in our own lives,
+to that for which so many of our friends have laid down theirs. We are
+met at a culminating moment of human fate--when, so far as human
+judgement can discern, the political destinies of this planet are being
+settled for many generations to come--perhaps for good. If the task of
+leadership in the arts of government remains with us, let us face the
+responsibility conscious of the vast spiritual issues which it involves,
+and let us so plan and act that history, looking back on these years of
+blood, may date from them a new birth of freedom and progress, not for
+ourselves in this country alone but throughout that kingdom of Man which
+must one day, as we believe, become in very truth the kingdom of God.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+1. _Man's Control over Nature_:
+
+   Ray Lankester, _The Kingdom of Man_, and other essays. 1912.
+
+   Demolins, _Comment la route crée le type social_.
+
+   Curtis (ed. by), _The Commonwealth of Nations_. Vol. i, 1916.
+
+   Murphy, _The Basis of Ascendancy_. 1909.
+
+   _Introduction to the Study of International Relations_ (Greenwood
+   and others). 1916.
+
+2. _Political Ideals_:
+
+   _The Jews_: Todd, _Politics and Religion in Ancient Israel_. 1904.
+
+   _Greece_: _Aristotle's Politics_, translated by B. Jowett. 1908.
+
+   Dickinson, _The Greek View of Life_. 1909.
+
+   Barker, _The Political thought of Plato and Aristotle_. 1908.
+
+   _Rome_: H. Stuart Jones, _The Roman Empire_. (Story of the
+   Nations.) 1908. Warde Fowler, _Rome_ (Home University
+   Series).
+
+   _The Middle Ages_: A. L. Smith, _Church and State in the Middle
+   Ages_. 1911.
+
+   Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_ (introduction by
+   Maitland). 1900.
+
+   _Miscellaneous_: Wallas, _Human Nature in Politics_. 1908.
+
+   Acton, _The History of Freedom_, and other essays. 1909.
+
+   Lowell, _The Government of England_.
+
+   Bülow, _Imperial Germany_. 1916.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[53] A. L. Smith, _Church and State in the Middle Ages_, pp. 207-8.
+
+[54] Lankester, _Nature and Man_, Romanes Lecture, 1905, pp. 27-9.
+
+[55] _The Commonwealth of Nations_, edited by L. Curtis, Part I, p. 130.
+
+[56] Ibid., p. 166.
+
+[57] P. H. Kerr in _An Introduction to the Study of International
+Relations_, 1915, p. 149.
+
+[58] A still better name would be the Great Responsibilities.
+
+[59] _Second Thoughts of an Economist_, 1916, pp. 17-18, 22.
+
+[60] _Freedom and other Essays_, p. 22.
+
+[61] Isaiah lxvi. 2; lvii. 19, 21; ii. 3, 4.
+
+[62] _Ecclesiastical Polity_, Book I, ch. xvi. 5.
+
+[63] End of Book I of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_.
+
+[64] Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Age_, pp. 8 and 10.
+
+[65] _The Commonwealth of Nations_, Part I, p. 73.
+
+[66] _Memoirs and letters of Sir Robert Morier_, ii. 276.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+PROGRESS IN INDUSTRY
+
+A. E. ZIMMERN
+
+
+In our study of Government we traced the upward course of the common
+life of mankind in the world. We saw it in the increasing control of Man
+over his physical environment, and we saw it also in his clearer
+realization of the ultimate ideal of government--the ordering of the
+world's affairs on the basis of liberty. We have now to turn aside from
+this main stream of social development to watch one particular branch of
+it--to survey man's record in the special department of economics. We
+shall no longer be studying human history, or the history of human
+society, as a whole, but what is known as economic or industrial
+history.
+
+It is important to be clear at the outset that economic or industrial
+history _is_ a tributary stream and not the main stream: for there are a
+number of people who are of the contrary opinion. There has been an
+increasing tendency of recent years to write human history in terms of
+economic or industrial progress. 'Tell me what men ate or wore or
+manufactured,' say historians of this school, 'and we will tell you what
+stage of civilization he had reached. We will place him in his proper
+pigeonhole in our arrangement of the record of human progress.' Did he
+use flint implements or fight with nothing but a bow and arrow? Did he
+use a canoe with a primitive pole which he had not even the sense to
+flatten so as to make it into a serviceable paddle? Then our
+sociologist will put him very low down on his list of the stages of
+human progress. For the modern sociologist is a confirmed plutocrat. He
+measures the character of men and races by their wealth. Just as
+old-fashioned people still think of the society of our own country as a
+hierarchy, in which the various classes are graded according to their
+social prestige and the extent of their possessions: so students of
+primitive civilization classify races according to their material
+equipment, and can hardly help yielding to the temptation of reckoning
+their stage of progress as a whole by the only available test. Thus it
+is common, especially in Germany and the United States, to find
+histories of what purports to be the progress of mankind which show man
+first as a hunter and a fisherman, then as a shepherd, then as a tiller
+of the soil, and then work upwards to the complicated industrial system
+of to-day. We are asked to accept the life of Abraham or David among the
+sheepfolds as the bottom of the ladder, and the life of a modern
+wage-earner under the smoky sky of a manufacturing area as the top; and
+when we complain and say, as men like William Morris and Stephen Graham
+are always saying, that we would far prefer to live in David's world, in
+spite of all its discomforts, we are told that we have no right to
+quarrel with the sacred principle of Evolution.
+
+To interpret human history in this way is, of course, to deny its
+spiritual meaning, to deny that it is a record of the progress of the
+human _spirit_ at all. It is to read it as a tale of the improvement, or
+rather the increasing complication, of _things_, rather than of the
+advance of man. It is to view the world as a Domain of Matter, not as
+the Kingdom of Man--still less, as the Kingdom of God. It is to tie us
+helplessly to the chariot wheels of an industrial Juggernaut which knows
+nothing of moral values. Let the progress of industry make life noisy
+and ugly and anxious and unhappy: let it engross the great mass of
+mankind in tedious and uncongenial tasks and the remainder in the
+foolish and unsatisfying activities of luxurious living; let it defile
+the green earth with pits and factories and slag-heaps and the mean
+streets of those who toil at them, and dim the daylight with exhalations
+of monstrous vapour. It is not for us to complain or to resist: for we
+are in the grip of a Power which is greater than ourselves, a Power to
+which mankind in all five continents has learnt to yield--that Economic
+Process which is, in truth, the God, or the Devil, of the modern world.
+
+No thinking man dare acquiesce in such a conclusion or consent to bow
+the head before such fancied necessities. The function of industry, he
+will reply, is to serve human life not to master it: to beautify human
+life not to degrade it: to set life free not to enslave it. Economics is
+not the whole of life: and when it transgresses its bounds and exceeds
+its functions it must be controlled and thrust back into its place by
+the combined activities of men. The soul is higher than the body, and
+life is more than housekeeping. Liberty is higher than Riches, and the
+welfare of the community more important than its economic and material
+progress. These great processes, which the increase of man's knowledge
+has set in motion, are not impersonal inhuman forces: Men originated
+them: men administer them: and men must control them. Against economic
+necessity let us set political necessity: and let the watchword of that
+political necessity, here as always, be the freedom and the well-being
+of mankind.
+
+With this caution in mind, then, let us approach our subject.
+
+What is Economics? Economics is simply the Greek for 'house-keeping'. If
+writers and thinkers on the subject had only kept this simple fact in
+mind, or used the English word instead of the Greek, the world would
+have been saved much misery and confusion. Political economy is not,
+what Mill and other writers define it to be, 'the Science of Wealth'. It
+is the art of community-housekeeping, and community-housekeeping, as
+every woman knows, is a very important if subsidiary branch of the art
+of community-management or government.
+
+Housekeeping, of course, is not a selfish but a social function.
+Housewives do not lay in bread and cheese simply to gratify their own
+desire to be possessors of a large store, but for the sake of their
+household. The true housekeeper or economic man is the man who is
+consciously ministering to the real needs of the community. Like the
+ruler or minister in the political sphere, he is a man who is performing
+a public service.
+
+This is equally true whether the housekeeper has a monopoly of the
+purchase of bread and cheese for the household, or whether he or she has
+to compete with others as to which is to be allowed to serve the public
+in that particular transaction. Just as, under the party system, which
+seems to be inseparable from the working of democratic institutions, men
+stand for Parliament and compete for the honour of representing their
+neighbours, so in most systems of industry men compete for the honour of
+supplying the public. Competition in industry is practically as old as
+industry. In the earliest picture that has come down to us of Greek
+village life we read of the competition between potter and potter and
+between minstrel and minstrel--a competition as keen and as fierce, we
+may be sure, as that between rival shopkeepers to-day. For the opposite
+of competition, as has been truly said, is not co-operation but monopoly
+or bureaucracy: and there is no short and easy means of deciding between
+the rival systems. Sometimes the community is better served by
+entrusting one department wholly to one purveyor or one system of
+management--as in the Postal Service, or the Army and Navy. Sometimes it
+is clearly better to leave the matter open to competition. Nobody, for
+instance, would propose to do with only one minstrel, and seal the lips
+of all poets but the Poet Laureate. Sometimes, as in the case of the
+organized professions and the liquor trade, a strictly regulated system
+of competition has been considered best. No doubt the tendency at the
+present time is setting strongly against competition and towards more
+unified and more closely organized systems of doing business. But it is
+important to make quite clear that there is nothing immoral or
+anti-social about the fact of competition itself, and nothing
+inconsistent with the idea of service and co-operation which should
+underlie all social and economic activity. It is not competition itself,
+as people often wrongly think, which is the evil, but the shallow and
+selfish motives and the ruthless trampling down of the weak that are too
+often associated with it. When we condemn the maxim 'the Devil take the
+hindmost', it is not because we think we ought to treat the hindmost as
+though he were the foremost--to buy cracked jars or patronize incapable
+minstrels. It is because we feel that there is a wrong standard of
+reward among those who have pushed to the front, and that the community
+as a whole cannot ignore its responsibility towards its less fortunate
+and capable members.
+
+It is, indeed, quite impossible to abolish competition for the patronage
+of the household without subjecting its members to tyranny or tying them
+down to an intolerable uniformity--forcing them to suppress their own
+temporary likes or dislikes and to go on taking in the same stuff in the
+same quantities world without end. For the most serious and permanent
+competition is not that between rival purveyors of the same goods,
+between potter and potter and minstrel and minstrel, but between one
+set of goods and another: between the potter and the blacksmith, the
+minstrel and the painter. If we abolished competition permanently
+between the British railways we could not make sure that the public
+would always use them as it does now. People would still be at liberty
+to walk or to drive or to bicycle or to fly, or, at the very worst, to
+stay at home. Competition, as every business man knows, sometimes arises
+from the most unexpected quarters. The picture-house and the bicycle
+have damaged the brewer and the publican. Similarly the motor-car and
+the golf links have spoilt the trade in the fine china ornaments such as
+used to be common in expensively furnished drawing-rooms. People sit
+less in their rooms, so spend less on decorating them. The members of
+the household always retain ultimate control over their economic life,
+if they care to exercise it. 'Whoso has sixpence,' as Carlyle said, 'is
+sovereign (to the length of sixpence), over all men; commands Cooks to
+feed him, Philosophers to teach him, Kings to mount guard over him,'--to
+the length of sixpence. Passive resistance and the boycott are always
+open to the public in the last resort against any of their servants who
+has abused the powers of his position. A good instance of this occurred
+in the events which led to the so-called Tobacco riots in Milan in 1848.
+The Austrians thought they could force the Italians in their Lombard
+provinces to pay for a government they hated by putting a heavy tax on
+tobacco. But the Italians, with more self-control than we have shown in
+the present war, with one accord gave up smoking. Here was a plain
+competition between a monopoly and the consumer, between tobacco and
+patriotism: between a united household and an unpopular servant: and the
+household won, as it always can unless its members are incapable of
+combined action or have been deprived by governmental tyranny of all
+power to associate and to organize.
+
+We are faced then with a community or household which has certain wants
+that need to be supplied. The individual members of the community are
+justified, within the limits of general well-being,[67] in deciding what
+are their own wants and how to satisfy them. They claim the right to
+_demand_, as the economists put it, the goods and services they require,
+bread and cheese, poetry, tobacco, motor-bicycles, china ornaments. In
+order to meet those demands, which are stable in essentials but subject
+to constant modification in detail, there is ceaseless activity,
+rivalry, competition, on the part of the purveyors--on the side of what
+economists call _supply_. The business of housekeeping, or what is
+called the economic process, is that of bringing this demand and this
+supply into relation with one another. If the members of the household
+said they wanted to eat the moon instead of sugar, their demand would
+not be an economic demand: for no housekeeper could satisfy it.
+Similarly on the supply side: if the baker insisted on bringing round
+bad epics instead of bread and the grocer bad sonatas instead of sugar,
+the supply, however good it might seem to the baker and the grocer, and
+however much satisfaction they might personally have derived from their
+work, would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper, acting on
+behalf of the household, would not take it in. But if the demand was for
+something not yet available, but less impossibly remote than the moon,
+the housekeeper might persuade the purveyors to cudgel their brains till
+they had met the need. For, as we know, Necessity, which is another word
+for Demand, is the mother of invention. Similarly, if a purveyor
+supplied something undreamed of by the household, but otherwise good of
+its kind, he might succeed in persuading the household to like it--in
+other words, in creating a demand. The late Sir Alfred Jones, by putting
+bananas cheap on the market, persuaded us that we liked them. Similarly
+Mr. Marvin, who deals in something better than bananas, has persuaded us
+all to come here, though most of us would never have thought of it
+unless he had created the demand in us.
+
+Economic Progress, then, is progress both on the side of demand and on
+the side of supply. It is a progress in wants as well as in their means
+of satisfaction: a progress in the aspirations of the household as well
+as in the contrivances of its purveyors: a progress in the sense of what
+life might be, as well as in the skill and genius and organizing powers
+of those to whom the community looks for help in the realization of its
+hopes. It is important that this double aspect of our subject should be
+realized, for in what follows we shall have no opportunity to dwell
+further upon it. Space compels us to leave the household and its wants
+and aspirations out of account and to direct our attention solely to the
+side of supply; although it must always be remembered that no real and
+permanent progress in the organization of production is possible without
+improvements in the quality and reduction in the number of the
+requirements of what is called civilization.[68] What we have to watch,
+in our study of progress in industry, is the history of man as a
+purveyor of the household: in other words, as a producer of goods and
+services: from the days of the primitive savage with his bark canoe to
+the gigantic industrial enterprises of our own time.
+
+We can best do so by dividing our subject into two on somewhat similar
+lines to the division in our study of government. Let us consider
+industry, first as an activity involving a relationship between man and
+Nature; secondly, as involving what may be called a problem of
+industrial government, a problem arising out of the co-operation between
+man and man in industrial work. In the first of these aspects we shall
+see man as a maker, an inventor, an artist; in the second as a subject
+or a citizen, a slave or a free man, in the Industrial Commonwealth.
+
+Man as a maker or producer carries us back to the dawn of history. Man
+is a tool-using animal and the early stages of human history are a
+record of the elaboration of tools. The flint axes in our museums are
+the earliest monuments of the activity of the human spirit. We do not
+know what the cave men of the Old Stone Age said or thought, or indeed
+whether they did anything that we should call speaking or thinking at
+all; but we know what they made. Centuries and millenniums elapsed
+between them and the first peoples of whom we have any more intimate
+record--centuries during which the foundations of our existing
+industrial knowledge and practice were being steadily laid. 'One may say
+in general,' says Mr. Marvin,[69]
+
+     that most of the fruitful practical devices of mankind had
+     their origin in prehistoric times, many of them existing
+     then with little essential difference. Any one of them
+     affords a lesson in the gradual elaboration of the simple. A
+     step minute in itself leads on and on, and so all the
+     practical arts are built up, a readier and more observant
+     mind imitating and adapting the work of predecessors, as we
+     imagined the first man making his first flint axe. The
+     history of the plough goes back to the elongation of a bent
+     stick. The wheel would arise from cutting out the middle of
+     a trunk used as a roller. House architecture is the
+     imitation with logs and mud of the natural shelters of the
+     rocks, and begins its great development when men have learnt
+     to make square corners instead of a rough circle. And so on
+     with all the arts of life or pleasure, including clothing,
+     cooking, tilling, sailing, and fighting.
+
+How did this gradual progress come about? Mr. Marvin himself supplies
+the answer. Through the action of the 'readier and more observant
+minds'--in other words, through specialization and the division of
+labour. As far back as we can go in history we find a recognition that
+men are not all alike, that some have one gift and some another, and
+that it is to the advantage of society to let each use his own gift in
+the public service. Among primitive peoples there has indeed often been
+a belief that men are compensated for physical weakness and disability
+by peculiar excellence in some sphere of their own. Hephaestos among the
+Greek gods was lame: so he becomes a blacksmith and uses his arms. Homer
+is blind: so instead of fighting he sings of war. They would not go so
+far as to maintain that all lame men must be good blacksmiths or all
+blind men good poets: but at least they recognized that there was room
+in the community for special types and that the blacksmith and the poet
+were as useful as the ordinary run of cultivators and fighting men. The
+Greek word for craftsman--[Greek: dêmiourgos]--'worker for the people,'
+shows how the Greeks felt on this point. To them poetry and
+craftsmanship were as much honourable occupations or, as we should say,
+professional activities as fighting and tilling. Whether Homer took to
+poetry because he could not fight or because he had an overwhelming
+poetic gift, he had justified his place in the community.
+
+Specialization is the foundation of all craftsmanship and therefore the
+source of all industrial progress. We recognize this, of course, in
+common speech. 'Practice makes perfect,' 'Genius is an infinite capacity
+for taking pains,' are only different ways of saying that it is not
+enough to be 'ready' and 'observant', but that continued activity and
+concentration are necessary. A perfect industrial community would not be
+a community where everybody was doing the same thing: nor would it be a
+community where every one was doing just what he liked at the moment: it
+would be a community where every one was putting all his strength into
+the work which he was by nature best qualified to do--where, in the
+words of Kipling:
+
+    No one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
+    But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
+    Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of Things as They Are.
+
+Progress in industry, then, on this side, consists in increasing
+specialization and in the perfection of the relationship between the
+workman and his work. Man in this world is destined to labour, and
+labour is often described as the curse of Adam. But in reality, as every
+one knows who has tried it, or observed the habits of those who have,
+idleness is far more of a curse than labour. Few men--at any rate in the
+temperate zone--can be consistently idle and remain happy. The born
+idler is almost as rare as the born poet. Most men, and, it must be
+added, most women, are happier working. If holidays were the rule and
+work the exception the world would be a much less cheerful place than it
+is even to-day. Purposeful activity is as natural to man as playing is
+to a kitten. From a purely natural point of view, no one has ever given
+a better definition of happiness than Aristotle when he defined it as
+_an activity of the soul in the direction of excellence in an unhampered
+life_. By excellence, of course, in this famous definition, Aristotle
+does not mean simply virtue: he means excellence in work. It is
+impossible, as we all know, to be good in the abstract. We must be good
+in some particular directions, _at_ some particular thing. And the
+particular thing that we are good at is _our_ work, our craft, our
+art--or, to use our less aesthetic English word, for which there is no
+equivalent in Greek, our duty. If happiness is to be found in doing
+one's duty, it does not result from doing that duty badly, but from
+doing it well--turning out, as we say, a thoroughly good piece of work,
+whether a day's work or a life work. There is a lingering idea, still
+held in some quarters, that the more unpleasant an activity is the more
+virtuous it is. This is a mere barbarous survival from the days of what
+Nietzsche called slave-morality. We are each of us born with special
+individual gifts and capacities. There is, if we only knew it, some
+particular kind or piece of work which we are pre-eminently fitted to
+do--some particular activity or profession, be it held in high or in low
+repute in the world of to-day, in which we can win the steady happiness
+of purposeful labour. Shall we then say that it ministers to human
+progress and to the glory of God deliberately to bury our talent out of
+sight and to seek rather work which, because it is irksome and
+unpleasant to us, we can never succeed in doing either easily or really
+well? No one who knows anything of education or of the training of the
+young, no one, indeed, who has any love for children, would dare to say
+that we should. Our State educational system, miserably defective though
+it is in this regard, is based upon the idea of ministering to the
+special gifts of its pupils--of trying by scholarships, by Care
+Committees, by the institution of schools with a special 'bias', to meet
+the needs of different kinds of young people and to set them in the path
+on which they are best fitted to travel.
+
+In doing this the modern State is only trying to carry out the
+principle laid down in the greatest book ever written on
+education--Plato's _Republic_. Plato's object was to train every citizen
+to fill the one position where he could lead the best life for the good
+of the State. His aim was not to make his citizens happy but to promote
+goodness; but he had enough faith in human nature--and who can be an
+educational thinker without having faith in human nature?--to be
+convinced that to enable men to 'do their bit', as we say to-day, was to
+assure them of the truest happiness. We of this generation know how
+abundantly that faith has been confirmed. And indeed we can appeal in
+this matter not only to the common sense of Education Authorities or to
+the philosophy of the ancients, but to the principles of the Christian
+religion. The late Professor Smart, who was not only a good economist
+but a good man; has some very pertinent words on this subject. 'If for
+some reason that we know not of,' he remarks,[70]
+
+     this present is merely the first stage in being; if we are
+     all at school, and not merely pitched into the world by
+     chance to pick up our living as best we can ... it seems to
+     me that we have reason enough to complain of the existing
+     economic system.... I imagine that many of our churchgoing
+     people, if they ever get to the heaven they sing about, will
+     find themselves most uncomfortable, if it be a place for
+     which they have made no preparation but in the 'business' in
+     which they have earned their living.... A man's daily work
+     is a far greater thing towards the development of the God
+     that is in him than his wealth. And, however revolutionary
+     the idea is, I must say that all our accumulations of wealth
+     are little to the purpose of life if they do not tend
+     towards the giving to all men the opportunity of such work
+     as will have its reward _in the doing_.
+
+And of his own particular life-work, teaching, he remarks, in words that
+testify to his own inner peace and happiness, that 'some of us have got
+into occupations which almost seem to guarantee immortality'.
+
+Let us, then, boldly lay it down that the best test of progress in
+industry and the best measure of success in any industrial system is the
+degree to which it enables men to 'do their bit' and so to find
+happiness in their daily work, or if you prefer more distinctively
+religious language, the degree to which it enables men to develop the
+God that is in them. Let us have the courage to say that in the great
+battle which Ruskin and William Morris fought almost single-handed
+against all the Philistines of the nineteenth century, Ruskin and
+Morris, however wrong they may have been on points of practical detail,
+were right in principle. Let us make up our minds that a world in which
+men have surrendered the best hours of the day to unsatisfying drudgery,
+and banished happiness to their brief periods of tired leisure, is so
+far from civilized that it has not even made clear to itself wherein
+civilization consists. And when we read such a passage as the following
+from a leading modern economist, let us not yield to the promptings of
+our lower nature and acquiesce in its apparent common sense, but
+remember that economists, like all workmen, are bounded by the limits of
+their own particular craft or study. 'The greater part of the world's
+work,' says Professor Taussig,[71] the leading exponent of Economics at
+Harvard,
+
+     is not in itself felt to be pleasurable. Some reformers have
+     hoped to reach a social system under which all work would be
+     in itself a source of satisfaction. It is probable that
+     such persons are made optimistic by the nature of their own
+     doings. They are writers, schemers, reformers; they are
+     usually of strongly altruistic character, and the
+     performance of any duty or set task brings to them the
+     approval of an exacting conscience; and they believe that
+     all mankind can be brought to labour in their own spirit.
+     The world would be a much happier place if their state of
+     mind could be made universal. But the great mass of men are
+     of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or any
+     loftiness of character. Moreover, most of the world's work
+     for the satisfaction of our primary wants must be of a
+     humdrum sort, and often of a rough and coarse sort. There
+     must be ditching and delving, sowing and reaping, hammering
+     and sawing, and all the severe physical exertion which,
+     however lightened by tools and machinery, yet can never be
+     other than labour in the ordinary sense of the word.
+
+When Professor Taussig assures us that 'the great mass of men are of a
+humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or loftiness of character'
+he is simply denying the Christian religion. To argue the point with him
+would carry us too far. We will do no more here than remind him that the
+people to whom the Founder of Christianity preached, and even those who
+were chosen to be its first disciples, were, like this audience,
+distinctly humdrum, and that assuredly the American Professor would not
+have discerned in them promising material for a world-transforming
+religious movement. What people see in others is often a mirror of
+themselves. Perhaps Professor Taussig, in spite of his excellent book,
+is rather a humdrum person himself.
+
+When, however, Professor Taussig declares that 'the greater part of the
+world's work is not in itself felt to be pleasurable' he is saying what,
+under existing conditions, we must all recognize to be true. A year or
+two ago Mr. Graham Wallas made an investigation into this very question,
+the results of which confirmed the general impression that modern
+workmen find little happiness in their work.[72] But two of the
+conclusions which he reached conflict in a rather curious way with the
+statement of Professor Taussig. Mr. Wallas's evidence, which was largely
+drawn from students of Ruskin College, led him to the conclusion 'that
+there is less pleasantness or happiness in work the nearer it approaches
+the fully organized Great Industry'. The only workman who spoke
+enthusiastically of his work was an agricultural labourer who 'was very
+emphatic with regard to the pleasure to be obtained from agricultural
+work'. Professor Taussig, on the other hand, selects four agricultural
+occupations, ditching, delving, sowing, and reaping, as
+characteristically unpleasant and looks to machinery and the apparatus
+of the Industrial Revolution to counteract this unpleasantness. But the
+most interesting evidence gathered by Mr. Wallas was that relating to
+women workers. He had an opportunity of collecting the views of girls
+employed in the laundries and poorer kind of factories in Boston. 'The
+answers', he says,[73] 'surprised me greatly. I expected to hear those
+complaints about bad wages, hard conditions and arbitrary discipline
+which a body of men working at the same grade of labour would certainly
+have put forward. But it was obvious that the question "Are you happy?"
+meant to the girls "Are you happier than you would have been if you had
+stayed at home instead of going to work?" And almost every one of them
+answered "Yes".' Why were they unhappy at home? Let Professor Taussig
+reflect on the answer. Not because they had 'rough' or 'coarse' or
+'humdrum' work to do, as in a factory or laundry, but because they had
+nothing to do, and they had found idleness unbearable. 'One said that
+work "took up her mind", she had been awfully discontented'. Another
+that 'you were of some use'. Another thought 'it was because the hours
+went so much faster. At home one could read, but only for a short time,
+there was the awful lonesome afternoon ahead of you.' 'Asked a little
+girl with dyed hair but a good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It
+made her feel she was worth something.' And Mr. Wallas concludes that it
+is just because 'everything that is interesting, even though it is
+laborious, in the women's arts of the old village is gone': because
+'clothes are bought ready-made, food is bought either ready-cooked, like
+bread and jam and fish, or only requiring the simplest kind of cooking':
+in fact just because physical exertion has been lightened by books and
+machinery, that 'there results a mass of inarticulate unhappiness whose
+existence has hardly been indicated by our present method of
+sociological enquiry'.
+
+It would seem then that the task of associating modern industrial work
+with happiness is not impossible, if we would only set ourselves to the
+task. And the task is a two-fold one. It is, first, to make it possible
+for people to follow the employment for which they are by nature best
+fitted; and secondly, to study much more closely than heretofore, from
+the point of view of happiness, the conditions under which work is done.
+The first task involves a very considerable reversal of current
+educational and social values. It does not simply mean paving the way
+for the son of an engine-driver to become a doctor or a lawyer or a
+cavalryman. It means paving the way for the son of a duke to become,
+without any sense of social failure, an engine-driver or a merchant
+seaman or a worker on the land--and to do so not, as to-day, in the
+decent seclusion of British Columbia or Australia, but in our own
+country and without losing touch, if he desires it, with his own natural
+circle of friends. The ladder is an old and outworn metaphor in this
+connexion. Yet it is still worth remembering that the Angels whom Jacob
+observed upon it were both ascending and descending. It is one of the
+fallacies of our social system to believe that a ladder should only be
+used in one direction--and that the direction which tends to remove men
+from contact and sympathy with their fellows. But in truth we need to
+discard the metaphor of the ladder altogether, with its implied
+suggestion that some tasks of community-service are more honourable and
+involve more of what the world calls 'success' than others. We do not
+desire a system of education which picks out for promotion minds gifted
+with certain kinds of capacity and stimulates them with the offer of
+material rewards, while the so-called humdrum remainder are left, with
+their latent talents undiscovered and undeveloped.
+
+Recent educational experiments,[74] and not least that most testing of
+all school examinations, the war, have shown us that we must revise all
+our old notions as to cleverness and stupidity. We know now that, short
+of real mental deficiency, there is or ought to be no such personage as
+the dunce. Just as the criminal is generally a man of unusual energy and
+mental power directed into wrong channels, so the dunce is a pupil whose
+special powers and aptitudes have not revealed themselves in the routine
+of school life. And just as the criminal points to serious defects in
+our social system, so the dunce points to serious defects in our
+educational system. The striking record of our industrial schools and
+reformatories in the war shows what young criminals and dunces can do
+when they are given a fair field for their special gifts. One of the
+chief lessons to be drawn from the war is the need for a new spirit and
+outlook in our national education from the elementary school to the
+University. We need a system which treats every child, rich or poor, as
+a living and developing personality, which enables every English boy and
+girl to stay at school at least up to the time when his or her natural
+bent begins to disclose itself, which provides for all classes of the
+community skilled guidance in the choice of employment based upon
+psychological study of individual gifts and aptitude,[75] which sets up
+methods of training and apprenticeship in the different trades--or, as I
+would prefer to call them the different professions--such as to
+counteract the deadening influence of premature specialization, and
+which ensures good conditions and a sense of self-respect and
+community-service to all in their self-chosen line of life, whether
+their bent be manual or mechanical or commercial or administrative, or
+for working on the land or for going to sea, or towards the more special
+vocations of teaching or scholarship or the law or medicine or the cure
+of souls. No one can estimate how large a share of the unhappiness
+associated with our existing social system is due to the fact that,
+owing to defects in our education and our arrangements for the choice of
+employment, there are myriads of square pegs in round holes. This
+applies with especial force to women, to whom many of the square holes
+are still inaccessible, not simply owing to the lack of opportunities
+for individuals, but owing to the inhibitions of custom and, in some
+cases, to narrow and retrograde professional enactments. The war has
+brought women their chance, not only in the office and the workshop,
+but in higher administrative and organizing positions, and not the least
+of its results is the revelation of undreamt-of capacities in these
+directions.
+
+In the second task, that of perfecting the adaptation between men and
+their tools, we have much to learn from the industrial history of the
+past. It is natural for men to enjoy 'talking shop', and this esoteric
+bond of union has existed between workmen in all ages. We may be sure
+that there were discussions amongst connoisseurs in the Stone Age as to
+the respective merits of their flint axes, just as there are to-day
+between golfers about niblicks and putters, and between surgeons as to
+the technique of the extraction of an appendix. A good workman loves his
+tools. He is indeed inseparable from them, as our law acknowledges by
+forbidding a bankrupt's tools to be sold up. Give a good workman, in
+town or country, a sympathetic listener and he is only too ready to
+expatiate on his daily work. This sense of kinship between men and their
+tools and material is so little understood by some of our modern expert
+organizers of industry that it is worth while illustrating it at some
+length. I make no apology, therefore, for quoting a striking passage
+from an essay by Mr. George Bourne, who is not a trade unionist or a
+student of Labour politics but an observer of English village life, who
+has taken the trouble to penetrate the mind of what is commonly regarded
+as the stupidest and most backward--as it is certainly the least
+articulate--class of workmen in this country, the agricultural labourer
+in the southern counties. 'The men', he writes,
+
+     are commonly too modest about their work, and too
+     unconscious that it can interest an outsider, to dream of
+     discussing it. What they have to say would not therefore by
+     itself go far in demonstration of their acquirements in
+     technique. Fortunately, for proof of that we are not
+     dependent on talk. Besides talk there exists another kind of
+     evidence open to every one's examination, and the technical
+     skill exercised in country labours may be purely deduced
+     from the aptness and singular beauty of sundry country
+     tools.
+
+     The beauty of tools is not accidental, but inherent and
+     essential. The contours of a ship's sail bellying in the
+     wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the
+     curves of an adze-head or of a plough-share. Cast in iron or
+     steel, the gracefulness of a plough-share is more
+     indestructible than the metal, yet pliant (in the limits of
+     its type) as a line of English blank verse. It changes for
+     different soils: it is widened out or narrowed; it is
+     deep-grooved or shallow; not because of caprice at the
+     foundry or to satisfy an artistic fad, but to meet the
+     technical demands of the expert ploughman. The most familiar
+     example of beauty indicating subtle technique is supplied by
+     the admired shape of boats, which, however, is so variable
+     (the statement is made on the authority of an old
+     coast-guardsman) that the boat best adapted for one stretch
+     of shore may be dangerous, if not entirely useless, at
+     another stretch ten miles away. And as technique determines
+     the design of a boat, or of a waggon, or of a plough-share,
+     so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is
+     responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all
+     tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow.
+     But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because
+     there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its
+     calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the
+     violinist's technique reached such marvellous fineness of
+     power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious
+     as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with
+     anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example
+     of a rule which is equally well exemplified by many humbler
+     tools. Quarryman's peck, coachman's whip, cricket-bat,
+     fishing-rod, trowel, all have their intimate relation to the
+     skill of those who use them; and like animals and plants,
+     adapting themselves each to its own place in the universal
+     order, they attain to beauty by force of being fit. That law
+     of adaptation which shapes the wings of a swallow and
+     prescribes the poise and elegance of the branches of trees
+     is the same that demands symmetry in the corn-rick and
+     convexity in the beer-barrel; the same that, exerting itself
+     with matchless precision through the trained senses of
+     haymakers and woodmen, gives the final curve to the handles
+     of their scythes and the shafts of their axes. Hence the
+     beauty of a tool is an unfailing sign that in the proper
+     handling of it technique is present ...
+
+'It is not the well-informed and those eager to teach', he says in
+another passage,
+
+     who know the primitive necessary lore of civilization; it is
+     the illiterate. In California, Louis Stevenson found men
+     studying the quality of vines grown on different pockets of
+     earth, just as the peasants of Burgundy and the Rhine have
+     done for ages. And even so the English generations have
+     watched the produce of their varying soils. When or how was
+     it learnt--was it at Oxford or at Cambridge?--that the
+     apples of Devonshire are so specially fit for cider? Or how
+     is it that hops are growing--some of them planted before
+     living memory--all along the strip of green sand which
+     encircles the Weald--that curious strip to which text-books
+     at last point triumphantly as being singularly adapted for
+     hops? Until it got into the books, this piece of knowledge
+     was not thought of as learning; it had merely been acted
+     upon during some centuries. But such knowledge exists,
+     boundless, in whatever direction one follows it: the
+     knowledge of fitting means to ends: excellent rule-of-thumb
+     knowledge, as good as the chemist uses for analyzing water.
+     When the peculiar values of a plot of land have been
+     established--as, for instance, that it is a clay 'too
+     strong' for bricks--then further forms of localized
+     knowledge are brought to supplement this, until at last the
+     bricks are made. Next, they must be removed from the field;
+     and immediately new problems arise. The old farm-cart,
+     designed for roots or manure, has not the most suitable
+     shape for brick-carting. Probably, too, its wide wheels,
+     which were intended for the softness of ploughed land, are
+     needlessly clumsy for the hard road. Soon, therefore, the
+     local wheelwright begins to lighten his spokes and felloes,
+     and to make the wheels a trifle less 'dished'; while his
+     blacksmith binds them in a narrower but thicker tyre, to
+     which he gives a shade more tightness. For the wheelwright
+     learns from the carter--that ignorant fellow--the answer to
+     the new problems set by a load of bricks. A good carter, for
+     his part, is able to adjust his labour to his locality. A
+     part of his duty consists in knowing what constitutes a fair
+     load for his horse in the district where he is working. So
+     many hundred stock bricks, so many more fewer of the red or
+     wire-cut, such and such a quantity of sand, or timber, or
+     straw, or coal, or drain-pipes, or slates, according to
+     their kinds and sizes, will make as much as an average horse
+     can draw in this neighbourhood; but in London the loads are
+     bigger and the vehicles heavier; while in more hilly parts
+     (as you may see any day in the West Country) two horses are
+     put before a cart and load which the London carter would
+     deem hardly too much for a costermonger's donkey.
+
+     So it goes throughout civilization: there is not an industry
+     but produces its own special knowledge relating to
+     unclassified details of adjustment.[76]
+
+It is this craft-knowledge and common professional feeling which is at
+the basis of all associations of workpeople, from the semi-religious
+societies of ancient times, which met in secret to worship their
+patron-god--Hephaestos, the god of the metal-workers, or Asclepios, the
+god of the doctors--through the great guilds of the Middle Ages to the
+trade unions and professional organizations of to-day. Trade unions do
+not exist simply to raise wages or to fight the capitalist, any more
+than the British Medical Association exists simply to raise fees and to
+bargain with the Government. They exist to serve a professional need: to
+unite men who are doing the same work and to promote the welfare and
+dignity of that work. It is this which renders so difficult the problems
+of adjustment which arise owing to the introduction of new and
+unfamiliar processes. Professional associations are, and are bound to
+be, conservative: their conservatism is honourable and to their credit:
+for they are the transmitters of a great tradition. The problem in every
+case is to ensure the progress necessary to the community without injury
+to that sense of 'fellowship in the mystery' on which the social spirit
+of the particular class of workmen depends. It is from this point of
+view that recent American proposals in the direction of 'scientific
+management' are most open to criticism: for they involve the break-up of
+the craft-spirit without setting anything comparable in its place. In
+fact, Mr. F. W. Taylor, one of the inventors of what is called the
+'system' of scientific management, frankly ignores or despises the
+craft-spirit and proposes to treat the workman as a being incapable of
+understanding the principles underlying the practice of his art. He goes
+so far as to lay it down as a general principle that 'in almost all the
+mechanic arts the science which underlies each act of each workman is so
+great and amounts to so much that the workman who is best suited to
+actually doing the work is incapable of fully understanding this
+science, without the guidance and help of those who are working with him
+or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient
+mental capacity'.[77] Along the lines of this philosophy no permanent
+industrial advance is possible. It may improve the product for a time,
+but only at the cost of degrading the producer. If we are to make
+happiness our test, and to stand by our definition of happiness as
+involving free activity, such a system, destructive as it is of any real
+or intense relationship between the workman and his work, stands
+self-condemned. If we are looking for _real_ industrial progress it is
+elsewhere that we must turn.
+
+This leads us naturally on to the second great division of our subject:
+progress in the methods of co-operation between man and man in doing
+industrial work. For if man is a social animal his power to do his bit
+and his consequent happiness must be derived, in part at least, from his
+social environment. The lonely craftsman perfecting his art in the
+solitude of a one-man workshop does not correspond with our industrial
+ideal any more than the hermit or the monk corresponds with our general
+religious ideal. It was the great apostle of craftsmanship, William
+Morris, who best set forth the social ideal of industry in his immortal
+sentence: 'Fellowship is Life and lack of Fellowship is Death.' Our
+study of the workman, then, is not complete when we have seen him with
+his tools: we must see him also among his workmates. We must see
+industry not simply as a process of production but as a form of
+association; and we must realize that the association of human beings
+for the purpose of industrial work involves what is just as much a
+problem of government as their association in the great political
+community which we call the State.
+
+It is difficult to see the record of the progress of industrial
+government in clear perspective for the simple reason that the world is
+still so backward as regards the organization of this side of its common
+life. The theory and practice of industrial government is generations,
+even centuries, behind the theory and practice of politics. We are still
+accustomed in industry to attitudes of mind and methods of management
+which the political thought of the Western World has long since
+discarded as incompatible with its ideals. Two instances must suffice to
+illustrate this. It is constantly being said, both by employers and by
+politicians, and even by writers in sympathy with working-class
+aspirations, that all that the workman needs in his life is security.
+Give him work under decent conditions, runs the argument, with
+reasonable security of tenure and adequate guarantees against sickness,
+disablement and unemployment, and all will be well. This theory of what
+constitutes industrial welfare is, of course, when one thinks it out,
+some six centuries out of date. It embodies the ideal of the old feudal
+system, but without the personal tie between master and man which
+humanized the feudal relationship. Feudalism, as we saw in our study of
+political government, was a system of contract between the lord and the
+labourer by which the lord and master ran the risks, set on foot the
+enterprises (chiefly military), and enjoyed the spoils, incidental to
+mediaeval life, while the labourer stuck to his work and received
+security and protection in exchange. Feudalism broke down because it
+involved too irksome a dependence, because it was found to be
+incompatible with the personal independence which is the birthright of a
+modern man. So it is idle to expect that the ideal of security will
+carry us very far by itself towards the perfect industrial commonwealth.
+
+Take a second example of the wide gulf that still subsists between men's
+ideas of politics and men's ideas of industry. It is quite common, even
+in these latter days, and among those who have freely sacrificed their
+nearest and dearest to the claims of the State, to hear manufacturers
+and merchants say that they have a 'right to a good profit'. The
+President of the Board of Trade remarked openly in the House of Commons
+after many months of war that it was more than one could expect of human
+nature for coal-owners not to get the highest price they could. Such a
+standpoint is not merely indecent: it is hopelessly out-of-date. Looked
+at from the political point of view it is a pure anachronism. There used
+to be times when men made large fortunes out of the service of
+government, as men still make them out of the service of the community
+in trade and industry to-day. In the days of St. Matthew, when
+tax-gathering was let out by contract, the apostle's partners would
+probably have declared, as Mr. Runciman does to-day, that it was more
+than one could expect of human nature that a publican who had a
+government contract for the collection of the taxes should not get all
+he could out of the tax-payer. It is, indeed, little more than a century
+ago since it was a matter of course in this country to look upon oversea
+colonies merely as plantations--that is, as business investments rather
+than as communities of human beings. The existence of Chartered Company
+government marks a survival of this habit of mind. The old colonial
+system, which embodied this point of view, proved demoralizing not only
+to the home government but to the colonists, as a similar view is to the
+working class, and it led to the loss of the American colonies as surely
+as a similar attitude on the part of employers leads to unrest and
+rebellion among workpeople to-day.
+
+We have thus a long way to travel before the ideals of politics have
+been assimilated into the industrial life of the community and have
+found fitting embodiment in its kindred and more complex problems. But
+at least we have reached a point where we can see what the problem of
+industrial government is. We can say with assurance that a system which
+treats human beings purely as instruments or as passive servants, and
+atrophies their self-determination and their sense of individual and
+corporate responsibility, is as far from perfection in industry as the
+Roman Empire was in politics. Renan's words about 'the intolerable
+sadness' incidental to such a method of organization apply with
+redoubled force to occupations which take up the best part of the day of
+the mass of the working population. The bleak and loveless buildings,
+with their belching chimneys, which arrest the eye of the thoughtful
+traveller in the industrial districts of England are not prisons or
+workhouses. But they often look as if they were, and they resemble them
+in this--that they too often stand for similarly authoritarian ideas of
+government and direction. Industry is still an autocracy, as politics
+was in the days before the supremacy of Parliament. Power still descends
+from above instead of springing from below. It is a power limited no
+doubt by trade union action and parliamentary and administrative
+control: but it is in essence as autocratic as the government of England
+used to be before the transference of sovereignty from the monarch to
+the representatives of his subjects. It was recently announced in the
+press that Lord Rhondda had bought a group of Welsh collieries for 2
+millions, and that as a result 'Lord Rhondda now controls over 3-1/2
+millions of capital, pays 2-1/2 millions in wages every year, and is
+virtually the dictator of the economic destiny of a quarter of a million
+miners. Rumours are also current', the extract continues, 'that Lord
+Rhondda is extending his control over the press of Wales'.[78] The
+existence of such power in this twentieth century in the hands of single
+individuals, not selected from the mass for their special wisdom or
+humanity, is a stupendous fact which must give pause to any one who is
+inclined to feel complacent about modern industrial progress. In days
+gone by political power was as irresponsible as the economic power
+wielded to-day by Lord Rhondda; and it descended from father to son by
+hereditary right in the same way as the control over the lives of
+countless American workers descends to-day as a matter of course from
+John D. Rockefeller senior to John D. Rockefeller junior. If there is
+any reality at all in our political faith we must believe that a similar
+development towards self-government can and must take place in
+industry. It may be that generations will elapse before the problems of
+industrial government find a final and satisfactory constitutional
+solution. But at least we can say that there is only one basis for that
+solution which is compatible with a sound ideal of government, or indeed
+with any reasoned view of morality or religion--the basis of individual
+and corporate freedom with its corresponding obligations of
+responsibility and self-respect. No nation, as Abraham Lincoln said, can
+remain half-slave and half-free: and it was a greater than Lincoln who
+warned us that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. It is this
+underlying conflict of ideals in the organization of our existing
+economic system which is the real cause of the 'Labour unrest' of which
+we have heard so much in recent years.
+
+With this warning in our minds as to the imperfections of our modern
+industrial organization, let us briefly survey the record of the forms
+of economic association which preceded it.
+
+The earliest form of industrial grouping is, of course, the family; and
+the family, as we all know, still retains its primitive character in
+some occupations as a convenient form of productive association. This is
+particularly the case in agriculture in communities where peasant
+holdings prevail. But the family is so much more than an industrial
+group that it hardly falls to us to consider it further here.
+
+Outside the family proper, industrial work among primitive peoples is
+often carried on by slaves. It was a step forward in human progress when
+primitive man found that it was more advantageous to capture his enemies
+than to kill or eat them; and it was a still greater step forward when
+he found that there was more to be got out of slaves by kind treatment
+than by compulsion. This is not the place in which to go into the vexed
+questions connected with various forms of slavery. Suffice it to say
+that it is a profound mistake to dismiss the whole system in one
+undiscriminating condemnation. Slavery involves the denial of freedom,
+and as such it can never be good. But other systems besides slavery
+implicitly involve the denial of freedom. Some of the finest artistic
+work in the world has been done by slaves--and by slaves not working
+under compulsion but in the company of free men and on terms of
+industrial equality with them. This should serve to remind us that, in
+judging of systems of industry, we must look behind the letter of the
+law to the spirit of the times and of social institutions. Slavery at
+its best merges insensibly into wage-labour at its lower end. Many of
+the skilled slaves of ancient Greece and Rome are hardly distinguishable
+in status from a modern workman bound by an unusually long and strict
+indenture and paid for his work not only in money but partly in truck.
+In order to stimulate their productive capacity it was found necessary
+in Greece and Rome to allow skilled slaves to earn and retain
+money--although in the eye of the law they were not entitled to do so;
+and they were thus frequently in a position to purchase their own
+freedom and become independent craftsmen. Slavery in the household and
+in small workshops is open to many and serious dangers, which need not
+be particularized here; but the worst abuses of slavery have always
+taken place where slaves have been easily recruited, as in the early
+days of European contact with Africa, and when there were large openings
+for their employment in gangs on work of a rough and unskilled
+character. The problem of slavery in its worse forms is thus at bottom a
+cheap-labour problem analogous to that which confronts North America and
+South Africa to-day; and there is an essential difference which is often
+ignored between the educated slave in a Roman Government office who did
+the work of a First Division Civil Servant for his imperial master and
+his compeer working in the fields of South Italy: and between the
+household servants of a Virginian family and the plantation-slaves of
+the farther South. Let us remember, in passing judgement on what is
+admittedly an indefensible system, that during the war which resulted in
+the freeing of the American slaves the slaveholders of the South trusted
+their household slaves to protect the women and children during their
+absence from home and that that trust was nowhere betrayed. There is
+another side to _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ as surely as there is another side
+to Mr. Carnegie's paean of modern industrialism in his _Triumphant
+Democracy_.
+
+Systems of serfdom or caste which bind the workman to his work without
+permitting him to be sold like a slave may be regarded as one step
+higher than slavery proper. Such systems are common in stable and
+custom-bound countries, and persisted throughout the European Middle
+Ages. We need not describe how the rising tide of change gradually broke
+up the system in this country and left the old-time villein a free but
+often a landless and property less man. The transition from serfdom to
+the system of wage-labour which succeeded it was a transition from legal
+dependence to legal freedom, and as such it marked an advance. But it
+was also a transition from a fixed and, as it were, a professional
+position of service to the community to a blind and precarious
+individualism. It was a transition, as Sir Henry Maine put it, from
+status to contract. This famous nineteenth-century aphorism is eloquent
+of the limitations of that too purely commercial age. Every thinking man
+would admit to-day that status at its best is a better thing than
+contract at its best--that the soldier is a nobler figure than the army
+contractor, and that corporate feeling and professional honour are a
+better stimulus to right action than business competition and a laudable
+keenness to give satisfaction to a valuable customer. We have always
+suffered from the temptation in this country of adapting business
+methods and ideals to politics rather than political ideals and methods
+to business. Our eighteenth-century thinkers explained citizenship
+itself, not as a duty to our neighbours but as the fulfilment of an
+unwritten contract. Our nineteenth-century legal writers elevated the
+idea of free contract almost to an industrial ideal; while, in somewhat
+the same spirit, the gutter journalists of to-day, when they are at a
+loss for a popular watchword, call for a business government. Such
+theories and battle-cries may serve for a 'nation of shopkeepers'; but
+that opprobrious phrase has never been true of the great mass of the
+English people, and it was never less true than to-day.
+
+The idea of industrial work as the fulfilment of a contract, whether
+freely or forcibly made, is thus essentially at variance with the ideal
+of community service. It is difficult for a man who makes his livelihood
+by hiring himself out as an individual for what he can get out of one
+piece of work after another to feel the same sense of community service
+or professional pride as the man who is serving a vocation and has
+dedicated his talents to some continuous and recognized form of work. It
+is this which makes the system of wage-labour so unsatisfactory in
+principle compared with the guilds of the town workmen in the Middle
+Ages and with the organized professions of to-day; and it is this which
+explains why trade unions of recent years have come to concern
+themselves more and more with questions of status rather than of wages
+and to regard the occupation which they represent more and more as a
+profession rather than a trade. No one has laid bare the deficiencies of
+the wage-system more clearly than Adam Smith in the famous chapter in
+which he foreshadows the principle of collective bargaining. 'What are
+the common wages of labour', he there remarks,[79]
+
+     'depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between
+     those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same.
+     The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as
+     little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in
+     order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of
+     labour.... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the
+     combinations of masters, though frequently of those of
+     workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that
+     masters rarely combine is as ignorant of the world as of the
+     subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of
+     tacit but constant and uniform combination not to raise the
+     wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this
+     combination is everywhere a most unpopular action and a sort
+     of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We
+     seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the
+     usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which
+     nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into
+     particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even
+     below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost
+     secrecy till the moment of execution; and, when the workmen
+     yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though
+     severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other
+     people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted
+     by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who
+     sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind,
+     combine of their own accord to raise the price of labour.
+     Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of
+     provisions, sometimes the great profit which their masters
+     make by their work.'
+
+These words were written 140 years ago, but, as we all know, they are
+still true of the working of the system to-day. Indeed the war has
+served to emphasize their truth by showing us how deeply entrenched are
+the habits of bargaining and of latent antagonism which the working of
+the wage-system has engendered. It is the defect of the wage-system, as
+Adam Smith makes clear to us, that it lays stress on just those points
+in the industrial process where the interests of employers and
+workpeople run contrary to one another, whilst obscuring those far more
+important aspects in which they are partners and fellow-workers in the
+service of the community. This defect cannot be overcome by
+strengthening one party to the contract at the expense of the other, by
+crushing trade unions or dissolving employers' combinations, or even by
+establishing the principle of collective bargaining. It can only be
+overcome by the recognition on both sides that industry is in essence
+not a matter of contract and bargaining at all, but of mutual
+interdependence and community service: and by the growth of a new ideal
+of status, a new sense of professional pride and corporate duty and
+self-respect among all who are engaged in the same function. No one can
+say how long it may take to bring about such a fundamental change of
+attitude, especially among those who have most to lose, in the material
+sense, by an alteration in the existing distribution of economic power.
+But the war has cleared away so much of prejudice and set so much of our
+life in a new light that the dim ideals of to-day may well be the
+realities of to-morrow. This at least we can say: that no country in the
+world is in a better position than we are to redeem modern industry from
+the reproach of materialism and to set it firmly upon a spiritual basis,
+and that the country which shall first have had the wisdom and the
+courage to do so will be the pioneer in a vast extension of human
+liberty and happiness and will have shown that along this road and no
+other lies the industrial progress of mankind.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+1. _Economics_:
+
+   H. Clay, _Economics for the General Reader_. 1916.
+
+   Ruskin, _Unto this last_.
+
+   Smart, _Second Thoughts of an Economist_. 1916.
+
+2. _Man and his Tools_:
+
+   Marvin, _The Living Past_. 1913.
+
+   F. W. Taylor, _The Principles of Scientific Management_. 1911.
+
+   Hoxie, _Scientific Management and Labour_. 1916.
+
+3. _Industrial Government_:
+
+   Aristotle, _Politics_ (Book I, chapters on Slavery).
+
+   Zimmern, _The Greek Commonwealth_ (chapters on Slavery). 1911.
+
+   Ashley, _The Economic Organization of England_. 1914.
+
+   Unwin, _Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
+   Centuries_.
+
+   S. and B. Webb, _The History of Trade Unionism_.
+
+   Macgregor, _The Evolution of Industry_ (Home University Library).
+
+   Wallas, _The Great Society_. 1914.
+
+   G. D. H. Cole, _The World of Labour_. 1915.
+
+   _Round Table, June 1916 (Article on the Labour Movement and the
+   Future of British Industry)._
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[67] Including the well-being of the producers--a point which is too
+often overlooked.
+
+[68] On this point see _Poverty and Waste_, by Hartley Withers, 1914,
+written before the war, which has driven its lessons home.
+
+[69] _The Living Past_, pp. 20, 21.
+
+[70] _Second Thoughts of an Economist_, p. 89.
+
+[71] _Principles of Economics_, vol. i, p. 11. It is interesting to note
+that in his latest book, _Inventors and Money-making, lectures on some
+relations between Economics and Psychology_ (1915), Professor Taussig to
+some extent goes back upon the point of view of the extract given above.
+
+[72] A similar inquiry on a much larger scale was made by Adolf
+Levinstein in his book _Die Arbeiterfrage_ (Munich, 1910). He examined
+4,000 workpeople, consisting of coalminers, cotton operatives, and
+engineers. With the exception of a few turners and fitters almost all
+replied that they found little or no pleasure in their work.
+
+[73] _The Great Society_, p. 363.
+
+[74] Especially the wonderful results obtained from the young criminals
+at the Little Commonwealth in Dorsetshire.
+
+[75] See _Readings in Vocational Guidance_ by Meyer Bloomfield (Boston,
+1915).
+
+[76] _Lucy Bettesworth_, pp. 178-80, and 214-16.
+
+[77] This sentence is practically an unconscious paraphrase of a passage
+from Aristotle's defence of slavery.
+
+[78] _The Welsh Outlook_, August 1916, p. 272.
+
+[79] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I, ch. viii.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+PROGRESS IN ART
+
+A. CLUTTON BROCK
+
+
+It is often said that there can be no such thing as progress in art. At
+one time the arts flourish, at another they decay: but, as Whistler put
+it, art happens as men of genius happen; and men cannot make it happen.
+They cannot discover what circumstances favour art, and therefore they
+cannot attempt to produce those circumstances. There are periods of
+course in which the arts, or some one particular art, progress. One
+generation may excel the last; through several generations an art may
+seem to be rushing to its consummation. This happened with Greek
+sculpture and the Greek drama in the sixth and fifth centuries; with
+architecture and all kindred arts in western Europe in the twelfth and
+thirteenth centuries, and at the same time with many arts in China. It
+happened with painting and sculpture in Italy in the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries, with literature in England in the sixteenth
+century, with music in Germany in the eighteenth century and the
+beginning of the nineteenth. But in all these cases there followed a
+decline, often quite unconscious at the time and one of which we cannot
+discover the causes. Attempts are made by historians of the arts to
+state the causes; but they satisfy only those who make them, for they
+are, in fact, only statements of the symptoms of decline. They tell us
+what happened, not why it happened. And they all seem to point to two
+conclusions about the course of the arts, both of which would make us
+despair of any settled progress in them. The first is that the practice
+of any art by any particular people always follows a certain natural
+course of growth, culmination, and decay. At least it always follows
+this course where an art is practised naturally and therefore with
+success. Art in fact, in its actual manifestations, is like the life of
+an individual human being and subject to inexorable natural laws. It is
+born, as men are born, without the exercise of will; and in the same way
+it passes through youth, maturity, and old age. The second conclusion
+follows from this, and it is that one nation or age cannot take up an
+art where another has left it. That is where art seems to differ from
+science. The mass of knowledge acquired in one country can, if that
+country loses energy to apply or increase it, be utilized by another.
+But we cannot so make use of the art of the Greeks or of the Italian
+Renaissance or of our own Middle Ages. In the Gothic revival we tried to
+make use of the art of the Middle Ages and we failed disastrously. We
+imitated without understanding, and we could not understand because we
+were not ourselves living in the Middle Ages. Art, in fact, is always a
+growth of its own time which cannot be transplanted, and no one can tell
+why it grows in one time and among one people and not in another.
+
+That is what we are always told, and yet we never quite believe all of
+it. For, as art is a product of the human mind, it must also be a
+product of the human will, unless it is altogether unconscious like a
+dream. But that it is not; for men produce it in their waking hours and
+with the conscious exercise of their faculties. If a man paints a
+picture he does so because he wants to paint one. He exercises will and
+choice in all his actions, and the man who buys a picture does the same.
+We talk of inspiration in the arts as something that cannot be
+commanded, but there is also inspiration in the sciences. No man can
+make a scientific discovery by the pure exercise of his will. It jumps
+into one mind and not into another just like an artistic inspiration.
+And further we are taught and trained in the arts as in the sciences;
+and success in both depends a great deal upon the nature of the
+training. In both good training will not give genius or inspiration to
+those who are without it; but it will enable those who possess it to
+make the most of it; and, what is more, it will enable even the mediocre
+to produce work of some value. What strikes us most about the Florentine
+school of painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fact
+that its second-rate painters are so good, that we can enjoy their works
+even when they are merely imitative. But the Florentine school excelled
+all others of the time in its teaching; most painters of other schools
+in Italy learnt from Florence; and the inspiration came to them from
+Florence, they were quickened from Florence, however much their art kept
+its own natural character. But this school which had the best teaching
+also produced the most painters of genius. Its level was higher and its
+heights were higher; and for this reason, that the whole Florentine
+intellect went both into the teaching and into the practice of painting
+and sculpture. The Florentine was able to put all his mind, the
+scientific faculties as well as the aesthetic, into his art. He never
+relied merely on his temperament or his mood. He was eager for
+knowledge. It was not enough for him to paint things as he saw them; he
+tried to discover how they were made, what were the laws of their growth
+and construction; and his knowledge of these things changed the
+character of his vision, made him see the human body, for instance, as
+no mediaeval artist had ever seen it; made him see it as an engineer
+sees a machine. Just as an engineer sees more in a machine than a man
+who does not understand its working, so the Florentine saw more in the
+human body than a mediaeval artist. He saw it with a scientific as well
+as an aesthetic passion, and all this science of his enriched his art so
+that there has never since been drawing like the Florentine, drawing at
+once so logical and so expressive.
+
+The Florentines in fact did exercise their will upon their art more than
+any other modern artists, more, perhaps, than any other artists known to
+us, and their painting and sculpture were the greatest of the modern
+world. Yet the fact remains that Florentine art declined suddenly and
+irresistibly, and that all the Florentine intellect, which still
+remained remarkable and produced men of science like Galileo, could not
+arrest that decline. Indeed the Florentines themselves seem not to have
+been conscious of it. They thought that the dull imitators of
+Michelangelo were greater than his great predecessors. As we say, their
+taste became bad, their values were perverted; and with that perversion
+all their natural genius for the arts was wasted. To this day Carlo
+Dolci is the favourite painter of the ordinary Florentine. He was a man
+of some ability, and he painted pictures at once feeble and revolting
+because he himself and his public liked such pictures.
+
+There is no accounting for tastes, we say, and in saying that we despair
+of progress in the arts. For it is ultimately this unaccountable thing
+called taste, and not the absence or presence of genius, which
+determines whether the arts shall thrive or decay in any particular age
+or country. People often say that they know nothing about art, but that
+they do know what they like; and what they imply is that there is
+nothing to be known about art except your own likes and dislikes, and
+further that no man can control those. The Florentines of the
+seventeenth century happened to like Carlo Dolci, where the Florentines
+of the fifteenth had liked Botticelli. That is the only explanation we
+can give of the decline of Florentine painting.
+
+It is of course no explanation; and because no explanation beyond it has
+been given, we are told that there can be no such thing as progress in
+the arts. That is the lesson of history. We are far beyond the Egyptians
+in science, but certainly not beyond them in art. Indeed one might say
+that there has been a continual slow decline in all the arts of Europe,
+except music, since the year 1500, and that music itself has been slowly
+declining since the death of Beethoven. But with this slow inexorable
+decline of the arts there has been a great advance in nearly everything
+else, in knowledge, in power, even in morality. Upon everything man has
+been able to exercise his will except upon the arts. Where he has really
+wished for progress there he has got it, except in this one case.
+Therefore it seems that upon the arts he cannot exercise his will, and
+that they alone of all his activities are not capable of progress. What
+do we mean by progress except the successful exercise of the human will
+in a right direction? That is what distinguishes progress from natural
+growth; that alone can preserve it from natural processes of decay.
+There are people who say that it does not exist, that everything which
+happens to man is a natural process of growth or decay. Whether that is
+so or not, we do mean by progress something different from these natural
+processes. When we speak of it we do imply the exercise of the human
+will, man's command over circumstances; and those who deny progress
+altogether deny that man has any will or any command over circumstances.
+For them things happen to man and that is all, it is not man's will that
+makes things happen. But if we use the word progress at all, we imply
+that it is man's will that makes things happen. And since man is
+evidently liable to decline as well as progress, it follows that if we
+believe man to be capable of exercising his will in a right direction we
+must also believe that he can and does exercise it in a wrong direction.
+I assume that man has this power both for good and for evil. If I did
+not, I should not be addressing you upon the question whether man is
+capable of progress in the arts, but upon the question whether he is
+capable of progress at all. And I should be trying to prove that he is
+not.
+
+As it is, the question I have to discuss is whether he has the power of
+exercising for good or evil his will upon the arts as upon other things;
+and hitherto I have been giving you certain facts in the history of the
+arts which seem to prove that he is not. They all amount to this--that
+man has not hitherto succeeded in exercising his will upon the arts;
+that he has not produced good art because he wished to produce it. We,
+for instance, wish to excel in the arts; we have far more power than the
+ancient Greeks or Egyptians; but we have not been able to apply that
+power to the arts. In them we are conscious of a strange impotence. We
+cannot build like our forefathers of the Middle Ages, we cannot make
+furniture like our great-grandfathers of the eighteenth century. Go into
+an old churchyard and look at the tombstones of the past and present.
+You will see that the lettering is always fine up to the first
+generation of the nineteenth century. In that generation there is a
+rapid decline; and since about 1830 there has been no decent lettering
+upon tombstones except what has been produced in the last ten years or
+so by the conscious effort of a few individual artists of great natural
+talent and high training. If I want good lettering on a tombstone I have
+to employ one of these artists and to pay him a high price for his
+talent and his training. But that is only one example of a universal
+decline in all the arts of use, a decline which happened roughly between
+the years 1800 and 1830. And the significant fact about it is that when
+it happened no one was aware of it. So far as I know, this artistic
+catastrophe, far the swiftest and most universal known to us in the
+whole course of history, was never even mentioned in contemporary
+literature. The poets, the lovers of beauty, did not speak of it. They
+talked about nature, not about art. There is not a hint of it in the
+letters of Shelley or Keats. There is just a hint of it in some sayings
+of Blake; but that is all. One would suppose that such a catastrophe
+would have filled the minds of all men who were not entirely occupied
+with the struggle for life, that all would have seen that a glory was
+passing away from the earth, and would have made some desperate struggle
+to preserve it. But, as I say, they saw nothing of it. They were not
+aware that a universal ugliness was taking the place of beauty in all
+things made by man; and therefore the new ugliness must have pleased
+them as much as the old beauty. So it appears once again that there is
+no accounting for tastes, and no test that we can apply to them. When
+science declines, men at least know that they have less power. They are
+more subject to pestilence when they forget medicine and sanitation;
+their machines become useless to them when they no longer know how to
+work them; there is anarchy when they lose their political goodwill. But
+when their taste decays they do not know that it has decayed. And with
+it decays their artistic capacity, so that, quite complacently, they
+lose the power of doing decently a thousand things that their fathers
+did excellently.
+
+But here suddenly I am brought to a stop by a new fact in human history.
+The arts have declined, but our complacency over their decline has
+ceased. The first man who disturbed it was Ruskin. It was he who saw
+the catastrophe that had happened. Suddenly he was aware of it; suddenly
+he escaped from the universal tyranny of the bad taste of his time. He
+was the first to deny that there was no accounting for tastes; the first
+to deny, indeed, that the ordinary man did know what he liked. And he
+was followed with more knowledge and practical power, in fact with more
+science, by William Morris. What both of these great men really said was
+that taste is not unaccountable; that the mass of men do not know what
+they like, that they do not apply their intellect and will to what they
+suppose to be their likes and dislikes, and that they could apply their
+intellect and will to these things if they chose.
+
+When we say that there is no accounting for tastes we imply that tastes
+are always real, that, whether good or bad, they happen to men without
+any exercise of their will. But Ruskin and Morris implied that we must
+exercise our will and our intelligence to discover what our tastes
+really are; that this discovery is not at all easy, but that, if we do
+not make it, we are at the mercy, not of our own real tastes, but of an
+unreal thing which is called the public taste, or of equally unreal
+reactions against it. We think that we like what we suppose other people
+to like, and these other people too think that they like what no one
+really likes. Or in mere blind reaction we think that we dislike what
+the mob likes. But in either case our likes and dislikes are not ours at
+all and, what is more, they are no one's. Taste in fact is bad because
+it is not any one's taste, because no one's will is exercised in it or
+upon it. When it is good, it is always real taste, that is to say some
+real person's taste. In the work of art the artist does what he really
+likes to do and expresses some real passion of his own, not some passion
+which he believes that he, as an artist, ought to express. Art, said
+Morris, is the expression of the workman's pleasure in his work. It
+cannot be real art unless it is a real pleasure. And so the public will
+not demand real art unless they too take a real pleasure in it. If they
+do not know what they really like, they will not demand of the artist
+what they really like or what he really likes. They will demand
+something tiresome and insincere, and by the tyranny of their demand
+will set him to produce it.
+
+That was what happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century in
+nearly all the arts and especially in the arts of use. It had happened
+before in different ages and countries, especially in painting,
+sculpture, architecture, and the arts of use as they were patronized by
+the vulgar rich, such as the court of Louis XV. But now it happened
+suddenly and universally to all arts. There were no longer vulgar rich
+only but also vulgar poor and vulgar middle-classes. Everywhere there
+spread a kind of aesthetic snobbery which obscured real tastes. Of this
+I will give one simple and homely example. The beautiful flowers of the
+cottage garden were no longer grown in the gardens of the well-to-do,
+because they were the flowers of the poor. Instead were grown lobelias,
+geraniums, and calceolarias, combined in a hideous mixture, not because
+any one thought them more beautiful, but because, since they were grown
+in green-houses, they implied the possession of green-houses and so of
+wealth. They did not, of course, even do that, since they could be
+bought very cheaply from nurserymen. They implied only the bad taste of
+snobbery which is the absence of all real taste. For it is physically
+impossible for any one to like such a combination of plants better than
+larkspurs and lilies and roses. What they did enjoy was not the flowers
+themselves but their association with gentility. But so strong was the
+contagion of this association that cottagers themselves began to throw
+away their beautiful cottage-garden flowers and to grow these plants, so
+detestable in combination. And to this day one can see often in cottage
+gardens pathetic imitations of a taste that never was real and which now
+is discredited among the rich, so that a border of lobelias,
+calceolarias, and geraniums has become a mark of social inferiority as
+it was once one of social superiority. But what it never was and never
+could be was an expression of a genuine liking.
+
+Now I owe the very fact that I am able to give this account of a simple
+perversion of taste to Ruskin and Morris. It was they who first made the
+world aware that its taste was perverted and that most of its art was
+therefore bad. It was they who filled us with the conviction of artistic
+sin, and who also in a manner entirely scientific tried to discover what
+was the nature of this sin and how it had come about. First Ruskin
+tentatively, and afterwards Morris systematically and out of his own
+vast artistic experience, connected this decay of the arts with certain
+social conditions. It was not merely that taste had decayed or that the
+arts had developed to a point beyond which there was nothing for them
+but decline. Morris insisted that there were causes for the decay of
+taste and the decline of the arts, causes as much subject to the will of
+man as the causes of any kind of social decay or iniquity. He insisted
+that a work of art is not an irrational mystery, not something that
+happens and may happen well or ill; but that all art is intimately
+connected with the whole of our social well-being. It is in fact an
+expression of what we value, and if we value noble things it will be
+noble, if we pretend to value base things it will be base.
+
+Whistler said that this was not so. He insisted that genius is born, not
+made, and that some peoples have artistic capacity, some have not. Now
+it is true that nations vary very much in their artistic capacity and in
+the strength of their desire to produce art. But even the nations which
+have little artistic capacity and little desire to produce art have in
+their more primitive state produced charming works of real art. Whistler
+gave the case of the Swiss as an excellent people with little capacity
+for art. But the old Swiss chalets are full of character and beauty, and
+there are churches in Switzerland which have all the beauty of the
+Middle Ages. The cuckoo clocks and other Swiss articles of commerce
+which Whistler despised are contemptible, not because they are Swiss,
+but because they are tourist trash produced by workmen who express no
+pleasure of their own in them for visitors who buy them only because
+they think they are characteristic of Switzerland. They are, in fact,
+not the expression of any genuine taste or liking whatever, like the
+tourist trash that is sold in the Rue de Rivoli. Probably the Swiss
+would never be capable of producing works of art like Chartres Cathedral
+or Don Giovanni, but they have in the past possessed a genuine and
+delightful art of their own like nearly every European nation in the
+Middle Ages.
+
+So, though genius is born, it is also made, and though nations differ in
+artistic capacity, they all have some artistic capacity so long as they
+know what they like and express only their own liking in their art, so
+long as they are not infected with artistic snobbism or commercialism.
+This we know now, and we have developed a new and remarkable power of
+seeing and enjoying all the genuine art of the past. This power is part
+of the historical sense which is itself modern. In the past, until the
+nineteenth century, very few people could see any beauty or meaning in
+any art of the past that did not resemble the art of their own time and
+country. The whole art of the Middle Ages, for instance, was thought to
+be merely barbarous until the Gothic revival, and so was the art of all
+the past so far as it was known, except the later art of Greece and
+Rome. For our ancestors' taste did indeed happen as art happened, and
+they could not escape from the taste which circumstances imposed on
+them; any art that was not according to that taste was for them as it
+were in an unknown tongue. But we have made this great progress in
+taste, at least, if not in the production of art, that we can understand
+nearly all artistic languages, and that what used to be called classical
+art has lost its old superstitious prestige for us. Not only can we
+enjoy the art of our own Middle Ages; but many of us can enjoy and
+understand just as well the great art of Egypt and China, and can see as
+clearly when that art is good or bad as if it were of our own time. We
+have, in fact, in the matter of artistic appreciation gained the freedom
+of all the ages, and this is a thing that has never, so far as we know,
+happened before in the history of the human mind.
+
+But still this freedom of all the ages has not enabled us to produce a
+great art of our own. There are some, indeed, who think that it has
+hindered us from doing so, that we are becoming merely universal
+connoisseurs who can criticize anything and produce nothing. We have the
+most wonderful museums that ever were, and the most wonderful power of
+enjoying all that is in them, but, with all our riches from the past,
+our present is barren; and it is barren because our rich men would
+rather pay great prices for past treasures than encourage artists to
+produce masterpieces now. If that is so, if that is all that is coming
+to us from our freedom of all the ages, there is certainly not progress
+in it. Better that we should produce and enjoy the humblest genuine art
+of our own than that we should continue in this learned impotence.
+
+But this power of enjoying the art of all ages, though it certainly has
+had some unfortunate results, must be good in itself. It is sympathy,
+and that is always better than indifference or antipathy. It is
+knowledge, and that is always better than ignorance. And we have to
+remember that it has existed only for a short time and is, therefore,
+not yet to be judged by its fruits. We are still gasping at all the
+artistic treasures of the past that have been revealed to us like a new
+world; and still they are being revealed to our new perceptions. Only in
+the last ten years, for instance, have we discovered that Chinese
+painting is the rival of Italian, or that the golden age of Chinese
+pottery was centuries before the time of that Chinese porcelain which we
+have hitherto admired so much. The knowledge, the delight, is still
+being gathered in with both hands. It is too soon to look for its
+effects upon the mind of Europe.
+
+But it is not the result of mere barren connoisseurship or
+scholasticism. Rather it is a new renaissance, a new effort of the human
+spirit, and an effort after what? An effort to exert the human will in
+the matter of art far more consciously than it has exerted ever before.
+It is to be noted that Morris himself, the man who first told us that we
+must exert our wills in art, was also himself eager in the discovery and
+enjoyment of all kinds of art in the past. He had his prejudices, the
+prejudices of a very wilful man and a working artist. 'What can I see in
+Rome,' he said, 'that I cannot see in Whitechapel?' But he enjoyed the
+art of most ages and countries more than he enjoyed his prejudices. He
+had the historical sense in art to a very high degree. He knew what the
+artist long dead meant by his work as if it were a poem in his own
+language, and from the art of the past which he loved he saw what was
+wrong with the art of our time. So did Ruskin and so do many now.
+Further we are not in the least content to admire the art of the past
+without producing any of our own. There is incessant restless
+experiment, incessant speculation about aesthetics, incessant effort to
+apply them to the actual production of art, in fact to exert the
+conscious human will upon art as it has never been exerted before.
+
+So, if one wished in a sentence to state the peculiarity of the last
+century in the history of art, one would say that it is the first age in
+which men have rebelled against the process of decadence in art, in
+which they have been completely conscious of that process and have tried
+to arrest it by a common effort of will. We cannot yet say that that
+effort has succeeded, but we cannot say either that it has failed. We
+may be discontented with the art of our own time, but at least we must
+allow that it is, with all its faults, extravagances, morbidities and
+blind experiments, utterly unlike the art of any former age of decadence
+known to us. There may be confusion and anarchy, but there is not mere
+pedantry and stagnation. Artists perhaps are over-conscious, always
+following some new prophet, but at least there is the conviction of sin
+in them, which is exactly what all the decadent artists of the past have
+lacked.
+
+The artistic decadence of the past which is most familiar to us is that
+of the later Graeco-Roman art. It was a long process which began at
+least as early as the age of Alexander and continued until the fall of
+the Western Roman Empire and afterwards, until, indeed, the decadent
+classical art was utterly supplanted by the art which we call Romanesque
+and Byzantine, and which seems to us now at its best to be as great as
+any art that has ever been.
+
+But a hundred years ago this Romanesque and Byzantine art was thought to
+be only a barbarous corruption of the classical art. For then the
+classical art even in its last feebleness still kept its immense and
+unique prestige. Shelley said that the effect of Christianity seemed to
+have been to destroy the last remains of pure taste, and he said this
+when he had been looking at the great masterpieces of Byzantine mosaic
+at Ravenna. Now we know with an utter certainty that he was wrong. He
+was himself a great artist, but to him there was only one rational and
+beautiful and civilized art, and that was the decadent Graeco-Roman art.
+To him works like the Apollo Belvedere were the masterpieces of the
+world, and all other art was good as it resembled them. He and in fact
+most people of his time were still overawed by the immense complacency
+of that art. They had not the historical sense at all. They had no
+notion of certain psychological facts about art which are now familiar
+to every educated man. They did not know that art cannot be good unless
+it expresses the character of the people who produce it; that
+characterless art, however accomplished, is uninteresting; that there
+may be more life and so more beauty in the idol of an African savage
+than in the Laocoon.
+
+This later Greek and Graeco-Roman art was doomed to inevitable decay
+because of its immense complacency. The artists had discovered, as they
+thought, the right way to produce works of art, and they went on
+producing them in that way without asking themselves whether they meant
+anything by them or whether they enjoyed them. They knew, in fact, what
+was the proper thing to do just as conventional people now know what is
+the proper thing to talk about at a tea party; and their art was as
+uninteresting as the conversation of such people. In both the talk and
+the art there is no expression of real values and so no expression of
+real will. The past lies heavy upon both. So people have talked, so
+artists have worked, and so evidently people must talk and artists must
+work for evermore.
+
+Now we have been threatened with just the same kind of artistic
+decadence, and we are still threatened with it; so that it would be very
+easy to argue that, when men reach a certain stage in that organization
+of their lives which we call civilization, they must inevitably fall
+into artistic decadence. The Roman Empire did attain to a high stage of
+such organization, and all the life went out of its art. We have reached
+perhaps a still higher or at least more elaborate stage of it, and the
+life has gone or is going out of our art. It has become even more
+mechanical than the Graeco-Roman. We, too, have lost the power of
+expressing ourselves, our real values, our real will, in it; and we had
+better submit to that impotence and not make a fuss about it. Indeed art
+really is an activity proper to a more childish stage of the human mind,
+and we shall do well not to waste our time and energy upon it. That is
+the only way in which we can be superior to the Graeco-Roman world in
+the matter of art. We can give it up altogether or rather put it all
+into museums as a curiosity of the past to be studied for historical and
+scientific purposes.
+
+But I have only to say that to prove that we will not be contented with
+such a counsel of despair. The Romans went on producing art, even if it
+was bad art, and we shall certainly go on producing art whether it is
+good or bad. We have produced an immense mass of bad art, worse perhaps
+than any that the Roman world produced. But there is this difference
+between us and the Romans, that we are not content with it. We have the
+conviction of artistic sin and they had not. Therefore we do not think
+that their example need make us despair. They were not exercising their
+will on their art. It was to them what a purely conventional morality is
+to a morally decadent people. It went from bad to worse, just as
+conventional morals do, when no man arises and says: 'This is wrong,
+although you think it right. I know what is right from my own sense of
+values, and I will do it in spite of you.' So far as we know, there were
+no rebels of that kind in the art of the Graeco-Roman world. But our
+world of art is full of such rebels and has been ever since the artistic
+debacle at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact the chief
+and the unique characteristic of the art of the last hundred years has
+been the constant succession of artistic rebels. All our greatest
+artists have been men who were determined to exercise their own wills in
+their art, whatever the mass of men might think of it. And what has
+always happened is that they have been first bitterly abused and then
+passionately praised. This, so far as I know, has never happened before.
+There have been rebel artists like Rembrandt, but only a few of them.
+Most great artists before the nineteenth century have been admired in
+their own time. But in the nineteenth century, and more and more towards
+the end of it, the great artists have had to conquer the world with
+their rebellion, they have had to exercise their own individual wills
+against the common convention. And it seems to us now the mark of the
+great artist so to exercise his individual will, so to rebel and conquer
+the world with his rebellion, even if he kills himself in the process.
+Think of Constable and even Turner, of our pre-Raphaelites, and above
+all of nearly all the great French artists, of Millet, of Manet, of
+Cezanne, Gauguin, of Rodin himself, who has conquered the world now, but
+only in his old age. Think of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, and of
+all the rebel musicians of to-day. But in the past the great artists,
+Michelangelo, Titian, even the great innovator Giorgione; Mozart, Bach,
+Handel; none of these were thought of as rebels. They had not to conquer
+the world against its will. They came into the world, and the world
+knew them. So, we may be sure, the decadent artists of the Graeco-Roman
+world were not rebels. There they were like Michelangelo and Raphael, if
+they were like them in nothing else. If they had been rebels we might
+not yawn at their works now.
+
+Now, clearly, this rebellion is not so good a thing as the harmony
+between the artist and his public which has prevailed in all great ages
+of art. But it is better than the harmony of dull and complacent
+convention which prevailed in the Graeco-Roman decadence. For it means
+that our artists are not content with such complacence, that they will
+not accept decadence as an inevitable process. And the fact that we do
+passionately admire them for their rebellion as soon as we understand
+what it means, that this rebellion seems to us a glorious and heroic
+thing, is a proof that we, the public, also are not content to sink into
+the Graeco-Roman complacency. We may stone our prophets at first, but
+like the Hebrews, we produce prophets as well as priests, that is to say
+academicians. And we treasure their works as the Hebrews treasured the
+books of the prophets.
+
+Art, in fact, is a human activity in which we try to exercise our wills.
+We are aware that it is threatened with decadence by the mere process of
+our civilization, that it is much more difficult for us to produce
+living art than it was for our forefathers of the Middle Ages. But still
+we are not content to produce dead art. Half unconsciously we are making
+the effort to exercise our wills upon our art, as upon our science, our
+morals, our politics, to avoid decadence in art as we try to avoid it in
+other human activities; and this effort is the great experiment, the
+peculiar feature, of the art of the last century.
+
+It is an effort not merely aesthetic but also intellectual. There is a
+great interest in aesthetics and a constant and growing effort to
+charge them with actual experience and to put them to some practical
+end. In the past they have been the most backward, the most futile and
+barren, kind of philosophy because men wrote about them who had never
+really experienced works of art and who saw no connexion between their
+philosophy and the production of works of art. They talked about the
+nature of the beautiful, as schoolmen talked about the nature of God.
+And they knew no more about the nature of the beautiful from their own
+experience of it than schoolmen knew about the nature of God. But now
+men are interested in the beautiful because they miss it so much in the
+present works of men and because they so passionately desire it; and
+their speculation has the aim of recovering it. So aesthetics, whatever
+some artists in their peculiar and pontifical narrowness may say, is of
+great importance now; they are part of the effort which the modern world
+is making to exercise its will in the production of works of art, and
+they are bound, if that effort is successful, to have more and more
+effect upon that production.
+
+But is that effort going to be successful? That is a question which no
+one can answer yet. But my object is to insist that in our age, because
+of its effort, an effort which has never been made so consciously and
+resolutely before, there is a possibility of a progress in art of the
+same nature as progress in other human activities. If we can escape from
+what has seemed to some men this inexorable process of decadence in art,
+we shall have accomplished one of the greatest achievements of the human
+will. We shall have redeemed art from the tyranny of mere fate.
+
+What we have to do now is to understand what it is that causes decadence
+in art, we have to apply a conscious science to the production of it. We
+have to see what are the social causes that produce excellence and
+decay in it. And we have made a great beginning in this. For we are all
+aware that art is not an isolated thing, that it does not merely happen,
+as Whistler said. We know that it is a symptom of something right or
+wrong with the whole mind of man and with the circumstances that affect
+that mind. We know at last that there is a connexion between the art of
+man and his intellect and his conscience. It was because William Morris
+saw that connexion that he, from being a pure artist, became a socialist
+and spoke at street corners. Such a change, such a waste and perversion
+as it seemed to many, would have been impossible in any former age. It
+was possible and inevitable, it was a natural process for Morris in the
+nineteenth century, because he was determined to exercise his will upon
+art, just as men in the past had exercised their will upon religion or
+politics; because he no longer believed that art happened as the weather
+happens and that the artist is a charming but irresponsible child swayed
+merely by the caprices of his own private subconsciousness. Was he right
+or wrong? I myself firmly believe that he was right. That if man has a
+will at all, if he is not a mere piece of matter moulded by
+circumstances, he has a will in art as in all other things. And,
+further, if he has a common will which can express itself in his other
+activities, in religion or politics, that common will must also be able
+to express itself in art. It has not hitherto done so consciously,
+because man in all periods of artistic success has been content to
+succeed without asking why he succeeded, and in all periods of artistic
+failure he has been content to fail without asking why he has failed. We
+have been for long living in a period of artistic failure, but we have
+asked, we are asking always more insistently, why we fail. And that is
+where our time differs from any former period of artistic decadence,
+why, I believe, it is not a period of decadence but one of experiment,
+and of experiment which will not be wasted, however much it may seem at
+the moment to fail. But if out of all this conscious effort and
+experiment we do arrest the process of decadence, if we do pass from
+failure to success, then we shall have accomplished a progress in art
+such as has never been accomplished before even in the greatest ages.
+For whereas men have never been able to learn from the experience of
+those ages, whereas the Greeks and the men of the thirteenth century
+have not taught men how to avoid decadence in art, we and our children
+will teach them how to avoid it. We shall then have given a security to
+art such as it has never enjoyed before; and we shall do that by
+applying science to it, by using the conscious intelligence upon it.
+
+We may fail, of course, but even so our effort will not have been in
+vain. And some future age in happier circumstances may profit by it, and
+achieve that progress, that application of science to art, which we are
+now attempting.
+
+Many people, especially artists, tell us that the attempt is a mere
+absurdity. But ignorance even about art need not be eternal. Ignorance
+is eternal only when it is despairing or contented. Twenty years ago
+many people said that men never would be able to fly, yet they are
+flying now because they were resolved to fly. So we are more and more
+resolved to have great art. Every year we feel the lack of it more and
+more. Every year more people exercise their wills more and more
+consciously in the effort to achieve it. This, I repeat, has never
+happened before in the history of the world. And the consequence is that
+our art, what real art we have, is unlike any that there has been in the
+world before. It is so strange and so rebellious that we ourselves are
+shocked and amazed by it. Much of it, no doubt, is merely strange and
+rebellious, as much of early Christianity was merely strange and
+rebellious and so provoked the resentment and persecution of
+self-respecting pagans. Every great effort of the human mind attracts
+those who merely desire their own salvation, and so it is with the
+artistic effort now. There are cubists and futurists and
+post-impressionists who are as silly as human beings can be, because
+they hope to attain to artistic salvation by rushing to extremes. They
+are religious egotists, in fact, and nothing can be more disagreeable
+than a religious egotist. But there were no doubt many of them among the
+early Christians. Yet Christianity was a great creative religious effort
+which came because life and truth had died out of the religions of the
+past, and men could not endure to live without life and truth in their
+religion. So now they cannot endure to live without life and truth in
+their art. They are determined to have an art which shall express all
+that they have themselves experienced of the beauty of the universe,
+which shall not merely utter platitudes of the past about that beauty.
+
+So far perhaps there is little but the effort at expression, an effort
+strange, contorted, self-conscious. You can say your worst about it and
+laugh at all its failures. Yet they are failures different in kind from
+the artistic failures of the past, for they are failures of the
+conscious will, not of mere complacency. And it is such failures in all
+human activities that prepare the way for successes.
+
+Let us remember then, always, that art is a human activity, not a fairy
+chance that happens to the mind of man now and again. And let us
+remember, too, that it does not consist merely of pictures or statues or
+of music performed in concert-rooms. It is, indeed, rather a quality of
+all things made by man, a quality that may be good or bad but which is
+always in them. That is one of the facts about art that was discovered
+in the nineteenth century, when men began to miss the excellence of art
+in all their works and to wish passionately that its excellence might
+return to them. And this discovery which was then made about art was of
+the greatest practical importance. For then men became aware that they
+could not have good pictures or architecture or sculpture unless the
+quality of art became good again in all their works. So much they learnt
+about the science of art. They began, or some of them did, to think
+about their furniture and cottages and pots and pans and spoons and
+forks, and even about their tombstones, as well as about what had been
+called their works of art. And in all these humbler things an advance, a
+conscious resolute wilful advance, has been made. We begin to see when
+and also why spoons and forks and pots and pans are good or bad. We are
+less at the mercy of chance or blind fashion in such things than our
+fathers were. We know our vulgarity and the naughtiness of our own
+hearts. The advance, the self-knowledge, is not general yet, but it
+grows more general every year and the conviction of sin spreads. No
+doubt, like all conviction of sin, it often produces unpleasant results.
+The consciously artistic person often has a more irritating house than
+his innocently philistine grandfather had. So, no doubt, many simple
+pagan people were much nicer than those early Christians who were out
+for their own salvation. But there was progress in Christianity and
+there was none in paganism.
+
+The title of this book is _Progress and History_, and it may justly be
+complained that the progress of which I have been talking is not
+historic, but a progress that has not yet happened and may never happen
+at all. But that I think is a defect of my particular branch of the
+subject. Progress in art, if progress is anything more than a natural
+process of growth to be followed inevitably by a natural process of
+decay, has never yet happened in art; but there is now an effort to make
+it happen, an effort to exercise the human will in art more completely
+and consciously than it has ever been exercised before. Therefore I
+could do nothing but attempt to describe that effort and to speculate
+upon its success.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+PROGRESS IN SCIENCE
+
+F.S. MARVIN
+
+
+    'L'Esprit travaillant sur les données de l'expérience.'
+
+The French phrase, neater as usual than our own, may be taken as the
+starting-point in our discussion. We shall put aside such questions as
+what an experience is, or how much the mind itself supplies in each
+experience, or what, if anything, is the not-mind upon which the mind
+works. We must leave something for the chapter on philosophy; and the
+present chapter is primarily historical. Having defined what we mean by
+science, we are to consider at what stage in history the working of the
+mind on experience can be called scientific, in what great strides
+science has leapt forward since its definite formation, and in what ways
+this growth of science has affected general progress, both by its action
+on the individual and on the welfare and unity of mankind.
+
+Our French motto must be qualified in order to give us precision in our
+definition and a starting-point in history for science in the strict
+sense. In a general sense the action of the mind upon the given in
+experience has been going on from the beginning of animal life. But
+science, strictly so-called, does not appear till men have been
+civilized and settled in large communities for a considerable time. We
+cannot ascribe 'science' to the isolated savage gnawing bones in his
+cave, though the germs are there, in every observation that he makes of
+the world around him and every word that he utters to his mates. But we
+may begin to speak of science when we reach those large and ordered
+societies which are found in the great river-basins and sedentary
+civilizations of East and West, especially in Egypt and Chaldea.
+
+When we turn to the quality of the thing itself, we note in the first
+place that while science may be said to begin with mere description, it
+implies from the first a certain degree of order and accuracy, and this
+order and accuracy increase steadily as science advances. It is thus a
+type of progress, for it is a constant growth in the fullness, accuracy
+and simplification of our experience. From the dawn of science,
+therefore, man must have acquired standards and instruments of
+measurement and means of handing on his observations to others. Thus
+writing must have been invented. But in the second place, there is
+always involved in this orderly description, so far as it is scientific,
+the element of prediction. The particular description is not scientific.
+'I saw a bird fly' is not a scientific description, however accurate;
+but 'The bird flies by stretching out its wings' is. It contains that
+causal connexion or element of generality which enables us to predict.
+
+Before entering on a historical sketch of the most perfect example of
+human progress, it is of the first importance to realize its social
+foundation. This is the key-note, and it connects science throughout with
+the other aspects of our subject. Knowledge depends upon the free
+intercourse of mind with mind, and man advances with the increase and
+better direction of his knowledge. But when we consider the implications
+of any generalization which we can call 'a law of nature' the social
+co-operation involved becomes still more apparent. Geometry and
+astronomy--the measurement of the earth and the measurement of the
+heavens--dispute the honour of the first place in the historical order.
+Both, of course, involved the still more fundamental conception of number
+and the acceptance of some unit for measurement. Now in each case and at
+every step a long previous elaboration is implied of intellectual
+conventions and agreements--conscious and unconscious--between many minds
+stretching back to the beginnings of conscious life: the simplest element
+of thought involves the co-operation of individual minds in a common
+product. Language is such a common product of social life and it prepares
+the ground for science. But science, as the exact formulation of general
+truths, attains a higher degree of social value, because it rises above
+the idioms of person or race and is universally acceptable in form and
+essence. Such is the intrinsic nature of the process, and the historical
+circumstances of its beginnings make it clear. It was the quick mind of
+the Greek which acted as the spark to fire the trains of thought and
+observation which had been accumulating for ages through the agency of the
+priests in Egypt and Babylonia. The Greeks lived and travelled between the
+two centres, and their earliest sages and philosophers were men of the
+most varied intercourse and occupation. Their genius was fed by a wide
+sympathy and an all-embracing curiosity. No other people could have
+demonstrated so well the social nature of science from its inception, and
+they were planting in a soil well prepared. In Egypt conspicuously and in
+Chaldea also to a less extent there had been a social order which before
+the convulsions of the last millennium B.C. had lasted substantially
+unchanged for scores of centuries. This order was based upon a religious
+discipline which connected the sovereigns on earth with the divine power
+ruling men from the sky. Hence the supreme importance of the priesthood
+and their study of the movements of the heavenly bodies. The calendar,
+which they were the first to frame, was thus not only or even primarily a
+work of practical utility but of religious meaning and obligation. The
+priests had to fix in advance the feast days of gods and kings by
+astronomical prediction. Their standards and their means of measurement
+were rough approximations. Thus the 360 degrees into which the Babylonians
+taught us to divide the circle are thought to have been the nearest round
+number to the days of the year. The same men were also capable of the more
+accurate discovery that the side of a hexagon inscribed in a circle was
+equal to the radius and gave us our division of sixty minutes and sixty
+seconds with all its advantages for calculation. In Egypt, if the
+surveyors were unaware of the true relation between a triangle and the
+rectangle on the same base, they had yet established the carpenter's rule
+of 3, 4 and 5 for the sides of a right-angled triangle.
+
+How much the Greeks drew from the ancient priesthoods we shall never
+know, nor how far the priests had advanced in those theories of general
+relations which we call scientific. But one or two general conclusions
+as to this initial stage of scientific preparation may well be drawn.
+
+One is that a certain degree of settlement and civilization was
+necessary for the birth of science. This we find in these great
+theocracies, where sufficient wealth enabled a class of leisured and
+honoured men to devote themselves to joint labour in observing nature
+and recording their observations. Another point is clear, namely, that
+the results of these early observations, crude as they were, contributed
+powerfully to give stability to the societies in which they arose. The
+younger Pliny points out later the calming effect of Greek astronomy on
+the minds of the Eastern peoples, and we are bound to carry back the
+same idea into the ancient settled communities where astronomy began and
+where so remarkable an order prevailed for so long during its
+preparation.
+
+But however great the value we allow to the observations of the priests,
+it is to the Ionian Greeks that we owe the definite foundation of
+science in the proper sense; it was they who gave the raw material the
+needed accuracy and generality of application, A comparison of the
+societies in the nearer East to which we have referred, with the history
+of China affords the strongest presumption of this. In the later
+millenniums B.C. the Chinese were in many points ahead of the
+Babylonians and Egyptians. They had made earlier predictions of eclipses
+and more accurate observations of the distance of the sun from the
+zenith at various places. They had, too, seen the advantages of a
+decimal system both in weights and measures and in the calculations of
+time. But no Greek genius came to build the house with the bricks that
+they had fashioned, and in spite of the achievements of the Chinese they
+remained until our own day the type in the world of a settled and
+contented, although unprogressive, conservatism.
+
+Science then among its other qualities contains a force of social
+movement, and our age of rapid transformation has begun to do fuller
+justice to the work of the Greeks, the greatest source of intellectual
+life and change in the world. We are now fully conscious of the defects
+in their methods, the guesses which pass for observations, the
+metaphysical notions which often take the place of experimental
+results.[80] But having witnessed the latest strides in the unification
+of science on mathematical lines, we are more and more inclined to prize
+the geometry and astronomy of the Greeks, who gave us the first
+constructions on which the modern mechanical theories of the universe
+are based. We shall quote from them here only sufficient illustrations
+to explain and justify this statement.
+
+The first shall be what is called Euclidean geometry, but which is in
+the main the work of the Pythagorean school of thinkers and social
+reformers who flourished from the seventh to the fifth centuries B.C.
+This formed the greater part of the geometrical truth known to mankind
+until Descartes and the mathematicians recommenced the work in the
+seventeenth century. The second greatest contribution of the Greeks was
+the statics and the conics of which Archimedes was the chief creator in
+the third century B.C. In his work he gave the first sketch of an
+infinitesimal calculus and in his own way performed an integration. The
+third invaluable construction was the trigonometry by which Hipparchus
+for the first time made a scientific astronomy possible. The fourth, the
+optics of Ptolemy based on much true observation and containing an
+approximation to the general law.
+
+These are a few outstanding landmarks, peaks in the highlands of Greek
+science, and nothing has been said of their zoology or medicine. In all
+these cases it will be seen that the advance consisted in bringing
+varying instances under the same rule, in seeing unity in difference, in
+discovering the true link which held together the various elements in
+the complex of phenomena. That the Greek mind was apt in doing this is
+cognate to their idealizing turn in art. In their statues they show us
+the universal elements in human beauty; in their science, the true
+relations that are common to all triangles and all cones.
+
+Ptolemy's work in optics is a good example of the scientific mind at
+work.[81] The problem is the general relation which holds between the
+angles of incidence and of refraction when a ray passes from air into
+water or from air into glass. He groups a series of the angles with a
+close approximation to the truth, but just misses the perception which
+would have turned his excellent raw material into the finished product
+of science. His brick does not quite fit its place in the building. His
+formula _i_ (the angle of incidence) = _nr_ (the angle of refraction)
+only fits the case of very small angles for which the sine is
+negligible, though it had the deceptive advantage of including reflexion
+as one case of refraction. He did not pursue the argument and make his
+form completely general. Sin _i_ = _n_ sin _r_ escaped him, though he
+had all the trigonometry of Hipparchus behind him, and it was left for
+Snell and Descartes to take the simple but crucial step at the beginning
+of the seventeenth century.
+
+The case is interesting for more than one reason. It shows us what is a
+general form, or law of nature in mathematical shape, and it also
+illustrates the progress of science as it advances from the most
+abstract conceptions of number and geometry, to more concrete phenomena
+such as physics. The formula for refraction which Ptolemy helped to
+shape, is geometrical in form. With him, as with the discoverer of the
+right angle in a semicircle, the mind was working to find a general
+ideal statement under which all similar occurrences might be grouped.
+Observation, the collection of similar instances, measurement, are all
+involved, and the general statement, law or form, when arrived at, is
+found to link up other general truths and is then used as a
+starting-point in dealing with similar cases in future. Progress in
+science consists in extending this mental process to an ever-increasing
+area of human experience. We shall see, as we go on, how in the concrete
+sciences the growing complexity and change of detail make such
+generalizations more and more difficult. The laws of pure geometry seem
+to have more inherent necessity and the observations on which they were
+originally founded have passed into the very texture of our minds. But
+the work of building up, or, perhaps better, of organizing our
+experience remains fundamentally the same. Man is throughout both
+perceiving and making that structure of truth which is the framework of
+progress.
+
+Ptolemy's work brings us to the edge of the great break which occurred
+in the growth of science between the Greek and the modern world. In the
+interval, the period known as the Middle Ages, the leading minds in the
+leading section of the human race were engaged in another part of the
+great task of human improvement. For them the most incumbent task was
+that of developing the spiritual consciousness of men for which the
+Catholic Church provided an incomparable organization. But the interval
+was not entirely blank on the scientific side. Our system of
+arithmetical notation, including that invaluable item the cipher, took
+shape during the Middle Ages at the hands of the Arabs, who appear to
+have derived it in the main from India. Its value to science is an
+excellent object-lesson on the importance of the details of form. Had
+the Greeks possessed it, who can say how far they might have gone in
+their applications of mathematics?
+
+Yet in spite of this drawback the most permanent contribution of the
+Greeks to science was in the very sphere of exact measurement where they
+would have received the most assistance from a better system of
+calculation had they possessed it. They founded and largely constructed
+both plane and spherical geometry on the lines which best suit our
+practical intelligence. They gave mankind the framework of astronomy by
+determining the relative positions of the heavenly bodies, and they
+perceived and correctly stated the elementary principles of equilibrium.
+At all these points the immortal group of men who adopted the Copernican
+theory at the Renascence, began again where the Greeks had left off. But
+modern science starts with two capital improvements on the work of the
+Greeks. Measurement there had been from the first, and the effort to
+find the constant thing in the variable flux; and from the earliest days
+of the Ionian sages the scientific mind had been endeavouring to frame
+the simplest general hypothesis or form which would contain all the
+facts. But the moderns advanced decisively, in method, by experimenting
+and verifying their hypotheses, and in subject-matter, by applying their
+method to phenomena of movement, which may theoretically include all
+facts biological as well as physical. Galileo, the greatest founder of
+modern science, perfectly exemplifies both these new departures.
+
+It is, perhaps, the most instructive and encouraging thing in the whole
+annals of progress to note how the men of the Renascence were able to
+pick up the threads of the Greeks and continue their work. The texture
+held good. Leonardo da Vinci, whose birth coincides with the invention
+of the printing-press, is the most perfect reproduction in modern times
+of the early Greek sophos, the man of universal interests and capacity.
+He gave careful and admiring study to Archimedes, the greatest pure man
+of science among the Greeks, the one man among them whose works,
+including even his letters, have come down to us practically complete. A
+little later, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Copernicus
+gained from the Pythagoreans the crude notion of the earth's movement
+round a great central fire, and from it he elaborated the theory which
+was to revolutionize thought. Another half-century later the works of
+Archimedes were translated into Latin and for the first time printed.
+They thus became well known before the time of Galileo, who also
+carefully studied them. At the beginning of the seventeenth century
+Galileo made the capital discoveries which established both the
+Copernican theory and the science of dynamics. Galileo's death in 1642
+coincides with the birth of Sir Isaac Newton.
+
+Such is the sequence of the most influential names at the turning-point
+of modern thought.
+
+Galileo's work, his experiments with falling bodies and the revelations
+of his telescope, carried the strategic lines of Greek science across
+the frontiers of a New World, and Newton laid down the lines of
+permanent occupation and organized the conquest. Organization, the
+formation of a network of lines connected as a whole, and giving access
+to different parts of the world of experience, is perhaps the best image
+of the growth of science in the mind of mankind. It will be seen that it
+does not imply any exhaustion of the field, nor any identification of
+all knowledge with exact or systematic knowledge. The process is rather
+one of gradual penetration, the linking up and extension of the area of
+knowledge by well-defined and connected methods of thought. No
+all-embracing plan thought out beforehand by the first founders of
+science, or any of their successors, can be applied systematically to
+the whole range of our experience. It has not been so in the past; still
+less does it seem possible in the future. For the most part the
+discoverer works on steadily in his own plot, occupying the nearest
+places first, and observing here and there that one of his lines runs
+into some one else's. Every now and then a greater and more
+comprehensive mind appears, able to treat several systems as one whole,
+to survey a larger area and extend that empire of the mind which, as
+Bacon tells us, is nobler than any other.
+
+Of such conquerors Newton was the greatest we have yet known, because he
+brought together into one system more and further-reaching lines of
+communication than any one else. He unified the forms of measurement
+which had previously been treated as the separate subjects of geometry,
+astronomy, and the newly-born science of dynamics. Celestial mechanics
+embraces all three, and is a fresh and decisive proof of the commanding
+influence of the heavenly bodies on human life and thought. Not by a
+horoscope, but by continued and systematic thought, humanity was
+unravelling its nature and destiny in the stars as well as in itself.
+These are the two approaches to perfect knowledge which are converging
+more and more closely in our own time. Newton's work was the longest
+step yet taken on the mechanical side, and we must complete our notice
+of it by the briefest possible reference to the later workers on the
+same line, before turning to the sciences of life which began their more
+systematic evolution with the discovery of Harvey, a contemporary of
+Newton.
+
+The seventeenth century, with Descartes' application of algebra to
+geometry, and Newton's and Leibnitz's invention of the differential and
+integral calculus, improved our methods of calculation to such a point
+that summary methods of vastly greater comprehensiveness and elasticity
+can be applied to any problem of which the elements can be measured. The
+mere improvement in the method of describing the same things (cf. e.g. a
+geometrical problem as written down by Archimedes with any modern
+treatise) was in itself a revolution. But the new calculus went much
+farther. It enabled us to represent, in symbols which may be dealt with
+arithmetically, any form of regular movement.
+
+As movement is universal, and the most obvious external manifestation of
+life itself, the hopes of a mathematical treatment of all phenomena are
+indefinitely enlarged, for all fresh laws or forms might conceivably be
+expressed as differential equations. So to the vision of a Poincaré the
+human power of prediction appears to have no assignable theoretical
+limit.
+
+The seventeenth century which witnessed this momentous extension of
+mathematical methods, also contains the cognate foundation of scientific
+physics. Accurate measurement began to be applied to the phenomena of
+light and heat, the expansion of gases, the various changes in the forms
+of matter apart from life. The eighteenth century which continued this
+work, is also and most notably marked by the establishment of a
+scientific chemistry. In this again we see a further extension of
+accurate measurement: another order of things different in quality began
+to be treated by a quantitative analysis. Lavoisier's is the greatest
+name. He gave a clear and logical classification of the chemical
+elements then known, which served as useful a purpose in that science,
+as classificatory systems in botany and zoology have done in those
+cases. But the crucial step which established chemistry, a step also due
+to Lavoisier, was making the test of weight decisive. 'The balance was
+the _ultima ratio_ of his laboratory.' His first principle was that the
+total weight of all the products of a chemical process must be exactly
+equal to the total weight of the substances used. From this, and rightly
+disregarding the supposed weight of heat, he could proceed to the
+discovery of the accurate proportions of the elements in all the
+compounds he was able to analyse.
+
+Since then the process of mathematical synthesis in science has been
+carried many stages further. The exponents of this aspect of scientific
+progress, of whom we may take the late M. Henri Poincaré as the leading
+representative in our generation, are perfectly justified in treating
+this gradual mathematical unification of knowledge with pride and
+confidence. They have solid achievement on their side. It is through
+science of this kind that the idea of universal order has gained its
+sway in man's mind. The occasional attacks on scientific method, the
+talk one sometimes hears of 'breaking the fetters of Cartesian
+mechanics', seem to suggest that the great structure which Galileo,
+Newton, and Descartes founded is comparable to the false Aristotelianism
+which they destroyed. The suggestion is absurd: its chief excuse is the
+desire to defend the autonomy of the sciences of life, about which we
+have a word to say later on. But we must first complete our brief
+mention of the greatest stages on the mechanical side, of which a full
+and vivid account may be found in such a book as M. Poincaré's _Science
+et Hypothèse_.
+
+Early in the nineteenth century a trio of discoverers, a Frenchman, a
+German, and an Englishman, established the theory of the conservation of
+energy. To the labours of Sadi Carnot, Mayer, and Joule is due our
+knowledge of the fact that heat which, as a supposed entity, had
+disturbed the physics and chemistry of the earlier centuries, was itself
+another form of mechanical energy and could be measured like the rest.
+Later in the century another capital step in synthesis was taken by the
+foundation of astrophysics, which rests on the identity of the physics
+and chemistry of the heavenly bodies with those of the earth.
+
+The known universe thus becomes still more one. Later researches again,
+especially those of Maxwell, tend to the identification of light and
+heat with electricity, and in the last stage matter as a whole seems to
+be swallowed up in motion. It is found that similar equations will
+express all kinds of motion; that all are really various forms of the
+motion of something which the mind postulates as the thing in motion; we
+have in each case to deal with wave-movements of different length. The
+broad change, therefore, which has taken place since the mechanics of
+Newton is the advance from the consideration of masses to that of
+molecules of smaller and smaller size, and the truth of the former is
+not thereby invalidated. Newton, Descartes, Fresnel, Carnot, Joule,
+Mayer, Faraday, Helmholtz, Maxwell appear as one great succession of
+unifiers. All have been engaged in the same work of consolidating
+thought at the same time that they extended it. Their conceptions of
+force, mass, matter, ether, atom, molecule have provisional validity as
+the imagined objective substratum of our experience, and the fact that
+we analyse these conceptions still further and sometimes discard them,
+does not in any way invalidate the law or general form in which they
+have enabled us to sum up our experience and predict the future.
+
+But now we turn to the other side. In spite of the continued progress
+noted on the mechanical side, it is true that the predominant scientific
+interest changed in the nineteenth century from mechanics to biology,
+from matter to life, from Newton to Darwin. Darwin was born in 1809, the
+year in which Lamarck, who invented the term biology, published his
+_Philosophie Zoologique_. The _Origin of Species_ appeared in 1858 after
+the conservation of energy had been established, and the range and
+influence of evolutionary biology have grown ever since.
+
+Before anything can be said of the conclusions in this branch of science
+one preliminary remark has to be made. From the philosophical point of
+view the science of life includes all other, for man is a living animal,
+and science is the work of his co-operating mind, one of the functions
+of his living activity. What this involves on the philosophical side
+does not concern us here, but it is necessary to indicate here the
+nature of the contact between the two great divisions of science, the
+mechanical and the biological, considered purely as sciences. For,
+though we know that our consciousness as a function of life must in some
+form come into the science of life, and is, in a sense, above it all, we
+are yet able to draw conclusions, apparently of infinite scope, about
+the behaviour of all living things around us and including ourselves,
+just as we do about a stone or a star. And we are interested in this
+chapter in seeing how this drawing of general conclusions keeps growing
+with regard to the phenomena of life, just as it has grown with regard
+to all other phenomena, and we have to consider what sort of difference
+there is between the one class of generalizations and the other.
+
+For those of us who are content to rest their conclusions on the
+positively known, who, while not setting any limits to the possible
+extension of knowledge, are not prepared to dogmatize about it, it is
+still necessary to draw a line. A dualism remains, name and fact alike
+abhorrent to the completely logical philosophic mind. On the one hand
+the ordinary laws of physical science are constantly extending their
+sphere; on the other, the fact of life still remains unexplained by
+them, and becomes in itself more and more marvellous as we investigate
+it. The general position remains much as Johannes Müller expressed it
+about the middle of the last century, himself sometimes described as the
+central figure in the history of modern physiology. 'Though there
+appears to be something in the phenomena of living beings which cannot
+be explained by ordinary mechanical, physical, or chemical laws, much
+may be so explained, and we may without fear push these explanations as
+far as we can, so long as we keep to the solid ground of observation and
+experiment.' Since this was written the double process has gone on
+apace. The chemistry and physics of living matter are being sketched,
+and biologists are more and more inclined to study the mechanical
+expression of the facts of life. Mr. Bateson, for instance, tells us
+that the greatest advance that we can foresee will be made 'when it is
+possible to connect the geometrical phenomena of development with the
+chemical'. The process of applying physical laws to life follows, it
+would seem, the reverse order of their original development. First the
+chemistry of organic matter was investigated, then the physical
+attraction of their molecules, and now their geometry is in question.
+So, says Professor Bateson, the 'geometrical symmetry of living things
+is the key to a knowledge of their regularity and the forces which cause
+it. In the symmetry of the dividing cell the basis of that resemblance
+which we call Heredity is contained'.
+
+But such work as this is still largely speculative and in the future. It
+does not solve the secret of life. It does not affect the fact of
+consciousness which we are free to conceive, if we will, as the other
+side of what we call matter, evolving with it from the most rudimentary
+forms into the highest known form in man, or still further into some
+super-personal or universal form. This, however, is philosophy or
+metaphysics. We are here concerned with the progress of science, in one
+of its two great departments, i.e. knowledge about life and all its
+known manifestations, which from Aristotle onwards have been subjected
+to a scrutiny similar to that which has been given to the physical facts
+of the universe and with results in many points similar also. But the
+facts, although superficially more familiar, are infinitely more
+complicated, and the scrutiny has only commenced in earnest some hundred
+years ago. Considering the short space for this concentrated and
+systematic study, the results are at least as wonderful as those
+achieved by the physicists. Two or three points of suggestive analogy
+between the courses of the two great branches of science may here be
+mentioned.
+
+We will put first the fundamental question on which, as we have seen, no
+final answer has yet been reached: What is life, and is there any
+evidence of life arising from the non-living? Now this baffling and
+probably unanswerable question--unanswerable, that is, in terms which go
+beyond the physical concomitants of life--has played the part in biology
+which the alchemists' quest played in chemistry. It led by the way to a
+host of positive discoveries. Aristotle, the father of biology, believed
+in spontaneous generation. He was puzzled by the case of parasites,
+especially in putrefying matter. Even Harvey, who made the first great
+definite discovery about the mechanism of the body, agreed with
+Aristotle in this error. It was left for the minute and careful
+inquirers of the nineteenth century to dispose of the myth. It was only
+after centuries of inquiry that the truth was established that life, as
+we know it, only arises from life. But the whole course of the inquiry
+had illuminated the nature of life and had brought together facts as to
+living things of all kinds, plants and animals, great and small, which
+show superficially the widest difference. Illumination by unification is
+here the note, as clearly as in the mathematical-physical sciences. All
+living things are found to be built up from cells and each cell to be an
+organism, a being, that is, with certain qualities belonging to it as a
+whole, which cannot be predicated of any collection of parts not an
+organism. The cell is such an organism, just as the animal is an
+organism, and among its qualities as an organism is the power of growth
+by assimilating material different from itself. Yet, in spite of this
+assimilation and constant change, it grows and decays as one whole and
+reproduces its like.
+
+Another point of analogy between the animate and the inanimate sphere is
+that the process of study in both has been from the larger to the
+smaller elements. The microscope has played at least as decisive a part
+as the telescope, and it dates from about the same time, at the
+beginning of the seventeenth century. Since then it has penetrated
+farther and farther into the infinitesimal elements of life and matter,
+and in each case there seems to be no assignable limit to our analysis.
+The cell is broken up into physiological units to which almost every
+investigator gives a new name. We are now confronted by the fascinating
+theory of Arrhenius of an infinite universe filled with vital spores,
+wafted about by radio-activity, and beginning their upward course of
+evolution wherever they find a kindly soil on which to rest. To such a
+vision the hopes and fears of mortal existence, catastrophes of nature
+or of society, even the decay of man, seem transient and trivial, and
+the infinities embrace.
+
+A third point, perhaps the most important in the comparison, is the way
+by which the order of science has entered into our notions of life,
+through a great theory, the theory of evolution or the doctrine of
+descent. In this we find a solid basis for the co-ordination of facts:
+it was the rise of this theory in the hands of one thinker of
+unconquerable patience and love of truth which has put the study of
+biology in the pre-eminent position which it now holds. But it is
+necessary to consider the evolution theory as something both older and
+wider than Darwin's presentation of it. Darwin's work was to suggest a
+_vera causa_ for a process which earlier philosophers had imagined
+almost from the beginning of abstract thought. He observed and collected
+a multitude of facts which made his explanations of the change of
+species--within their limits--as convincing as they are plausible. But
+the idea that species change, by slow and regular steps, was an old one,
+and his particular explanations, natural and sexual selection, are seen
+on further reflection to have only a limited scope.
+
+This is no place, of course, to discuss the details of the greatest and
+most vexed question in the whole science of life. But it belongs to our
+argument to consider it from one or two general points of view. Its
+analogies with, and its differences from, the great generalizations of
+mathematical physics, are both highly instructive. The first crude
+hypothesis of the gradual evolution of various vegetable and animal
+forms from one another may be found in the earliest Greek thinkers, just
+as Pythagoras and Aristarchus anticipated the Copernican theory.
+Aristotle gave the idea a philosophic statement which only the fuller
+knowledge of our own time enables us to appreciate. He traced the
+gradual progression in nature from the inorganic to the organic, and
+among living things from the simpler to the higher forms. But his
+knowledge of the facts was insufficient: the Greeks had no microscope,
+and the dissecting knife was forbidden on the human subject. Then, as
+these things were gradually added to science from the seventeenth
+century onwards, and the record of the rocks gave the confirmation of
+palaeontology, the whole realm of living nature was gradually unfolded
+before us, every form connected both in function and in history with
+every other, every organ fulfilling a necessary part, either now or in
+the past, and growing and changing to gain a more perfect accord with
+its environment. Such is the supreme conception which now dominates
+biological science much as the Newtonian theory has dominated physics
+for two hundred years; and it is idle to debate whether this new idea is
+different in kind or only in degree from the great law of physics. It is
+a general notion or law which brings together and explains myriads of
+hitherto unrelated particulars; it has been established by observation
+and experiment working on a previous hypothesis; it involves
+measurement, as all accurate observation must, and it gives us an
+increasing power of prediction. So far, therefore, we must class it with
+the great mathematical laws and dissent from M. Bergson. But seeing that
+the multitudinous facts far surpass our powers of complete colligation,
+that much in the vital process is still obscure, that we are conscious
+in ourselves of a power of shaping circumstances which we are inclined
+in various degrees to attribute to other living things, so far we
+recognize a profound difference between the laws of life and the laws of
+physics, and pay our respects to M. Bergson and his allies of the
+neo-vitalist school. Not for the first time in history we have to seek
+the truth in the reconciliation, or at least the cohabitation, of
+apparent contradictories.
+
+To us who are concerned in tracing the progress of mankind as a whole,
+and constantly find the roots of progress in the growth of the social
+spirit, the development, that is, of unity of spirit and of action on a
+wider and deeper scale, there is one aspect of biological truth, as the
+evolutionists have lately revealed it, which is of special interest. The
+living thing is an organism of which the characteristic is the constant
+effort to preserve its unity. This is in fact the definition of an
+organism. It only dies or suffers diminution in order to reproduce
+itself, and the new creature repeats by some sort of organic memory the
+same preservative acts that its parents did. We recognize life by these
+manifestations. A merely material, non-living thing, such as a crystal,
+cannot thus make good its loss, nor can it assimilate unlike substance
+and make it a part of itself. But these things are of the nature of
+life. Now mankind, as a whole, has, if our argument is correct, this
+characteristic of an organism: it is bound together by more than
+mechanical or accidental links. It is _one_ by the nature of its being,
+and the study of mankind, the highest branch of the science of life,
+rests, or should rest, upon the basis of those common functions by which
+humanity is held together and distinguished from the rest of the animate
+world.
+
+Just as in passing from the mechanical sciences to that of life, we
+noticed that the general laws of the lower sphere still held good, but
+that new factors not analysable into those of the former had to be
+reckoned with, so in passing from the animate realm, as a whole, to man
+its highest member, we find that, while animal, and subject to the
+general laws of animality, he adds features which distinguish him as
+another order and cannot be found elsewhere. His unity as an organism
+has a progressive quality possessed by no other species. Step by step
+his mind advances into the recesses of time and space, and makes the
+farthest objects that his mind can reach a part of his being. His unity
+of organization, of which the humblest animalcule is a simple type, goes
+far beyond the preservation or even the improvement of his species: it
+touches the infinite though it cannot contain it. To trace this widening
+process is the true key to progress, the _idée-mère_ of history. For
+while man's evolution has its practical side, like that of other
+species,--the needs of nutrition, of reproduction, of adapting himself
+to his environment,--with man this is the basis and not the end. The end
+is, first the organization of himself as a world-being, conscious of his
+unity, and then the illimitable conquest of truth and goodness as far as
+his ever-growing powers extend.
+
+Man's reason is thus, as philosophers have always taught, his special
+characteristic, and takes the place for him, on a higher plane, of the
+law of organic growth common to all living things. In this we join
+hands, across two thousand years, with Aristotle: he would have
+understood us and used almost identical language. But the content of the
+words as we use them and their applications are immeasurably greater.
+
+The content is the mass of knowledge which man's reason has accumulated
+and partly put in order since Aristotle taught. It is now so great that
+thoroughly to master a single branch is arduous labour for a lifetime
+of concentrated toil, and at the end of it new discoveries will crowd
+upon the worker and he will die with all his earlier notions crying for
+revision. No case so patent, so conclusive, of the reality of human
+unity and the paramount need of organization. The individual here can
+only thrive and only be of service as a small member of a great whole,
+one atom in a planet, one cell in a body. The demand which Comte raised
+more than fifty years ago for another class of specialists, the
+specialists in generalities, is now being taken up by men of science
+themselves. But the field has now so much extended and is so much fuller
+in every part, that it would seem that nothing less than a committee of
+Aristotles could survey the whole. And even this is but one aspect of
+the matter. Just as the genesis of science was in the daily needs of
+men--the cultivators whose fields must be re-measured after the
+flooding, the priests who had to fix the right hour for sacrifice--so
+all through its history science has grown and in the future will grow
+still more by following the suggestions of practice. It gathers strength
+by contact with the world and life, and it should use its strength in
+making the world more fit to live in. Thus our committee of scientific
+philosophers needs to have constantly in touch with it not one but many
+boards of scientific practitioners.
+
+The past which has given us this most wonderful of all the fruits of
+time, does not satisfy us equally as to the use that has been made of
+it. Our crowded slums do not proclaim the glory of Watt and Stephenson
+as the heavens remind us of Kepler and Newton. Selfishness has grown fat
+on ill-paid labour, and jealous nations have sharpened their weapons
+with every device that science can suggest. But a sober judgement, as
+well as the clearest evidence of history, dictates a more hopeful
+conclusion. Industry, the twin brother of science, has vastly increased
+our wealth, our comfort, and our capacity for enjoyment. Medicine, the
+most human of her children, has lengthened our lives, fortified our
+bodies, and alleviated our suffering. Every chapter in this volume gives
+some evidence of the beneficent power of science. For religion,
+government, morality, even art, are all profoundly influenced by the
+knowledge that man has acquired of the world around him and his
+practical conclusions from it. These do not, with the possible exception
+of art, contradict the thesis of a general improvement of mankind, and
+science must therefore claim a share--it would seem the decisive
+share--in the result. We speak, of course, of science in the sense which
+has been developed in this essay, of the bright well-ordered centre to
+our knowledge which is always spreading and bringing more of the
+surrounding fringe, which is also spreading, into the well-defined area.
+In this sense religion, morality and government have all within historic
+times come within the range of clear and well-ordered thought: and
+mankind standing thus within the light, stands more firmly and with
+better hope. He sees the dark spots and the weaknesses. He knows the
+remedies, though his will is often unequal to applying them. And even
+with this revelation of weakness and ignorance, he is on the whole
+happier and readier to grapple with his fate.
+
+If this appears a fair diagnosis of the Western mind in the midst of its
+greatest external crisis, the reason for this amazing firmness of mind
+and stability of society must be sought in the structure which science
+and industry combined have built around us. The savage, untutored in
+astronomy, may think that an eclipse betokens the end of the world.
+Science convinces him that it will pass. Just so the modern world
+trained to an order of thought and of society which rests on world-wide
+activities elaborated through centuries of common effort, awaits the
+issue of our darkened present calmly and unmoved. The things of the mind
+on which all nations have co-operated in the past will re-assert their
+sway. Fundamentally this is a triumph for the scientific spirit, the
+order which man has now succeeded in establishing between himself and
+his surroundings.
+
+The country is demanding--and rightly--a stronger bias in our
+educational system for teaching of a scientific kind; but teachers and
+professors are not unnaturally perplexed. They see the immeasurable
+scope of the new knowledge; they know the labour, often ineffective,
+that has been expended in teaching the rudiments of the old
+'humanities'. And now a task is propounded to them before which the old
+one with all its faults seems definite, manageable and formative of
+character. The classical world which has been the staple of our
+education for 400 years is a finished thing and we can compass it in
+thought. It lives indeed, but unconsciously, in our lives, as we go
+about our business. This new world into which our youth has now to
+enter, rests also on the past, but it is still more present; it grows
+all round us faster than we can keep pace with its earlier stages. How
+then can such a thing be used as an instrument of education where above
+all something is needed of clear and definite purpose, stimulating in
+itself and tending to mental growth and activity in after life? We could
+not, even if we would, offer any satisfactory answer here to one of the
+most troubled questions of the day. Decades of experiments will be
+needed before even a tolerable solution can be reached. But the argument
+pursued in this and other essays may suggest a line of approach. This
+must lie in a reconciliation between science and history, or rather in
+the recognition that science rightly understood is the key to history,
+and that the history best worth study is the record of man's collective
+thought in face of the infinite complexities, the barriers and byways,
+the lights and shadows of life and nature. From the study of man's
+approach to knowledge and unity in history each new-coming student may
+shape his own. He sees a unity of thought not wholly unattainable, a
+foundation laid beneath the storms of time. To a mind thus trained
+should come an eagerness to carry on the conquests of the past and to
+apply the lessons gained to the amelioration of the present.
+
+This we may hope from the well-disposed. But for all, the contemplation
+of a universe where man's mind has worked for ages in unravelling its
+secrets and describing its wonders, must bring a sense of reverence as
+well as trust. It is no dry category of abstract truths to which we turn
+and would have others turn, but a world as bright and splendid as the
+rainbow to the savage or the forest to the poet or the heavens to the
+lonely watcher on the Babylonian plain. The glories and the depths
+remain, deeper and more glorious, with all the added marvels of man's
+exploring thought. The seeing eye which a true education will one day
+give us, may read man's history in the world we live in, and read the
+world with the full illumination of a united human vision--the eyes of
+us all.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+Alcan, _De la méthode dans les Sciences_.
+
+Mach, _History of Mechanics_, Kegan Paul.
+
+Thomson, _Science of Life_, Blackie.
+
+Thomson, _Science in the Nineteenth Century_, Chambers.
+
+_New Calendar of Great Men_, Macmillan.
+
+_The Darwin Centenary Volume._
+
+Bergson, _Creative Evolution_.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[80] See Lewes, 'Aristotle, a chapter in the History of Science'.
+
+[81] H. Bouasse, _La Méthode dans les Sciences_, Alcan.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+PROGRESS IN PHILOSOPHY
+
+J.A. SMITH
+
+
+To contend that there has been progress in Philosophy may seem but a
+desperate endeavour. For the reproach against it of unprogressiveness is
+of long standing: where other forms of human knowledge have undoubtedly
+advanced, Philosophy, in modern times at any rate, has (so it is said)
+remained stationary, propounding its outworn problems, its vain and
+empty solutions. Because of this failure it has by common consent been
+deposed from its once proud position at the head of the sciences and
+obliged to confess, in the words of the Trojan queen:
+
+                  modo maxima rerum
+    Nunc trahor exul inops.
+
+The charge of unprogressiveness is not made against it by its foes
+alone; the truth of it is admitted by some of its best friends. If
+Voltaire exclaims 'O métaphysique, métaphysique, nous sommes aussi
+avancés qu'aux temps des Druides', Kant sadly admits the fact, sets
+himself to diagnose its cause, and if possible to discover or devise a
+remedy. Yet we must remember that it was philosophers who first descried
+those currents in the world of events which the non-philosophic,
+borrowing the name from them, call Progress, who first attempted to
+determine their direction and the possible goal of their convergence,
+and laboured to clear their own and others' minds in regard to the
+meaning, to capture which the name was thrown out as a net into the
+ocean of experience. Nor must we forget that it was in their own chosen
+field--the world of human thoughts and actions--that they from the
+beginning seemed to themselves to find the surest evidence of the
+reality of Progress. While the world that surrounded and hemmed them and
+their fellows in might or must be regarded as unchanging and
+unchangeable, doomed for ever to reproduce and monotonously reiterate
+whatsoever it had once done and been, the mind or spirit of Man in its
+own realm seemed capable of going beyond all its past achievements and
+rising to new heights, not merely here and there or in isolated
+instances but in such numbers or masses as to raise for long periods of
+history the general level of human efficiency and welfare. It is true
+that many of those who noted these advances or profited by them did not
+always admit that they took place in, or were due to the agency of,
+Philosophy. The advances were most often credited to other powers and
+the new territory claimed by their representatives. The contributions
+made by Philosophy to the general improvement of human life were and are
+obscure, difficult to trace, easily missed or forgotten. It came about
+that the philosopher was misconceived as one indifferent to ordinary
+human interests and disdainful of the more obvious advantages secured by
+others, pressing and urging forward and upward into a cloudland where
+the light was too dim for the eyes of man and the paths too uncertain
+for his feet. Unsatisfied with the region where Man had learned by the
+slow and painful lessons of experience to build himself a habitable city
+he dreamed of something higher, aspiring to explore beyond and above
+where the light of that experience shone and illuminated. Perhaps the
+main idea that the name of Philosophy now to most suggests is that of a
+Utopian ideal of knowledge so wide and so high that it must be by sane
+and sober minds pronounced for ever set beyond the reach of human
+faculty, an ideal which perhaps we cannot help forming and which
+constantly tempts us forward like a mirage, but which like a mirage
+leads us into waste and barren places, so much so that it is no small
+part of human wisdom to resist its subtle seductions and to confine our
+efforts to the pursuit of such ends as we may reasonably regard as well
+within the compass of our powers of thought and action. It is folly, we
+are told, to adventure ourselves upon the uncharted seas into which
+philosophers invite us, to waste our lives and perhaps break our hearts
+in the vain search for a knowledge that is for ever denied us. After
+all, there is much that we can know, and in the knowledge of which we
+can better the estate of Man, relieving him from many of his most
+pressing terrors and distresses. To cherish other hopes is to deceive
+ourselves to our own and our fellows' undoing, to refuse them our help
+and fail to play our part in the common business of mankind. There is
+surely in the world enough suffering and sorrow and sin to engage all
+our energies in dealing with them, nor are our endeavours to do so so
+plainly fruitless as to discourage from perseverance in them. Where in
+this task our hearts do faint and fail, are there not other means than
+the discredited nostrum of Philosophy to revive our hopes and recruit
+our forces? It was only, we are sometimes reminded, in the darkest days
+of human history that men turned desperately to Philosophy for comfort
+and consolation--how surely and demonstrably, we are told, in vain! When
+other duties are so urgent and immediate, have we even the right to
+consume our energies otherwise than in their direct discharge? And is it
+not presumption to ask for any further light than that which is
+vouchsafed to us in the ordinary course of experience or, if that is
+insufficient, in and by Religion?
+
+Much in this plea for a final relinquishment of aid from Philosophy in
+the furtherance of human progress is plausible and more than plausible.
+Yet the hope or, if you will, the dream of attaining some form or kind
+or degree of knowledge which the sciences do not and cannot supply and
+perhaps deny to be possible, some steadiness and firmness of assurance
+other and beyond the confidence of religious faith, is not yet extinct,
+is perhaps inextinguishable, and though it often takes extravagant and
+even morbid and repulsive forms, still haunts and tantalizes many, nor
+these the least wise or sane of our kind, so that they count all the
+labour they spend upon its search worth all the pains. Not for
+themselves alone do they seek it; they view themselves as not alone in
+the quest, but engaged in a matter of universally human moment. In the
+measure in which they count themselves to have attained any result they
+do not hoard it or grudge it to others. The notion of philosophic truth
+as something to be shared and enjoyed only by a few--as what is called
+'esoteric'--is no longer in vogue and is indeed felt to involve an
+essential self-contradiction; rather it is conceived as something the
+value of which is assured and enhanced by being imparted. Those who
+believe themselves to be by nature or (it may be) accident appointed to
+the office of its quest, by no means feel that they are thereby divided
+from their fellows as a peculiar people or a privileged and exclusive
+priesthood, but much rather as fellow servants enlisted and engaged in
+the public service of mankind. Least of all do they believe that their
+efforts are foredoomed to inevitable failure, that progress therein is
+not to be looked for, or that they and their predecessors have hitherto
+made no advance towards what they and, as they also believe, all men
+sought and still seek. To them the history of Philosophy for say the
+last two thousand years is not the dreary and dispiriting narrative of
+repeated error and defeat, but the record of a slow but secure and
+steady advance in which, as nowhere else, the mind of Man celebrates and
+enjoys triumphs over the mightiest obstacles, kindling itself to an
+ever-brightening flame. Reviewing its own past in history the spirit of
+Philosophy sees its own inner light, which is its act and its essence,
+constantly increasing, spreading ever wider into the circumambient dark,
+and touching far-off and hitherto undiscovered peaks with the fire of a
+coming dawn. In place of the starlight of Science or the moonlight of
+Religion it sees a sun arise flooding the world with light and warmth
+and life. High hopes, high claims; but can they be made good, or even
+rationally entertained? Suffice it here that they be openly avowed and
+proclaimed to be laid up in the heart of the philosophic spirit,
+'dreaming', and yet with waking eyes, 'of things to come'. Or rather
+shall we not say, seeing that its eyes are unsealed and the vision
+therefore no dream, beholding a present--an ever-present--Reality?
+
+It was Philosophy, or philosophers, as I have said, that first discerned
+the fact of Progress, named it, and divined its lineaments. To
+Philosophy the name and notion of Progress belongs as of right--the
+right of first occupation. Merely to have invented a name for the fact
+is no small service, for thus the fact was fixed for further study and
+examination. But with the name Philosophy gave us the idea, the notion,
+and therewith the fact began to be understood and to become amenable to
+further and further explanation. To this further explanation Philosophy
+gave notable assistance. To 'elaborate our concepts' has been said to be
+the whole business of Philosophy, that is, to arrest the vague and
+shifting meanings that float before our minds loosely attached to the
+words of ordinary careless speech, to fix their outlines,
+distinguishing, defining, ordering and organizing until each mass of
+meaning is improved and refined into a thought worthy to be called a
+notion, a fit member of the world of mind, a seat and source of
+intellectual light. In this work Philosophy proceeds and succeeds simply
+by reflecting on whatever meaning it has in whatever manner already
+acquired; it employs no strange apparatus or recondite methods, only
+continues more thoughtfully and conscientiously to use the familiar
+means by which the earlier simpler meanings were appropriated and
+developed, following the beaten tracks of the mind's native and
+spontaneous movement. Much more rarely than the sciences has it recourse
+to a technical vocabulary, being content to express itself in ordinary
+words though using them and their collocations with a careful delicacy
+and painstaking adroitness. To follow it in these uses demands an
+effort, for nothing is perhaps more difficult than to force our thoughts
+to run counter to our customary heedless use of words and to learn to
+employ them even for a short time with a steady precision of
+significance. Yet unless this effort is resolutely made we must remain
+the easy prey of manifold confusions and errors which trip us in the
+dark. Our words degrade into tokens which experience will not
+cash--tangles of symbols which we cannot retranslate.
+
+But Philosophy is more than the attempt to refine and subtilize our
+ordinary words so as to fit them for the higher service of
+interpretative thought, more even than the endeavour to improve the
+stock of ideas no matter how come by, by which we interpret to ourselves
+whatever it imports us to understand. All this it is and does, or
+strives to do, but only as subsidiary to its true business and real aim.
+All this it might do and do successfully, and yet make or bring about no
+substantial progress in itself or elsewhere. And when progress in
+Philosophy is spoken of, it is not either such improvement in language
+nor such improvement in ideas that alone or mainly is meant.
+
+What is claimed for (or denied to it) under the name of Progress is an
+advance in knowledge, knowledge clear-sighted, grounded, and assured,
+knowledge of some authentic and indubitable reality. It is by the
+attainment of such knowledge, by progress in and towards it, that the
+claim of Philosophy to be progressive must stand or fall. To the
+question whether it can make good its claim to the possession and
+increase of this knowledge we must give special attention, for if
+Philosophy fails in this it fails in all.
+
+The oldest name for the knowledge in question was simply Wisdom and, in
+some ways, in spite of its apparent arrogance this is the best name for
+what is sought--or missed. Yet from the beginning the name was felt not
+sufficiently to distinguish what was meant from the high skill of the
+cunning craftsman and the worldly wisdom of the man of affairs, the
+statesman or soldier or trader. In the case of all these it was
+difficult to disengage the knowledge involved from natural or trained
+practical dexterity. What was desired and required was knowledge
+distinguished but not divorced from practice and application--'pure
+knowledge' as it was sometimes called; not divorced, I repeat, for it
+was not conceived as without bearing upon the conduct of life, but still
+distinguished, as furnishing light rather than profit. For good or evil
+Philosophy began by considering what it sought and hoped to reach as
+pre-eminently knowledge in some distinctive sense, and having so begun
+it turned to reflect once more upon what it meant by so conceiving it
+and to make this meaning more precise and clear. So it came to present
+to itself as its aim or goal a special kind or degree of knowledge, to
+be inspired and guided by the hope of that. Practical as in many ways
+was the concern of ancient philosophy--its whole bent was towards the
+bettering of human life--it sought to achieve this by the extension and
+deepening of knowledge, and not either through the cultivation or
+refinement of emotion or the organization of practical, civil or social
+or philanthropic activities. It laboured--and laboured not in vain--to
+further the increase of knowledge by defining to itself in advance the
+kind or degree of knowledge which would accomplish the ultimate aim of
+its endeavour or subserve its accomplishment. Hence we must learn to
+view with a sympathetic eye its repeated essays to give precision and
+detail to the conception or ideal of knowledge.
+
+In form the answer rendered to its request to itself for a definition,
+was determined by the principle that the knowledge which was sought and
+alone, if found, could satisfy, was knowledge of the real, or as it was
+at first more simply expressed, of what is, or what really and veritably
+is. Refusing the name of knowledge except to what had this as its
+object, men turned to consider the nature of the object which stood or
+could stand in this relation. With this they contrasted what we, after
+them, call the phenomena, the appearances, the manifold aspects,
+constantly shifting with the shifting points of view of the observer or
+many observers of it, inconstant, unsteady, superficial, mirrored
+through the senses and imagination, multiplied and distorted in
+divergent and changing opinions, or misrepresented and even caricatured
+in the turbid medium of ordinary speech, like a clouded image on the
+broken waters of a rushing stream. 'It'--so at first they spoke of the
+object of true or 'philosophic' knowledge--was one and single, eternal
+and unchangeable, a universe or world-order of parts fixed for ever in
+their external relations and inward structure. In each and all of us
+there was, as it were, a tiny mirror that could be cleared so as to
+reflect all this, and in so far as such reflection took place an inner
+light was kindled in each which was a lamp to his path. Knowing--for to
+know was so to reflect the world as it really was--knowing, man came to
+self-possession and self-satisfaction--to peace and joy--and was even
+'on this bank and shoal of time' raised beyond the reach of all
+accidents and evils of mortal existence--looking around and down upon
+all that could harm or hurt him and seeing it to be in its law-abiding
+orderliness and eternal changelessness the embodiment of good. So
+viewing it, man learned to feel the Universe his true home, and was
+inspired not only with awe but with a high loyalty and public spirit.
+'The poet says "Dear City of Cecrops", and shall I not say "Dear City of
+God"?'
+
+The knowledge thus reached or believed to be attainable was more and
+more discriminated from what was offered or supplied by Art or Science
+or Religion, though it was still often confused with each and all of
+them. As opposed to that of Art, it was not direct or immediate vision
+flashed as it were upon the inner eye in moments of inspiration or
+excitement; as opposed to that of Science, it was a knowledge that
+pierced below the surface and the seeming of Nature and History; as
+opposed to that of Religion (which was rather faith than knowledge), it
+was sober, unimaginative, cleansed of emotional accompaniment and
+admixture, the 'dry light' of the wise soul. True to the principle which
+I have stated, ancient Philosophy proclaimed that the only knowledge in
+the end worth having was knowledge of Fact--of what lay behind all
+seeming however fair--Fact unmodified and unmodifiable by human wish or
+will; it bade us know the world in which we live and move and have our
+being, know it as it is truly and in itself, and knowing it love it,
+loyally acquiescing in its purposes and subserving its ends. In all this
+there was progress (was there not?) to a view, to a truth (how else
+shall we speak of it?) which has always, when apprehended, begotten a
+high temper in heroic hearts. Surely in having reached in thought so
+high and so far the mind of man had progressed in knowledge and in
+wisdom.
+
+But now a change took place, from which we must date the rise or birth
+of modern philosophy. Hitherto on the whole the mind of man had looked
+outward and sought knowledge of what lay or seemed to lie outside
+itself. So looking and gazing ever deeper it had encountered a spectacle
+of admirable and awe-compelling order, yet one which for that very
+reason seemed appallingly remote from, if not alien to, all human
+businesses and concerns. Now it turned inward and found within itself
+not only matter of more immediate or pressing interest, but a world that
+compelled attention, excited curiosity, rewarded study. Slowly and
+gradually the knowledge of this, the inner world--the world of the
+thinker's self--became the central object of philosophic reflection. The
+knowledge that was most required--that was all-important and
+indispensable (so man began explicitly to realize)--was knowledge of the
+Self, not of the outer world that at best could never be more than
+known, but of the self that knew or could know it, that could both know
+and be known. Henceforward what is studied is not knowledge of
+reality--of any and every reality--or of external reality, but knowledge
+of the Self which can know as well as be known. And the process by which
+it is sought is reflection, for the self-knowledge is not the knowledge
+of other selves, but the knowledge of just that Self which knows itself
+and no other. Thus the knowledge sought is once more and now finally
+distinguished from the knowledge offered or supplied by Art or Science
+or Religion: not by Art, for the Self cannot appear and has no seeming
+nor can it any way be pictured or described or imagined; not by
+Science, for it lies beyond and beneath and behind all observation, nor
+can it be counted or measured or weighed; not by Religion, for knowledge
+of it comes from within and the disclosure of its nature is by the
+self-witness of the Self to its self, not by revelation of any other to
+it. Thus there is disclosed the slowly-won and slowly-revealed secret of
+modern Philosophy, that the knowledge which is indispensable, which is
+necessary as the consummation and key-stone of all other knowledge, is
+knowledge of the knowing-self, self-knowledge, or, as it is sometimes
+more technically called, self-consciousness, with the corollary that
+this knowledge cannot be won by any methods known to or specially
+characteristic of Science or Art or Religion. To become self-conscious,
+to progress in self-consciousness is the end, and the way or means to it
+is by reflection--the special method of Philosophy.
+
+This is the step in advance made by the modern spirit beyond all
+discoveries of the ancients; it is the truth by the apprehension of
+which the modern spirit and its world is made what it is. Not outside us
+lies Truth or the Truth: Truth dwelleth in the inner man--_in interiore
+hominis habitat veritas_. Is this not progress, progress in wisdom, and
+to what else can we ascribe the advance save to Philosophy?
+
+It was one of the earliest utterances of modern Philosophy, and one
+which it has never found reason to retract, that the Self which knows
+can and does know itself better than aught else whatsoever, and in that
+knowledge can without end make confident and sure-footed advance. To
+itself the Self is the most certain and the most knowable of all
+realities--with this it is most acquainted, this it has light in itself
+to explore, of this it can confidently foresee and foretell the method
+of advance to further and further knowledge. It knows not only its
+existence but its essence, its nature, and it knows by what procedure,
+by what ordered effort or exercise of will it can progress to height
+beyond height of its self-knowledge. I say, it knows it, but it also
+knows that that knowledge cannot be attained all at once or taken
+complete and ready-made, for it _is_ itself a progress, a self-created
+and self-determined progress, and on that condition progress alone is or
+is real. For it to be is not to be at the beginning or at the end of
+this process, but to be always coming to be, coming to be what it is not
+and yet also what it has in it to be. Of nothing else is Progress so
+intimately the essence and very being; if we ask 'What progresses or
+evolves?', the most certain answer is 'The spirit which is in man, and
+what it progresses in, is knowledge of itself, which is wisdom'.
+Speaking of and for Philosophy I venture to maintain that nothing is
+more certain than that that spirit which has created it has grown, is
+growing, and will ever grow in wisdom, and that by reflection upon
+itself and its history--nor can the gates of darkness and error prevail
+against the irresistible march of its triumphant progress.
+
+As we look back the history of Philosophy seems strewn with the debris
+of outworn or outlived errors, but out of them all emerges this clear
+and assured truth, that in self-knowledge lies the master-light of all
+our seeing, inexhaustibly casting its rays into the retreating shadow
+world that now surrounds us, melting all mists and dispelling all
+clouds, and that the way to it is unveiled, mapped and charted in
+advance so that henceforward we can walk sure-footedly therein. Yet that
+does not mean that the work of Philosophy is done, that it can fold its
+hands and sit down, for only in the seeking is its prize found and there
+is no goal or end other than the process itself. For this too is its
+discovery, that not by, but in, endless reflection is the Truth
+concerning it known, the Truth that each generation must ever anew win
+and earn it for itself. The result is not without the process, nor the
+end without the means: the fact _is_ the process and other fact there is
+none. In other forms of so-called 'knowledge' we can sever the
+conclusion from its premisses, and the result can be given without the
+process, but with self-knowledge it is not so and no generation, or
+individual, can communicate it ready-made to another, but can only point
+the way and bid others help themselves. And if this, so put, seems hard
+doctrine, I can only remind you that to philosophize has always meant
+'to think by and for oneself'.
+
+It is perhaps more necessary to formulate the warning that what is here
+called self-knowledge and pronounced to constitute the very essence of
+the spirit that is in man, is far removed from what sometimes bears its
+name, the extended and minute acquaintance by the individual mind with
+its individual peculiarities or idiosyncrasies, its weaknesses and
+vanities, its whims and eccentricities; nor is it to be confused with
+the still wider acquaintance with those that make up our common human
+nature in all its folly and frailty which is sometimes called 'knowledge
+of human nature'; no, nor with such knowledge as psychological science,
+with its methods of observation and induction and experiment, offers or
+supplies. It is knowledge of something that lies far deeper within
+us--'the inward man', which is not merely alike or akin but is the same
+in all of us; beneath all our differences, strong against all our
+weaknesses, wise against all our follies, what each of us rightly calls
+his true self and yet what is not his alone, but all men's also. As we
+reflect upon it duly, what discloses or reveals itself to us is a self
+which is both our very own and yet common or universal, the self of each
+and yet the self of all. The more we get to apprehend and understand it,
+the more we become and know ourselves, not so much as being but as
+becoming one with one another; the differences that sunder us in
+feeling and thought and action melting away like mist. The removal of
+these differences is just the unveiling of it, in which it at once comes
+to be and to be known. In coming to know it we create it. The unity of
+the spirit thus becomes and is known as indubitable fact, or rather (I
+must repeat) not as fact, as if it were or were anything before being
+known, but as something which is ever more and more coming to be, in the
+measure in which it is coming to be known--known to itself. For this is
+the hard lesson of modern philosophy, that our inmost nature and most
+genuine self is not aught ready-made or given, but something which is
+created in and by the process of our coming to know it, which progresses
+in existence and substantiality and value as our knowledge of it
+progresses in width and depth and self-assurance. The process is one of
+creative--self-creative--evolution, in which each advance deposits a
+result which prescribes the next step and supplies all the conditions
+for it, and so constantly furnishes all that is required for an endless
+progress in reality and worth. This is the process in which the spirit
+of man capitalizes and substantiates its activities, committing its
+gains to secure custody, amassing and using them for its
+self-enrichment--in which it depends on no other than itself and is
+sovereign master of its future and its fate. This is the way in which
+selves are made, or rather, make themselves.
+
+This is the discovery of modern Philosophy, the now patent secret which
+it offers for the interpretation of all mysteries and the solving of all
+problems--and it offers it with unquestioning assurance, for it has
+explored the ground and has awakened to the true method of progress
+within it. And as I have said or implied, to the reflective mind regress
+is impossible, it cannot go back upon itself, and with due tenderness
+and gratitude it has set behind it the things of its unreflective
+childhood. It stands on the stable foundation of the witness of the
+spirit within us to itself, to its own nature, its own powers and its
+own rights; it knows itself as the knower, the interpreter, the teacher,
+and therefore the master and maker of itself. Yet we must not identify
+or confuse this our deeper or deepest self which we thus create with the
+separate selves or souls which each of us is; it is not any one of them
+nor all of them together, unless we give to the word 'together' a new
+and more pregnant sense than it has yet come to bear. It is not the
+'tribal' or 'collective' or 'social' self, for it is not made by
+congregation or collection or association, but by some far more intimate
+unification than is signified by any of these terms, namely by coming
+together in and by knowledge. It is the spirit which is in us all and in
+which we all are, which is more yet not other than we, without which we
+are nothing and do nothing and yet which is veritably the spirit of man,
+the immortal hero of all the tragedy and comedy--the whole drama--of
+human history; it is of this spirit as it is by it, that Philosophy has
+in repeated and resolute reflection come to know the nature and the
+method of its progress. Such knowledge has come into the world and
+prevails more widely and more potently than ever before; possessed in
+fullness by but a few, it is open and available to all and radiates as
+from a beacon light over the whole field of human experience; at that
+fire every man can light his candle. This is the light in which alone
+the record of man's thoughts and achievements can be construed and which
+exhibits them as steps and stages on that triumphant march to higher and
+higher levels such as alone we can rightly name Progress. Where else
+than in History, and, above all, in the History of Knowledge, is
+Progress manifested, and in that where more certainly than in the
+unretreating and unrevoked advance towards a deeper, a truer, a wiser
+knowledge of itself by the spirit that is in and is, Man?
+
+Yes, such knowledge, truth and wisdom now exists and is securely ours,
+though to inherit it each generation and each individual must win it
+afresh and having won it must develop and promote it, or it ceases not
+only to work but to be. For it exists only as it is made or rather only
+in the act and fact of its progress, and so for it not to progress is at
+once to return to impotence and nothingness. And it is we who maintain
+it in being, maintaining it by endless reiterated efforts of reflection,
+and so maintaining it we maintain ourselves, resting or relying upon it
+and using it as a source of strength and a fulcrum or a platform for
+further effort. Upon self-knowledge in this sense all other 'knowledge'
+reposes; upon it and the knowledge of other selves and the world, which
+flows from it, depends the possibility of all practical advance. In the
+dark all progress is impossible.
+
+But since this discovery was made and made good, the spirit of
+Philosophy has not stood still; it has gone on, and is still going on,
+to extend and deepen and secure its conquests. Once more it has turned
+from its fruitful and enlightening concentration on the inner self and
+its life to review what lies or seems to lie around and outside it. It
+finds that those who have stayed, or fallen, behind its audacious but
+justified advance in self-knowledge, still cherish a view of what is
+external to this (the true or real self so now made patent), thoughts or
+fancies which misconceive and misrepresent it--thoughts persisted in
+against the feebler protesting voices of Art and Religion and so held
+precariously and unstably though apparently grounded upon the authority
+of Science. To the unphilosophic or not yet philosophic mind the spirit
+of man, already in imagination multiplied and segregated into individual
+'souls', appears to be surrounded with an environment of alien
+character, often harsh to man's emotions, often rebellious or
+untractable to his purposes, often impenetrable to his understanding,
+and in a word indifferent or hostile to his ideals and aspirations after
+progress and good. Nay, the individual souls seem to act towards one
+another separately and collectively as such hindrances, and again, each
+individual soul seems to be encrusted with insuperable impediments. Even
+the light within is enclosed in an opaque screen which prevents or
+counteracts its outflow, so that the spirit within is as it were
+entombed or imprisoned. 'Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems us in,' we
+cannot communicate with one another or join with one another in thought
+or deed; and the hope of progress seems defeated by the recalcitrant
+matter that shell upon shell encases us. The world of our bodies, of the
+bodies and spirits of others, and all the vast _compages_ of things and
+forces which we call 'Nature' blinds and baffles us, mocks our hopes and
+breaks our hearts. How idle to dream that amidst and against all this
+neutrality or hostility any substantial or secure advance can be made!
+
+In answer to all these thoughts, these doubts and fears, Philosophy is
+beginning with increasing boldness to speak a word, not of mere comfort
+and consolation, but of secure and confident wisdom. All this so-called
+'external' nature and environment is not hostile or alien to the self or
+spirit which is in man, it is akin and allied to it as we now know it to
+be. Whatever is real and not merely apparent in History or Nature is
+rational, is of the same stuff and character as that which is within us.
+It too is spiritual, the appearance and embodiment of what is one in
+nature and mode of being with what lies deepest and is most potent in
+us. So far as it is not that, it is appearance and not reality, woven
+like a dream by imagination or endowed with an unstable and shifting
+quasi-reality by our thoughts and suppositions and fancies about we
+know not what. Not that it is an illusion, still less a delusion, rather
+what it is is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual
+reality, a symbol beautiful, orderly, awe-inspiring yet mutilated,
+partial, confused, of something deeper and more real, the expression,
+the face and gesture, of a spirit that, as ours does, knows itself, its
+own profound being and meaning, and does what it does in the light of
+such knowledge, a spirit which above all progresses endlessly towards
+and in a richer and fuller knowledge of itself. What we call
+Fact--historical or natural--is essentially such an expression, on the
+one hand a finished expression, set in the past and therefore for ever
+beyond the possibility of change and so of progress, an exhausted or
+dead expression, on the other hand a passing into the light of what was
+before unknown even to the expresser's self, an act by which was made
+and secured a self-discovery or self-revelation, a creative act of
+self-knowledge and so significant and interpretable. This double
+character of events in History and Nature is dimly descried in what we
+specially call 'nature', but comes more fully into view in the sphere of
+human history, where each step is at once a deed and a discovery, a
+contribution to the constitution of the world of fact and a fulguration
+of the light within illuminating facts as the condition of its own
+inexhaustible continuance. The world of Fact, artistic or aesthetic,
+scientific, moral, political, economic, is what the spirit builds round
+itself, creating it out of its own substance, while it itself in
+creating it grows within, evolving out of itself into itself and
+advancing in knowledge or wisdom and power. And out of its now securely
+won self-knowledge it declares that it--itself--is the source and spring
+of all real fact whatsoever, which is its self-created expression, made
+by it in its own interests, and for its own good, the better and better
+to know itself. Nothing is or can be alien, still less hostile to it,
+for 'in wisdom has it made them all'. Looking back and around it
+re-reads in all fact the results of its own power of self-expression.
+Nothing is but what it has made.
+
+All this might perhaps have been put very simply by saying that ever
+since man has set himself to know his own mind in the right way, he has
+succeeded better and better, and that in knowing his own mind he has
+come to know and is still coming to know all else beside, including all
+that at first sight seems other than, or even counter to, his own mind.
+He has learned what manner of being he is, how that being has been made
+and how it continues to be made and developed, and again, how in the
+course of its self-creation and self-advance it deposits itself in
+'fact' and reflecting on that fact rises beyond and above itself in
+knowledge and power. He is mind or spirit, and what lies behind and
+around him is spiritual. As he reflects upon this the meaning of it
+becomes ever more clear and distinct, ordered and organized, and at the
+same time more substantial, more real, more lively and potent. In
+becoming known what was before dead and dark and threatening or
+obstructive or hostile is made transparent, alive, utilisable,
+contributing to the constantly growing self that knows and is known.
+Here is the growing point of reality, the _fons emanationis_ of truth
+and worth and being, evidencing its power not as it were in increase of
+bulk, but in the enhancing of value. And surely here is Progress, which
+consists not in mere enlargement or expansion but in the heightening of
+forces to a new power--in a word, in their elevation to a more
+spiritual, a more intelligent and therefore more potent, level.
+
+To the artistic eye the universe presents itself as a vast and moving
+spectacle, to the scientific mind as the theatre of forces which repeat
+their work with a mechanical uniformity or perhaps fatally run down to
+a predestined and predictable final arrest, to the devout or religious
+soul as the constant efflux of a beneficent will, unweariedly kind,
+caring for the humblest of its creatures, august, worshipful, deserving
+of endless adoration and love, while to the philosophic mind it is known
+and ever more to be known as the self-expression of a mind in essence
+one with all minds that know it in knowing themselves, know it as the
+work or product of a mind engaged or absorbed in knowing itself, and so
+creating itself and all that is requisite that it may learn more and
+more what is hidden or stored from all eternity within its plenitude. At
+least we may say that the conception of a Mind which in order to know
+itself creates the conditions of such knowledge, which wills to learn
+whatever can be learned of itself from whatever it does, supplies the
+best pattern or original after which to model our vaguer and more
+blurred conceptions of progressive existence and being elsewhere. It
+furnishes to us an ideal of a progress which realizes or maintains and
+advances itself, for it is independent upon external conditions. The
+Progress of Philosophy or of Wisdom is a palmary instance of progress
+achieved out of the internal resources of that which progresses. And
+after this pattern we least untruly and least unworthily conceive the
+mode of that eternal and universal Progress which is the life of the
+Whole within and as part of which we live.
+
+The aim of Philosophy is not edification but the possession and
+enjoyment of Truth, and the Truth may wear an aspect which, while it
+enlightens, also blinds or even at first appals and paralyses. And
+certainly Reality or Philosophy as has come to know it and proclaims it
+to be, is not such as either directly to warm our hearts or stimulate
+our energies. Not to do either has Philosophy come into the world, nor
+so does it help to bring Progress about; nor does it offer prizes to
+those who pursue either moral improvement or business success, nor
+again does it increase that information concerning 'nature' and men
+which is the condition of the one and the other, yet to those who love
+Truth and who will buy no good at the sacrifice of it, what it offers is
+enough, and to progress towards and in it is for them worth all the
+world beside; it is, if not the only real progress, that in the absence
+of which all other progress is without worth or substance or reality. In
+the end, if any advance anywhere is claimed or asserted, must we not
+ask: Is the claim founded on truth, is the good or profit seemingly
+attained a (or the) true good? To whom or to what is it good? Can we
+stop short of the endeavour to assure ourselves beyond question or doubt
+that we are right in what answers we render? And where or by what means
+can we reach this save by turning inward on meditation or reflection,
+that is by philosophizing? [Greek: Ei philosophêteon philosophêteon, ei
+de mê, philosophêteon; pantôs ara philosophêteon]. Thither the mind of
+man has always turned when the burden of the mystery of its nature and
+fate has weighed all but intolerably upon it, and turning has never
+found itself betrayed, but from knowledge of itself has drawn fresh hope
+and strength to resume the uninterrupted march of Progress which is its
+life and its history, its being, its self-formation, in courage moving
+forwards in and towards the light. It is as if such light were not
+merely the condition of its welfare, but the food on which it lived, the
+stuff which it transmuted into substance and energy, out of it making,
+maintaining and building its very self. So under whatever name, whether
+we call what we are doing Philosophy or something else, the search for
+more and more light upon ourselves and our world is the most
+indispensable activity to which the leagued and co-operative powers of
+Man can be devoted. Fortunately it is also that in which success or
+failure depends most certainly upon ourselves and in which Progress can
+with most confidence be looked for. In it we cannot fail if we will to
+take sufficient trouble; the means to it are open and available; it is
+our fault if we do not employ them and profit by them. If we have less
+wisdom than we might have, it is never any one's fault but our own. The
+door of the treasure-house of Wisdom stands ever open.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+C. C. J. Webb, _History of Philosophy_ (Home University Library).
+
+Burnet, _History of Greek Philosophy_.
+
+E. J. Bevan, _Stoics and Sceptics_.
+
+Höffding, _History of Modern Philosophy_ (translated).
+
+Royce, _The Spirit of Philosophy_.
+
+Merz, _History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century_.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+PROGRESS AS AN IDEAL OF ACTION
+
+J. A. SMITH
+
+
+Throughout this course of lectures, now come to its close, we have
+together been engaged in a theoretical inquiry. We have been looking
+mainly towards the past, to something therefore for ever and in its very
+nature set beyond the possibility of alteration by us or indeed at all.
+'What is done not even God can make to be undone.' Were it otherwise it
+could not be fact or reality and so not capable of being theorized or
+studied. In the words of our programme we have analysed what is involved
+in the conception of Progress, shown when it became prominent in the
+consciousness of mankind and how far the idea has been realized--that is
+has become fact--in the different departments of life. We have taken
+Progress as a fact, something accomplished, and have attempted so taking
+it to explain or understand it. We have not indeed assumed that it is
+confined to the past, but have at times enlarged our consideration so as
+to recognize its continuance in the present and to justify the hope of
+its persistence in the future. Some of us would perhaps go further and
+hold that it has, by these and similar reflections, come to be part of
+our assured knowledge that it must so continue and persist. But however
+we have widened our purview, what we call Progress has remained to us a
+course or movement which still presents the appearance of a fact which
+is largely, if not wholly, independent of us--a fact because independent
+of us--to which we can occupy no other attitude than that of interested
+spectators, interested and concerned, moved or conditioned by it but not
+active or co-operative in it. So far as it is in process of realization
+in the vast theatre of nature, inorganic or organic, dead or living,
+that surrounds us, it pursues its course in virtue of powers not ours
+and unamenable to our control. And even when we view it within the
+closer environment of human history its current seems to carry us
+irresistibly with it. Its existence is indeed of very practical concern
+to us, but apparently all we can do is to come to know it, and knowing
+it to allow for it as or among the set conditions of our self-originated
+or self-governed actions if such actions there be.
+
+The clearer we have become as to the nature of Progress, the more it
+would appear that it must be for us, because it is in itself, a fact to
+be recognized in theory, taken into account and reckoned with. It is or
+it is not, comes to be or does not come to be, and what we have first
+and foremost to seek, is light upon its existence and character as it is
+or occurs. Light, we hope, has been cast upon it. We have learned that
+in its inmost essence and to its utmost bounds Reality--what lies
+outside and around us--is not fixed, rigid, immobile, was not and is not
+and cannot be as the ancient or mediaeval mind feigned or fabled,
+something beyond the reach of time and change--static or stationary--but
+is itself a process of ceaseless alteration. We have learned also to be
+dissatisfied with the compromise which, while acknowledging such
+alteration, all but withdraws it in effect by asserting it to be either
+in gross or in detail a process of mere repetition. The system of laws
+which science had taught us to consider as the truth of nature is itself
+now known to be caught in the evolutionary process, and to be undergoing
+a constant modification. As in the modern state, so in Nature, the
+legislative power is not exhausted but incessantly embodies itself in
+novel forms. Nature itself--_natura naturans_--is now conceived, and
+rightly conceived, as a power not bound to laws other than those which
+it makes for or imposes on itself, and as in its operations at least
+analogous to a will self-determined, self-governing, creative of the
+ways and means by which its purpose or purposes are achieved. What that
+purpose is we have begun to apprehend, and to see its various processes
+as converging or co-operating towards its fulfilment. In the
+mythological language which even Science is still obliged to use, we now
+speak of Nature as 'selecting' or 'devising', and we ascribe to it a
+large freedom of choice wisely used. We can already at least define the
+process as guided towards a greater variety and fullness and harmony of
+life, or (with a larger courage) as pointed towards a heightening or
+potentiation of life. So defining its goal we can sympathize with and
+welcome the successful efforts made toward it, and so feel ourselves at
+heart one with the power that carries on the process in its aspirations
+and its efforts. But still, we cannot help feeling, it and all its ways
+lie outside us, and to us it remains an alien or foreign power. I
+venture to repeat my contention that this is so just because, however
+much we come to learn of its ways, we do not feel that we are coming to
+understand it any better, getting inside it, as we do get inside and
+understand human nature. Its progress is a change, perhaps a betterment,
+in our environment--in externals--and takes place very largely whether
+we will and act or no. The larger our acquaintance with it, the more
+does its action seem to encroach upon the domain within which our
+volitions and acts can make any difference. Even in social life we seem
+in the grip and grasp of forces which carry us towards evil or good
+whether we will or no. _Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt._ The
+whole known universe outside and around us presents to us the spectacle
+of what has been called a _de facto_ teleology, and just because it is
+so, and so widely and deeply so, it leaves little or no room for us to
+set up our ideals within it and to work for their realization. The fact
+that the laws which prevail in it are modifiable and modified makes no
+difference; they modify themselves, and in their different forms still
+constrain us. And no matter how increasingly beneficent they may in
+their action appear, they are still despotic and we unfree. The rule of
+laws which Science discovers encroaches upon our liberties and
+privacies. What we had hitherto thought our very own, the movement of
+our impulses and desires and imaginations, are reported by science to be
+subject to 'laws of association', and we are borne onwards even if also
+at times upwards on an irresistible flood. We remain bound by the iron
+necessity of a fate that invades our inmost being--which will not let us
+anywhere securely alone. I repeat that it matters not how certainly the
+trend of the tide, which sets everywhere around and outside us, is
+towards what is good or best for us, it still is the case that it
+presents itself as neither asking for from us nor permitting to us the
+formation of any ideals of ours nor any prospect of securing them by our
+efforts. Were the fact of Progress established and conclusively shown to
+be all-pervasive and eternal, it still would bear to us the aspect of a
+paternal government which did good to and for us, but all the more left
+less and less to ourselves.
+
+This will doubtless be pronounced an exaggeration, and we may weakly
+refuse to face the impression naturally consequent upon the progress we
+have made in the ascertainment of the facts concerning the world in
+which we live. But does not the impression exist? The hateful and
+desolating impression made on us earlier by the thought of a 'block'
+universe, once for all and rigidly fixed in unalterable and uniform
+subjection to eternal and omnipresent law, has dissolved like the
+baseless fabric of a vision. And why? Just because being found
+intolerable it was faced and put to the question. Now that there has
+been substituted for it the spectacle of a universe necessarily or
+fatally evolving--or, as we have said, progressing--does it not, while
+still evoking the old awe or reverence, do anything but still daunt and
+dishearten us? What is our part, we ask, our very own part within all
+this? What can we within it do? And the answer, that it is ours, if we
+will, to enter into and live in the contemplation of all this no longer
+appeals to us. In such a progressive universe we can no longer feel
+ourselves 'at home'. In it our active nature would seem to exist only to
+be disappointed and rebuffed.
+
+The only progress which we can care for is the progress which we
+ourselves bring about, or can believe that we bring about, in ourselves
+or our fellows or in the world immediately around us. So long as what is
+so named is something devised and executed by a power not our own--not
+the same as our own--it may call out from us gratitude and reverence,
+but the spectacle of the reality of such Progress cannot exercise the
+attractive force nor, so far as it is realized, beget that creative joy
+which accompanies even humble acts in which we set an ideal of our own
+before ourselves, and see it through our efforts emerge into actual
+existence. A practical ideal must be through and through of our own
+making. It must be devised by us and set to ourselves for our pursuit,
+and its coming to be, or be real, must be our doing. The very idea of it
+must be our own, not given or prescribed, still less imposed, and the
+process towards it must be our doing too. That there should, on their
+view of it, ever be protest and rebellion against its tyrannous demands
+appears to me reasonable and right, and those who make it to be guarding
+the immediate jewel of man's nature. We should, we might say, if this
+were the whole truth about the universe, acknowledge ourselves as its
+sons bound to gratitude and obedience because of the fatherly care for
+us, but it would be an essential complement to our family loyalty that
+we should insist upon and make good our claims to be grown-up sons and
+fellow citizens, declining to pronounce it wholly good, if those claims
+were denied to us. Now all these conditions seem to make straight
+against the possibility of regarding Progress, in the view of it we have
+hitherto taken, as an ideal of our action.
+
+In view of this character of the known fact of Progress, so discouraging
+and disabling to our active or practical nature, certain suggestions
+have been made which are thought to relieve us from these effects. It is
+said sometimes that this fatal--if beneficent or beneficial, still
+fatal--progress leaves as it were certain interstices in the universe
+within which it loses its constraining force, petty provinces but
+sufficient, where man is master and determines all events, from which
+even, it is sometimes conceded, some obscure but important influences
+are permitted to flow, modifying his immediate surroundings, little
+sanctuaries where the spirit that is in him and is his devises and
+realizes ideals of its own. But the notion of such sacrosanct and
+inviolable autonomies is being steadily undermined, and they are felt,
+as science becomes more dominant over our imaginations and emotions, to
+be no more than eddies in the universal stream, only apparently distinct
+and self-maintained, means made and broken for its purpose, really
+products and instruments of the world-progress. At any rate, it has been
+denied that they can rightfully be thought to stand outside it or
+themselves to exercise any effect upon their fortunes and their fate,
+still less upon their environment. Another suggestion fully and frankly
+acknowledges this, but though denying to us any power to affect either
+the form or the direction of the currents on which we are borne along,
+declares still open to us the possibility of affecting their speed, and
+bids us find satisfaction in the thought that by taking thought or
+resolve we can hasten or delay their and the universal movement. Still
+another view, abandoning even that hope, proclaims one last choice open
+to us, namely, that of sullen submission to, or glad and loyal
+acquiescence in, its irresistible sway. But surely all these suggestions
+are idle, and but for a moment conceal or postpone the inevitable
+conclusion that if Progress was, is and must or will be, that is, is
+necessary, what we think or do makes no difference, and can make no
+difference to or in it. Whether or no we convert the fact into an ideal,
+whether or no we set it before as our aim and exert ourselves to work
+for it, it goes on its way all the same. Either then it is not a fact,
+never was, and never will be a fact, or it is no possible ideal for
+which we can act. To be or become a fact, it must be independent of our
+action or our consent or our liking; if it is not all these it is not an
+ideal of action, or at any rate not so for us. I must repeat that what
+is or can be an ideal of action for us must be wholly and solely of our
+making, the very thought of it self-begotten in our mind, every step to
+its actual existence the self-created deed of our will. Not that either
+idea or act comes into being in a void or without suggestion and
+assistance from without us, but still so that the initiative lies in
+what we think or do, and so that without us it is unreal and impossible.
+It is enough, indeed, that we should be contributory, but the ideal must
+be such that without our irreplaceable co-operation it must fail. The
+only Progress in which we can take an active interest or make an ideal
+of action, is one which we conceive and execute, and that the fact we
+call Progress is not.
+
+So far we have found much argument to show that what we have hitherto
+called Progress is not and cannot be an ideal of action, or at least of
+our action. And now we must face another argument more plain and
+apparently fatal, indeed, specially or peculiarly fatal. For the very
+notion of Progress is of a process which continues without end, or we
+have the dilemma that it is either endless or runs to an end in which
+there is no longer Progress but something else. In either case it is not
+itself an end or the end, and whatever an ideal of action is, it must be
+an end--something beyond which there is nothing, which has no Beyond at
+all. To set before oneself as an ideal of action what one certainly
+knows to be incapable of attainment or accomplishment, incapable of
+coming to an end--that is surely futile and vain. Without a best, better
+or better-and-better has no meaning, and when the best is reached
+Progress is no more.
+
+The objection may be put in various ways, as thus. What we seek or want
+or work for, is to be satisfied, and satisfaction is a state, not a
+process or a progress. Or again, acting is a process of seeking, seeking
+and striving for something, and surely the seeking cannot itself be the
+object of the search. Or once more, what we act for is, as we must
+conceive it, something complete, finished, perfect, but Progress is
+essentially something incomplete, unfinished, imperfect. We all feel
+this, and at times at least the thought that what we seek flies ever
+before, affrights and paralyses: recoiling from such a prospect, we set
+before our imaginations as the reward or result of our labours, not
+movement but rest, not creation or production but consumption and
+fruition. We dream of one day coming to participate in a life or
+experience so good that there is no change from less good to more good
+possible within it, and which, if it can be said to progress at all,
+only, in Milton's magnificent words, 'progresses the dateless and
+irrevoluble circle of its own perfections, joining inseparable hands
+with joy and bliss in over-measure for ever'. Once this ideal has
+presented itself to our hopes or desires, it degrades by comparison with
+it to a second-best, the former ideal of endless development from lower
+to higher. What we want and seek is to be there, to have done with
+getting there. 'Here is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the
+cup with the roses around it.' Compared with this, how disconsolate a
+prospect is that 'of the sea that hath no shore beyond it, set in all
+the sea'--the endless voyage or quest. Not Progress is or can be the
+end, but achievement and the enjoyment of it. The progress is towards
+and for the end; the end is the supreme good and the progress is only
+good because of it, because it is on the way that leads to it, the way
+we are content to travel only because it leads there. Once more, and on
+still surer grounds, we must pronounce what we have come to know as
+Progress to be no possible ideal of action. What draws us on is the hope
+of something to be attained in and by the progress. To take Progress,
+which on the one hand is a fact and on the other is an incomplete fact,
+to be the end of our striving and our doing is to acquiesce in a
+self-contradiction.
+
+Yet the counter-ideal of a state in which we shall simply rest from our
+labours and sit down to enjoy the fruits of them does not promise
+satisfaction either, and so cannot be the end or ideal. Our desire and
+our endeavour is not for a moveless, changeless, undeveloping
+perfection. In fact, so often as the dream of such a state attained has
+presented itself, it has to thoughtful minds appeared anything but
+attractive or desirable. Our desire is to go on, and for that we are
+willing to pay a price--nay, it is for more than merely to go on, it is
+to advance and increase in perfection, so much so that the ideal itself
+once more slews round into its opposite and the search appears worth
+more than the attainment. It seems that we were not on the other view so
+wholly wrong, but must try so to frame our ideal of action as to unite
+both characters and satisfy both demands at once, so that it shall be at
+once a state and a movement or process, an achievement and a progress, a
+rest or quiet and a striving after it, a perfection and a perfecting.
+The combination at first sight appears impossible. Yet both characters
+it must combine. Here again, I must confess that the idea of mere
+Progress, even as achieved by our own efforts, seems to me to omit
+something essential to an ideal of action--of what is worth while our
+acting for. What is to be an ideal of action must have the character of
+a fulfilment--something to be consumed, not merely eternally added to.
+For this character of the (or any) ideal of action the best name is
+fruition or enjoyment. And the defect in the conception of it as
+Progress is that it seems to postpone this without a date.
+
+Let us put this truth which we have discovered concerning Progress in a
+nutshell, hiding or disregarding the internal contradiction. What is the
+nature, what is the kind of reality, which we have learned to ascribe to
+Progress (for we did pronounce it real and essentially capable of being
+realized)? It is that it is fact, yet fact not made but in the making;
+it is just the name for what is real only through and in the process of
+becoming real or being realized. Now I have already elsewhere pointed
+out that while a realization which is also a reality, or a reality which
+is also a realization, is in nature or what is external to us a mystery
+and a puzzle, it is just when we look inwards the open secret of our
+being; in our life or action regarded from within, it appears as
+something which is only dark because it is so close and familiar to us
+that inspection of it is difficult, not because it is in itself opaque
+or unintelligible. To its exemplification or illustration there we must
+turn for light upon our problem.
+
+Let us for the time disregard the pressure exercised upon us by the
+suggestions of physical science, or even, I may add, popular and
+imaginative or opinionative--which is Latin for 'dogmatic'--Religion,
+and examine how Progress takes place, or is realized and real, within
+our spirits, or that spirit which is within us. The inward process is
+one by which that spirit is or is real only in the act or fact of being
+or coming to be realized, or rather of realizing itself, and the way in
+which it so becomes or makes itself real is by acknowledging its own
+past, treating it as fact, recognizing its failures or imperfections
+therein, projecting on the future an idea or ideal of itself, suggested
+by those apprehended wants or defects, of what it might be, and using
+that to supply itself with both energy and guidance, drawing from its
+own past both strength and light. In all this it acts autonomously, out
+of itself, and creates both the requisite light and the indispensable
+force, making its very limitations into new sources and reservoirs of
+both.
+
+We do not sufficiently note and hold and use the indubitable truth that,
+in contradistinction to what we call Nature, the forces of the spirit
+reinforce and re-create themselves in their use, are in their use not
+consumed but reinvigorated, not dissipated or degraded but recollected
+and elevated, not expended but enhanced. There is in the realm of spirit
+which is our nature and our world no law of either the conservation or
+the degradation of energy. We must not allow ourselves to be brow-beaten
+by arguments drawn from the obscurer region of physical and external
+nature. We know ourselves to be energies or energizing powers which
+increase and do not waste by exercise. That is what we ought to mean by
+saying that we are wills and not forces, spiritual not physical or
+natural beings. If need be to confirm ourselves in this knowledge, let
+us think of what takes place, has taken place in the advance of
+knowledge, and particularly of the most important kind of knowledge,
+viz. self-knowledge, how we make it by our reflection upon what we have
+already in respect of it achieved, recognize how it or we have fallen
+short or over-shot our mark, define what is required to make good its
+deficiencies, and find ourselves thereby already in actual possession of
+the preconceived supplement. The real, the fact, what is attained or
+accomplished in and by us, prescribes and facilitates, or rather
+supplies, its own missing complement of perfection. The process carries
+itself on, the progress realizes itself, the ideal translates itself
+into the fact or actuality: it accomplishes itself and yet it is the
+doing of our very self, of the spirit within us. All this is not merely
+our doing, it is our being, it is the process by which we make our
+minds, our souls, our very selves or self.
+
+That man is essentially an, or rather the, ideal-forming animal (or
+rather spirit) has long been noted, and also that the formation of
+ideals is an indispensable factor in his progress, which is his life and
+very being. But all the same, this is sometimes put in such a way as to
+make action, or at least human action, a dispensable accident in the
+universe, an ineffective and unsubstantial unreality, while at the same
+time those who put it thus, profess to see through the illusion and to
+enjoy moments of insight which recognize its nullity. This way of
+putting it in my judgement intolerably misconceives and misrepresents
+the truth.
+
+Our ideals of action must be self-made or self-begotten, but yet they
+must be congruent with known fact; but the manner of such congruence is
+hard to see, hard to express. Ideals cannot be themselves facts, and
+therefore cannot be known, but on the other hand they cannot be mere
+imaginations or suppositions or beliefs, still less, of course,
+illusions or delusions. They are not visionary, and the apprehension of
+them is a sort or degree of perception. They point beyond themselves to
+some higher fact which is not cognizable by our senses or perhaps our
+understanding, but which is yet genuinely cognizable and so in some high
+sense fact. Yet they are not, as we envisage them, the fact to which
+they point, but a substitute for or representative of that--an
+anticipation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind
+or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'--a term I do not
+like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of
+a certain incumbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or
+adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is
+that their reality--it seems a paradox that an ideal should possess
+'reality'--consists in their suggestiveness of modes of action and their
+applicability to it, all this being supported by the conception of a
+state of affairs beyond and around us which makes it 'right'.
+
+If all this is so, Progress as an ideal of action cannot be precisely
+identical with Progress as a fact or object of actual or possible
+knowledge. We can never know what we are aiming at. But though
+different, the two are and must be congruent, and this may be enough to
+justify us in using the one name for the two. Unless there were Progress
+as fact everywhere and always in the universe--outside us--in Nature and
+History, and unless we took ourselves genuinely to apprehend this, we
+could not form the practical ideal of Progress, or at least the ideal
+could not be right. But the difference remains, and we must be prepared
+for and allow for it; though we can use the knowledge we obtain of the
+fact of Progress to control and guide our formulation of the practical
+ideal, we cannot identify the one with the other. Our imagining and our
+supposing of what is best for or obligatory upon us to do or work for,
+must go on under conditions--the conditions of what we know as to the
+nature of ourselves and our surroundings--and yet under these conditions
+has a very large liberty or autonomy.
+
+The Progress which is to serve as a practical ideal is not and cannot be
+the Progress that we know, but must be the result of imagination or
+supposition, and it is high and necessary wisdom to trust our
+imaginations and aspirations. The forms which it rightly takes cannot be
+determined by what we have learned in or from the past; it cometh not
+with observation, and the sources of experience cannot of themselves
+supply us with it, and though it comes in and with experience, it does
+not come from or out of it. Yet it is due to an impression made upon us
+by the Universe as we by our faculties apprehend it, and is not merely
+subjective or of subjective origin. Begotten of the imagination, it is
+appearance, not ultimate reality, and it cannot be thought out or wholly
+evacuated of mystery and perplexity. Is this not involved in the
+language we use of it, proclaiming it practical and therefore not
+theoretical?
+
+Nevertheless, while I must acknowledge this insuperable difference
+between the Progress we can make our end or ideal and the Progress we
+believe that in ourselves and around us we apprehend, I still would lay
+renewed stress upon the congruence and affinity of the two, and urge
+that the perception of the one--the Progress without us--and the pursuit
+of the other--the Progress within us--support and fertilize each the
+other. The more we know or can learn of the one the more effectively do
+we pursue the other, and conversely. The light and the fruits are bound
+together: the theory and the practice of Progress cannot be dissevered
+without the ruin of both.
+
+The ideal of Progress which we present to ourselves is and must be one
+which is partly determined or limited by past achievement and partly
+enlarged by the study of what powers higher than our own have
+accomplished and are accomplishing. The formation of it must move
+constantly between a respect for what has been achieved and a worship,
+so to speak, for what is far better than anything that yet has been or
+become fact, and therefore incumbent or imperative upon us.
+
+The mode and manner of the Progress which is achieved in the Universe
+has become in various ways clearer to us and opens out undreamt-of
+possibilities, and our assurance of its reality is ever more and more
+confirmed, while on the other hand its actual or past results at the
+lower level of nature have grown and are growing more familiar. We see
+that Progress is the essential and therefore eternal form of life and
+spiritual being, which endows it everywhere with worth and substance.
+With this comes the conviction that the source of all this lies inward,
+in that inwardness where our true selves lie and springs from the very
+nature of that. The spirit which is within us is not other than the
+spirit which upholds and maintains the whole Universe and works after
+the same fashion. And with regard to this its manner of working, we have
+learned that it proceeds by taking account of its own past achievements,
+imagining or conceiving for itself tasks relevant to these but not
+limited by them, and finds in that the conditions and stimulus to their
+actualization. It is our business to imitate this procedure and so to
+contribute to the advance of the whole. No work so done is or can be
+lost. We are justified in supposing that in so doing we are leagued
+together in effective co-operation with one another and with all other
+forces at work in the whole. In and through us, though not in and
+through us only, Progress goes on, drawing us along with it. Inner and
+outer Progress, free allegiance and loyal subjection concur and do not
+clash, and the world in which we live and act appears to us as it is--a
+city of God which is also a self-governed and self-administered city of
+free men.
+
+But above all, what it prescribes to us is the duty--another name for
+'the ideal of action'--to seek first light as to the true nature of our
+world and ourselves, dismissing and disregarding all appearance, however
+charming or seductive. Unless we learn to see Progress as universal and
+omnipresent and omnipotent, we shall set before ourselves ideals of
+action which are false and treacherous. We must exert ourselves not
+merely to apprehend, but to dwell in the apprehension and vision of it.
+
+And if there were no other reason, we should know it for the right
+ideal--this command first to seek light--because it is the hardest thing
+that can be asked of us or that we can ask of ourselves. But what is
+thus asked is not mere Faith and Hope, but a loyal adherence to the
+knowledge which is within us.
+
+Is this not the hardest? To-day, when over there in France and Flanders,
+and indeed almost all over Europe, as in a sort of Devil's smithy, men
+are busied in the most horrid self-destruction. The accumulated stores
+of age-long and patient industry are being consumed and annihilated; the
+works and monuments of civilized life are laid low: all physical and
+intellectual energies are bent to the service of destruction. The very
+surface of the kindly and fertile earth is seamed and scarred and
+wasted. And the human beings who live and move in this inferno, are
+jerked like puppets hither and thither by the operation of passions to
+which we dare not venture to give names, lest we be found either not
+condemning what defiles and imbrutes our nature or denying our meed of
+praise and gratitude to what ennobles it. All this portentous activity
+and business flows from no other fount and is fed by no other spring
+than the spirit which is within us, that spirit which has created that
+wealth, material, artistic, spiritual, which it is so busily engaged in
+wrecking and undoing. It is still as of old, making History, making it
+in the old fashion with the old ends in view and by the exercise of its
+old familiar powers. And if in this tragic scene or episode we cannot
+still read the features of Progress, our theory is a baseless dream, and
+we can frame no valid or 'right' ideal of action. For except to an
+environment known to be still, because always, the work and
+self-expression of a spirit akin to, and indeed identical with our own,
+and except as knowing ourselves to be still, because always, in all our
+ways of working its vehicles and instruments, we can neither define nor
+realize any ideals of action at all. This war is not an accident, nor an
+outburst of subterranean natural forces, but the act and deed of human
+will, and being so it cannot be merely evil.
+
+What, then, can we read not into, but out of, the tragic spectacle now
+being enacted, not merely before but in, through, and by us? Unless we
+have all along been mistaken, the victims of mere delusion and error,
+here, too, there has been and still is Progress. Primarily and
+principally what is taking place, is a tremendous revelation of the
+potencies which in our nature--in that which makes us men--have escaped
+our notice and therefore, because unseen or ignored, working in the
+dark, have not yet been drawn upon and utilized. There has been and
+still is going on, an enormous increase of self-knowledge. At first
+sight this seems wholly an opening up of undreamt-of evil. Side by side
+there has come to us a parallel revelation of undreamt-of good. I must
+bear witness to my conviction that we are beholding a tremendous inrush
+or uprush of good into man and his world. But what I wish to dwell upon
+is the growing and ever-confirmed revelation of an intimate relation or
+connexion between the two which is the very spring of Progress, viz.
+that the supply of good is not only adequate and more than adequate to
+the utmost demand made upon it, in the combating of the evil, and that
+for this reason, that while on the one hand the evil that impedes or
+counter-works the good is itself of spiritual origin, its existence and
+power is conditioned by the law that it must evoke and stimulate the
+very power which it attempts to crush and defeat. This is, as I have
+said, the now discovered and known spring of Progress both within and
+without us, that whatsoever is evil, evil just because it is enacted and
+does not merely occur, passes within the reach of knowledge and
+understanding, and in the measure that it passes into the light, not
+merely loses its sting and its force, but is convertible and converted
+into a strengthening condition of that which in its first appearance it
+seemed merely to thwart. Even regress is seen to be a necessary incident
+in progress, and the seasons which we call periods of decadence to be
+occasions in which the spirit progresses in secret, recruiting itself
+not by idleness or rest, but genuinely refreshing and recreating itself.
+
+The view here suggested is no sentimental optimism. The drama of the
+universe is no comedy or even melodrama, but a tragedy or epic of
+heroism, and more especially is this the character of the history of the
+spirit which is in Man and is Man. The evil we enact is real evil, the
+only real evil, the checks which our disobedience or disloyalty imposes
+upon the course of good, are genuine retardations or frustrations;
+nevertheless they are not wholly evil, for nothing is such, but are the
+means which the spirit that has begotten them, utilizes in its eternal
+Progress and wins out of them a richness, a complex and varied harmony
+to which they are compelled to contribute. Our ideal of action must
+therefore in principle acknowledge as essential, what I have called the
+'tragic' character suggested by the spectacle of the war, the fear and
+agony which we imagine in Nature and comprehendingly discern in human
+history. The Progress which we can achieve or contribute to--which we
+can make our ideal of action--is one which cannot rightly be conceived
+otherwise than in its essence a victory over evil, and that it may be
+evil, it must come and be done in the dark. For the spirit in
+progressing deposits what, being abandoned by it, corrupts into venomous
+evil, but except in meeting and combating that, it cannot progress. And
+it can only combat it by getting to know it, for in darkness and
+ignorance it can make no secure advance.
+
+It has been profoundly said that to know all is to forgive all. Let us
+rather say that in coming to know its own past, the Spirit which is in
+Man can without undoing it--that it cannot--make it contributory to its
+own wealth of being, can, as I have said, utilize it for its own
+purposes, which are summed up in the knowing of itself. There is and can
+be nothing in its deeds which it cannot know, and so digest and
+assimilate and absorb into its own substance.
+
+In this interpretation of the meaning--the veiled but not hidden meaning
+of what has taken place and is taking place in the world--or rather in
+us and enacted by us, I seem to myself not to be expressing any private
+imagination or supposition which may or may not be so, but a certainty
+that it must be so. Either it is so or 'the pillared firmament is
+rottenness and earth's base built on stubble'. And this means that
+everywhere and always, but most specially and centrally and potently in
+man's spirit, there is Progress, in spite of checks and hindrances which
+come from within it, a constant if chequered advance in true worth or
+value. And that knowledge I build on grounded and reasoned hope that it
+will and must continue--how, I do not know, but can only surmise and
+conjecture and imagine.
+
+To the question, What, then, ought we to do? I can only reply first and
+foremost, Labour to retain this truth, fostering and developing it,
+verifying it as we have been doing in all the varied departments of
+human experience, exercising our imaginations while at the same time
+sobering and controlling them by the light that comes from it. If we are
+true to it and do not through slackness forget and lose it, we shall
+find arising spontaneously out of the depths of our self worthy and
+feasible ideals of action, the pursuit of which will not betray us or
+leave us without an ever-growing assurance that in bending and directing
+all our powers to their realization we are the agents of that Progress
+which is the source of all being and all worth whatsoever. If we will to
+learn from our own past, we can convert anything that is evil in it into
+an occasion, an opportunity, a means to good which without it were not
+possible. Thus we can even do what seems utterly impossible, for we can
+without forgetting or ignoring or denying, forgive ourselves even the
+evil which we have done. Yes, even the darkest and worst evil, the
+disloyalty to ourselves, to the best and deepest within us, which all
+but achieved the impossibility of finally defeating the march of
+Progress. For the basis and ground of our belief in the reality, and
+therefore the eternity, of Progress lies in this, that the now known
+nature of the Spirit which is in Man and not in Man alone, is that it
+can heal any wounds that it can inflict upon itself, can find in its own
+errors and failures, in its own mistakes and misdeeds, if it only will,
+the materials of richer and fuller and worthier life.
+
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes                                          |
+  |                                                              |
+  | Page 26: Opening and closing quotes added to "Beg humbly     |
+  | that he unlock the door."                                    |
+  | Page 89: _Suma Theologica_ _sic_                             |
+  | Page 92: course amended to coarse                            |
+  | Page 165: preventible amended to preventable                 |
+  | Page 299: missing word "is" added ("so far as it is          |
+  | realized")                                                   |
+  |                                                              |
+  | The footnote number is for footnote 81 is missing in the     |
+  | original text. The location of the number that has been      |
+  | added is only an assumption.                                 |
+  |                                                              |
+  | Discrepancies between the Table of Contents and chapter      |
+  | headings ("Government"/"Progress in Government";             |
+  | "Industry"/"Progress in Industry"; "Art"/"Progress in Art";  |
+  | "Science"/"Progress in Science" and "Philosophy"/"Progress   |
+  | in Philosophy") have been retained.                          |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Progress and History, by Various
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Progress and History, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Progress and History
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: F. S. Marvin
+
+Release Date: January 31, 2009 [EBook #27948]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROGRESS AND HISTORY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<div class='transnote'>
+<h3>Transcriber's Note</h3>
+
+<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in
+this text. For a complete list, please see <a href="#transnotes">the bottom of
+this document</a>.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+<h1>PROGRESS AND<br />
+HISTORY</h1>
+
+
+<h3><i>ESSAYS ARRANGED AND EDITED</i></h3>
+
+<h4>BY</h4>
+
+<h2>F. S. MARVIN</h2>
+
+<h5><span class='smcap'>late senior scholar of st. john's college, oxford</span><br />
+<span class='smcap'>author of 'the living past'</span><br />
+<span class='smcap'>editor of 'the unity of western civilization'</span></h5>
+
+<p class='epigraph'>'Tanta patet rerum series et omne futurum<br />
+Nititur in lucem.'<br />
+<span class="indent">Lucan.</span></p>
+
+<h4><i>THIRD IMPRESSION</i></h4>
+
+<h4>HUMPHREY MILFORD<br />
+OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS</h4>
+
+<h5>LONDON&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;EDINBURGH&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;GLASGOW&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;NEW YORK<br />
+TORONTO&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;MELBOURNE&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;CAPE TOWN&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;BOMBAY</h5>
+
+<h5>1919</h5>
+
+
+<p class='frontend'>PRINTED IN ENGLAND<br />
+AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_3" id="Page_3">[3]</a></span></p>
+<h2>PREFACE</h2>
+
+
+<p>This volume is a sequel to <i>The Unity of Western
+Civilization</i> published last year and arose in the
+same way, from a course of lectures given at the
+Woodbrooke Settlement, Birmingham.</p>
+
+<p>The former book attempted to describe some of
+the permanent unifying factors which hold our
+Western civilization together in spite of such
+catastrophic divisions as the present war. This
+book attempts to show these forces in growth. The
+former aimed rather at a statical, the present at
+a dynamical view of the same problem. Both are
+historical in spirit.</p>
+
+<p>It is hoped that these courses may serve as an
+introduction to a series of cognate studies, of
+which clearly both the supply and the scope
+are infinite, for under the general conception of
+'Progress in Unity' all great human topics
+might be embraced. One subject has been
+suggested for early treatment which would have
+especial interest at the present time, viz. 'Recent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_4" id="Page_4">[4]</a></span>
+Progress in European Thought'. We are by the
+war brought more closely than before into contact
+with other nations of Europe who are pursuing
+with inevitable differences the same main lines
+of evolution. To indicate these in general, with
+stress on the factor of betterment, is the aim of
+the present volume.</p>
+
+<p class='right'>F.S.M.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_5" id="Page_5">[5]</a></span></p>
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="TOC">
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td align='left'></td><td align='right'><span class='smcap'>page</span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>I.</td><td align='left'>THE IDEA OF PROGRESS</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_7">7</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">F. S. Marvin</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>II.</td><td align='left'>PROGRESS IN PREHISTORIC TIMES</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_27">27</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">R. R. Marett</span>, Reader in Social Anthropology, Oxford.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>III.</td><td align='left'>PROGRESS AND HELLENISM</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_48">48</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">F. Melian Stawell</span>, late Lecturer at Newnham College, Cambridge.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IV.</td><td align='left'>PROGRESS IN THE MIDDLE AGES</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_72">72</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By the Rev. <span class="smcap">A. J. Carlyle</span>, Tutor and Lecturer at University College, Oxford.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>V.</td><td align='left'>PROGRESS IN RELIGION</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_96">96</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">Baron Friedrich von H&uuml;gel</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VI.</td><td align='left'>MORAL PROGRESS</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_134">134</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">L. P. Jacks</span>, Principal of Manchester New College, Oxford.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'> VII.</td><td align='left'>GOVERNMENT</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_151">151</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">A. E. Zimmern</span>, late Fellow of New College, Oxford.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>VIII.</td><td align='left'>INDUSTRY</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_189">189</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">A. E. Zimmern</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>IX.</td><td align='left'>ART</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_224">224</a><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_6" id="Page_6">[6]</a></span></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">A. Clutton Brock</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>X.</td><td align='left'>SCIENCE</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_248">248</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">F. S. Marvin</span>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'>XI.</td><td align='left'>PHILOSOPHY</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_273">273</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">J. A. Smith</span>, Waynflete Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, Oxford.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'> XII.</td><td align='left'>PROGRESS AS AN IDEAL OF ACTION</td><td align='right'><a href="#Page_295">295</a></td></tr>
+<tr><td align='right'></td><td class='inset'>By <span class="smcap">J. A. Smith</span>.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span></p>
+<h2>I</h2>
+
+<h2>THE IDEA OF PROGRESS</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">F. S. Marvin</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>The editor of these essays was busy in the autumn of
+last year collating the opinions attached by different
+people to the word 'progress'. One Sunday afternoon
+he happened to be walking with two friends in Oxford,
+one a professor of philosophy, the other a lady. The
+professor of philosophy declared that to him human
+progress must always mean primarily the increase of
+knowledge; the editor urged the increase of power as its
+most characteristic feature, but the lady added at once
+that to her progress had always meant, and could only
+mean, increase in our appreciation of the humanity of
+others.</p>
+
+<p>The first two thoughts, harmonized and directed by the
+third, may be taken to cover the whole field, and this
+volume to be merely a commentary upon them. What
+we have to consider is, when and how this idea of progress,
+as a general thing affecting mankind as a whole, first
+appeared in the world, how far it has been realized in
+history, and how far it gives us any guidance and hope
+for the future. In the midst of a catastrophe which
+appears at first sight to be a deadly blow to the ideal,
+such an inquiry has a special interest and may have some
+permanent value.</p>
+
+<p>Words are the thought of ages crystallized, or rather
+embodied with a constantly growing soul. The word
+'Progress', like the word 'Humanity', is one of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span>
+most significant. It is a Latin word, not used in its
+current abstract sense until after the Roman incorporation
+of the Mediterranean world. It contains Greek
+thought summed up and applied by Roman minds. Many
+of the earlier Greek thinkers, Xenophanes and Empedocles
+as well as Plato and Aristotle, had thought and
+spoken of a steady process in things, including man
+himself, from lower to higher forms; but the first writer
+who expounds the notion with sufficient breadth of view
+and sufficiently accurate and concrete observation to
+provide a preliminary sketch, was the great Roman poet
+who attributed all the best that was in him to the Greeks
+and yet has given us a highly original picture of the
+upward tendency of the world and of human society
+upon it. He, too, so far as one can discover, was the first
+to use the word 'progress' in the sense of our inquiry.
+The passage in Lucretius at the end of his fifth book on the
+Nature of Things is so true and brilliant and anticipates
+so many points in later thought that it is worth quoting
+at some length, and the poet's close relation with Cicero,
+the typical Greco-Roman thinker, gives his ideas the more
+weight as an historical document.</p>
+
+<p>He begins by describing a struggle for existence in
+which the less well-adapted creatures died off, those who
+wanted either the power to protect themselves or the
+means of adapting themselves to the purposes of man.
+In this stage, however, man was a hardier creature than he
+afterwards became. He lived like the beasts of the field
+and was ignorant of tillage or fire or clothes or houses.
+He had no laws or government or marriage, and though he
+did not fear the dark, he feared the real danger of fiercer
+beasts. Men often died a miserable death, but not in
+multitudes on a single day as they do now by battle or
+shipwreck.</p>
+
+<p>The next stage sees huts and skins and fire which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span>
+softened their bodies, and marriage and the ties of family
+which softened their tempers. And tribes began to make
+treaties of alliance with other tribes.</p>
+
+<p>Speech arose from the need which all creatures feel to
+exercise their natural powers, just as the calf will butt
+before his horns protrude. Men began to apply different
+sounds to denote different things, just as brute beasts will
+do to express different passions, as any one must have
+noticed in the cases of dogs and horses and birds. No
+one man set out to invent speech.</p>
+
+<p>Fire was first learnt from lightning and the friction
+of trees, and cooking from the softening and ripening of
+things by the sun.</p>
+
+<p>Then men of genius invented improved methods of life,
+the building of cities and private property in lands and
+cattle. But gold gave power to the wealthy and destroyed
+the sense of contentment in simple happiness. It must
+always be so whenever men allow themselves to become
+the slaves of things which should be their dependants
+and instruments.</p>
+
+<p>They began to believe in and worship gods, because
+they saw in dreams shapes of preterhuman strength and
+beauty and deemed them immortal; and as they noted
+the changes of the seasons and all the wonders of the
+heavens, they placed their gods there and feared them
+when they spoke in the thunder.</p>
+
+<p>Metals were discovered through the burning of the
+woods, which caused the ores to run. Copper and brass
+came first and were rated above gold and silver. And
+then the metals took the place of hands, nails, teeth, and
+clubs, which had been men's earliest arms and tools.
+Weaving followed the discovery of the use of iron.</p>
+
+<p>Sowing, planting, and grafting were learnt from nature
+herself, and gradually the cultivation of the soil was
+carried farther and farther up the hills.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Men learnt to sing from the birds, and to blow on pipes
+from the whistling of the zephyr through the reeds: and
+those simple tunes gave as much rustic jollity as our more
+elaborate tunes do now.</p>
+
+<p>Then, in a summary passage at the end, Lucretius
+enumerates all the chief discoveries which men have made
+in the age-long process&mdash;ships, agriculture, walled cities,
+laws, roads, clothes, songs, pictures, statues, and all the
+pleasures of life&mdash;and adds, 'these things practice and
+the experience of the unresting mind have taught mankind
+gradually as they have progressed from point to
+point'.<a name="FNanchor_1_1" id="FNanchor_1_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_1_1" class="fnanchor">[1]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is the first definition and use of the word in literature.
+If we accept it as a typical presentation of the Greco-Roman
+view, seen by a man of exceptional genius and
+insight at the climax of the period, there are two or three
+points which must arrest our attention. Lucretius is
+thinking mainly of progress in the arts, and especially
+of the arts as they affect man's happiness. There is no
+mention of increase in knowledge or in love. As in the
+famous parallel passage in Sophocles' <i>Antigone</i>, it is man's
+strength and skill which most impressed the poet, and his
+skill especially as exhibited in the arts. Compared with
+what we shall see as typical utterances of later times, it
+is an external view of the subject. The absence of love
+as an element of progress carries with it the absence of
+the idea of humanity. There is no conception here, nor
+anywhere in classical thought before the Stoics, of a world-wide
+Being which has contributed to the advance and
+should share fully in its fruits. Still less do we find any
+hint of the possibilities of an infinite progress. The moral,
+on the contrary, is that we should limit our desires, banish
+disturbing thoughts, and settle down to a quiet and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span>
+sensible enjoyment of the good things that advancing
+skill has provided for us. It is, of course, true that thoughts
+can be found in individual writers, especially in Plato and
+Aristotle, which would largely modify this view. Yet it
+can hardly be questioned that Lucretius here represents
+the prevalent tone of thoughtful men of his day. They
+had begun to realize the fact of human progress, but
+envisaged it, as was natural in a first view, mainly on
+the external side, and, above all, had no conception of
+its infinite possibilities.</p>
+
+<p>When we turn to typical utterances of the next great
+age in history the contrast is striking. Catholic doctrine
+had absorbed much that was congenial to it from the
+Stoics, from Plato and Aristotle, but it added a thing that
+was new in the world, a passionate love and an overpowering
+desire for personal moral improvement. This
+is so clear in the greatest figures of the Middle Ages, men
+such as St. Bernard and St. Francis, and it is so unlike
+anything that we know in the world before, that we are
+justified in treating it as characteristic of the age. To
+some of us, indeed, it will appear as the most important
+element in the general notion of progress which we are
+tracing. It so appeared to Comte.<a name="FNanchor_2_2" id="FNanchor_2_2"></a><a href="#Footnote_2_2" class="fnanchor">[2]</a> Of numberless
+passages that might be quoted from fathers and doctors
+of the Church, a few words from Nicholas of Cusa must
+suffice. He was a divine of the early fifteenth century,
+true to the faith, but anxious to improve the discipline
+of the Church. To him progress took an entirely spiritual
+form. 'To be able to understand more and more without
+end is the type of eternal wisdom.... Let a man desire
+to understand better what he does understand and to
+love more what he does love and the whole world will
+not satisfy him.'</p>
+
+<p>Here is a point of view so different from the last that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span>
+we find some difficulty in fitting it into the same scheme
+of things. Yet both are essential elements in Western
+civilization; both have been developed by the operations
+of similar forces in the world civilized and incorporated
+by Greece and Rome.</p>
+
+<p>The Catholic divine looks entirely inward for his idea of
+progress, and his conception contains elements of real and
+permanent validity, of which our present notions are full.
+His eyes are turned towards the future and there is no
+limit to his vision. And though the progress contemplated
+is within the soul of the individual believer, it
+rests on the two fundamental principles of knowledge
+and love which are both essentially social. The believer
+may isolate himself from the world to develop his higher
+nature, but the knowledge and the love which he carries
+with him into his solitude are themselves fruits of that
+intercourse with his fellows from which an exclusive
+religious ideal temporarily cuts him off.</p>
+
+<p>Nor must we forget that Catholic doctrine and discipline,
+though aiming at this perfection of the individual rather
+than of the race, was embodied in an organization which
+carried farther than the Roman Empire the idea of a
+united civilization and furnished to many thinkers,
+Bossuet as well as Dante, a first sketch of the progress of
+mankind.</p>
+
+<p>But it is clear that this construction was provisional
+only, either on the side of personal belief and practice,
+or of ecclesiastical organization; provisional, that is, if
+we are looking for real unity in the mind of mankind.
+For we need a doctrine, a scheme of knowledge, into
+which all that we discover about the world and our own
+nature may find its place; we need principles of action
+which will guide us in attaining a state of society more
+congruent with our knowledge of the possibilities of the
+world and human nature, more thoroughly inspired by<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span>
+human love, love of man for man as a being living his
+span of life here and now, under conditions which call for
+a concentration of skill and effort to realize the best.
+The breaking of the old Catholic synthesis, narrow but
+admirable within its limits, took place at what we call the
+Renascence and Reformation; the linking up of a new one
+is the task of our own and many later generations. Let it
+not be thought that such a change involves the destruction
+of any vital element in the idea of progress already
+achieved; if true and vital, every element must survive.
+But it does involve an acceptance of the fact that progress,
+or humanity, or the evolution of the divine within
+us&mdash;however we prefer to phrase it&mdash;is a larger thing
+than any one organization or any one set of carefully
+harmonized doctrines. The truth, and the organ in
+which we enshrine it, must grow with the human minds
+who are collectively producing it. The new unity is
+itself progress.</p>
+
+<p>It must give us confidence in facing such a prospect to
+observe that at each remove from the first appearance
+of the idea of progress in the world man's use of the word
+has carried more meaning and, though sometimes quieter
+in tone, as in recent times, is better grounded in the
+facts of life and history. Such an advance in our conceptions
+took place after the Renascence. At the beginning
+of the seventeenth century, when the art and science
+of the ancient world had been recovered, the word and
+the idea of progress started on a fresh course of unexampled
+vigour. The lines were closer to those of the pre-Christian
+than of the Catholic world, but it would be by no means
+true to call them pagan. When Bacon and Descartes begin
+to sound the modern note of progress, they think primarily
+of an advance in the arts and sciences, but there is a
+spiritual and human side to their ideal which could not
+be really paralleled in classical thought. The Spirit of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span>
+Man is now invoked, and this, not in the sense of an &eacute;lite,
+the builders of the Greek State or the rulers of the Roman
+Empire, but of mankind as a whole. This is Christian, or
+perhaps we should say, Stoical-Christian. Thus Descartes
+tells us that he looks to science to furnish us ultimately
+with an art which will make us 'masters and possessors of
+nature ... and this not solely for the pleasure of enjoying
+with ease the good things of the world, but principally
+for the preservation and improvement of human health
+which is both the foundation of all other goods and the
+means of strengthening the spirit itself' ('Discours de la
+M&eacute;thode'). It is significant that the two words Progress
+and Humanity come into use in their modern sense side by
+side. The latter is the basis and the ideal of the former.</p>
+
+<p>But the new thing which had come into the world at
+this point, and gives a fresh impulse and content to the
+idea of progress, is the development of science. The
+Greeks had founded it and, as we shall see in a later
+chapter, it was the recovery of the Greek thread which
+gave the moderns their clue. But no one before the
+sixteenth century, before the marvels revealed by Galileo's
+telescope and knit up by Newton's synthetic genius,
+could have conceived the visions of human regeneration
+by science which light up the pioneers of the seventeenth
+century and are the gospel of the eighteenth.</p>
+
+<p>We turn to the eighteenth century, and primarily to
+the school of thinkers called 'philosophes' in France, for
+the fullest and most enthusiastic statement of progress
+as a gospel. It is, of course, European, as all the greatest
+advances of thought have been; and German thinkers, as
+well as English, stand with the French in the vanguard.
+Kant and Herder, from different points of view, thought it
+out perhaps more thoroughly than any one else at that time;
+but the French believed in it as a nation and were willing
+to stake their lives and souls on the belief. Thus Turgot,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>
+before the Revolution, declared that 'the total mass of
+the human race marches continually though sometimes
+slowly towards an ever-increasing perfection'. And
+Condorcet, in the midst of the Revolution, while himself
+under its ban, painted a picture 'of the human race,
+freed from its chains, and marching with a firm tread
+on the road of truth and virtue and happiness'.</p>
+
+<p>Here is the gospel in its purest and simplest form, and
+when we are inclined to think that the crimes and the
+partial failure of the Revolution discredit its principles,
+it is well to remember that the man who believed in them
+most systematically, expounded his belief with perfect
+calmness and confidence as he lay under sentence of death
+from a revolutionary tribunal.</p>
+
+<p>If this enthusiasm is madness, we might all well wish to
+be possessed. The true line of criticism is different. At
+the Revolution, as before at the Renascence, the leaders
+of the new movement could not see all their debt to the
+past. Like the Renascence, they idealized certain features
+in classical antiquity, but they had not yet gained the
+notion of historical continuity; above all, they did not
+realize the value of the religious development of the
+Middle Ages. It was left for the nineteenth century and
+for us, its successors, to attempt the supreme task of
+seeing things steadily and seeing them whole.</p>
+
+<p>For in spite of the capital contributions of the Renascence
+to progress and the idea of progress, especially by
+its scientific constructions, it is undeniable that a bias
+was then given to the course of Western civilization from
+which it has suffered ever since, and which it is now our
+urgent duty to correct. Two aspects of this may be
+specified. The old international unity which Rome had
+achieved, at least superficially, in the Mediterranean
+world, and which the Catholic Church had extended and
+deepened, was broken up in favour of a system of sovereign<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>
+and independent states controlling religion and influencing
+education on lines calculated to strengthen the national
+forces and the national forces alone. They even believed
+that, at any rate in trade and commerce, the interests of
+these independent states were rather rival than co-operative.
+The Revolution struck the note of human
+association clearly enough, but we have not yet learnt to
+set all our other tunes in accord with it. Another, and
+perhaps even more fundamental, weakness of the Renascence
+tradition was the stress it laid on the material,
+mechanical, external side of progress. On the one hand,
+the spiritual side of life tended to be identified with that
+system of thought and discipline which had been so
+rudely disrupted. On the other hand, the new advance
+in science brought quickly after it a corresponding growth
+of wealth and mechanical inventions and material comforts.
+The spirit of man was for the time impeded and
+half suffocated by its own productions.</p>
+
+<p>The present war seems to many of us the supreme
+struggle of our better nature to gain the mastery over
+these obstructions, and freedom for its proper growth.</p>
+
+<p>Now if this analysis be anywhere near the truth, it is
+clear that our task for the future is one of synthesis on the
+lines of social progress. Knowledge, power, wealth,
+increase of skill, increase of health, we have them all in
+growing measure, and Mr. Clutton Brock will tell us in
+his chapter in this volume that we may be able by an
+exercise of will to achieve even a new renascence in art.
+But we certainly do not yet possess these things fairly
+distributed or in harmony of mind.</p>
+
+<p>The connexion therefore between progress as we now
+envisage it, and unity, both in ourselves and in society
+at large, becomes apparent. At each of the previous
+great moments in the history of the West development
+has been secured by emphasis on one side of our nature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>
+at the expense of the rest. Visions of mankind in common
+progress have flashed on individual thinkers, a Roman
+Emperor, a Catholic Schoolman, a Revolutionary prophet.
+But the thing achieved has been one-sided, and the needed
+correction has been given by another movement more
+one-sided still. The greatest hope of the present day
+lies in the fact that in all branches of life, in government
+as well as in philosophy, in science as in social reform, in
+religion and in international politics, men are now striving
+with determination to bind the threads together.</p>
+
+<p>There is no necessary opposition between the rival
+forces which have so often led to conflict. In all our
+controversies harmony can be reached and has often been
+reached by the application of patience, knowledge, and
+goodwill. And goodwill implies here the readiness to
+submit the particular issue to the arbitration of the
+general good. The international question has been so
+fully canvassed in these days that it would be superfluous
+to discuss it here. The moral is obvious, and abundant
+cases throughout the world illustrate the truth that well-organized
+nationalities contain in themselves nothing
+contrary to the ideal of international peace.<a name="FNanchor_3_3" id="FNanchor_3_3"></a><a href="#Footnote_3_3" class="fnanchor">[3]</a> Nor is the
+still more persistent and universal opposition of capital
+and labour really less amenable to reconciliation, because
+in this case also the two factors in the problem are equally
+necessary to social progress, and we shall not enter on the
+various practical solutions&mdash;co-operation, co-partnership,
+partial state-socialism, &amp;c.&mdash;which have been proposed
+for a problem which no one believes to be insoluble. The
+conflict in our own souls between the things of matter
+and sense and the life of the spirit, is more closely germane
+to the present argument, because ultimately this has to
+be resolved, if not in every mind yet in the dominant<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>
+mind of Europe, before the more practical questions can
+be generally settled. Harmony here is at the root of
+a sound idea of progress.</p>
+
+<p>When the concluding chapters of this volume are
+reached it will be seen how fully the recent developments
+both in science and philosophy corroborate the line which
+is here suggested for the reconciliation of conflicts and
+the establishment of a stronger and more coherent notion
+of what we may rightly pursue as progress. For both in
+science and still more in philosophy attention is being
+more and more closely concentrated on the meaning of
+life itself, which science approaches by way of its physical
+concomitants, and philosophy from the point of view of
+consciousness. And while science has been analysing
+the characteristics of a living organism, philosophy finds
+in our consciousness just that element of community
+with others which an organic conception of progress
+demands. The only progress of which we can be certain,
+the philosopher tells us, is progress in our own consciousness,
+which becomes constantly fuller, more knowing, and
+more social, as time unfolds. This, he tells us, must
+endure, though the storms of passion and nature may
+fall upon us.</p>
+
+<p>On such a firm basis we would all gladly build our
+faith. No unity can be perfect except that which we
+achieve in our own souls, and no progress can be relied
+on except that which we can know within, and can
+develop from, our own consciousness and our own
+powers. But we cannot rest in this. We are bound to
+look outside our own consciousness for some objective
+correspondence to that progress which our own nature
+craves; and history supplies this evidence. It is from
+history that we derive the first idea and the accumulating
+proofs of the reality of progress. Lucretius's first
+sketch is really his summary of social history up to that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>
+point. The Catholic thinker had a wider scope. He was
+able to see that the whole course of Greco-Roman civilization
+was, from his point of view, a preparation for the
+Church which had the care of the spiritual life of man
+while on earth. And in the next stage, that in which we
+now live, we see all the interests of life taken back again
+into the completeness of human progress, and can trace
+that complete being, labouring slowly but unmistakably
+to a higher state, outside us in the world, as well as within
+our own consciousness, which is ready to expand if we will
+give it range.</p>
+
+<p>On such lines we may sketch the historical aspect of
+progress on which the personal is based; and it is of the
+utmost importance to keep the two aspects before us
+concurrently, because reliance on the growing fullness of
+the individual life to the neglect of the social evolution
+is likely to empty that life itself of its true content, to
+leave the self-centred visionary absorbed in the contemplation
+of some ideal perfection within himself, while the
+world outside him from which he ultimately derives his
+notions, is toiling and suffering from the want of those
+very elements which he is best able to supply.</p>
+
+<p>The succeeding chapters of this book will, it is hoped,
+supply some evidence of the concrete reality of progress,
+as well as of the tendency to greater coherence and purity
+in the ideal itself. It would have been easy to accumulate
+evidence; some sides of life are hardly touched on at all.
+The collective and the intellectual sides are fully dealt
+with both in this and in the volume on <i>The Unity of
+Western Civilization</i>. But if we make our survey over
+a sufficient space, coming down especially to our own
+days, our conclusion as to the advance made in the
+physical and moral well-being of mankind, will be hardly
+less emphatic. Our average lives are longer and continue
+to lengthen, and they are unquestionably spent with far<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>
+less physical suffering than was generally the case at
+any previous period. We are bound to give full weight
+to this, however much we rightly deplore the deadening
+effect of monotonous and mechanical toil on so large
+a part of the population. And even for these the opportunities
+for a free and improving life are amazingly
+enlarged. We groan and chafe at what remains to be
+done because of the unexampled size of the modern
+industrial populations with which we have to deal. But
+we know in some points very definitely what we want,
+and we are now all persuaded with John Stuart Mill
+that the remedy is in our own hands, 'that all the great
+sources of human suffering are in a great degree, many of
+them entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.'
+This conviction is perhaps the greatest step of all that we
+have gained. In morality some pertinent and necessary
+questions are raised in Chap. VI, but the general progress
+would be doubted by very few who have had the opportunity
+of comparing the evidence as to any previous
+state of morals, say in the Middle Ages or in the Elizabethan
+age&mdash;the crown of the Renascence in England&mdash;with
+that of the present day. The capital advance in
+morality, which by itself would be sufficient to justify
+our thesis, is the increase in the consciousness and the
+obligation of the 'common weal', that conception of
+which Government, increasingly better organized, is the
+most striking practical realization. It has its drawback
+in the spread of what we feel as a debasing 'vulgarity',
+but the general balance is overwhelmingly on the side of
+good. And in all such discussions we are apt to allow
+far too little weight to the change which the New World,
+and especially the United States, has brought about.
+In matters of personal prosperity and a high general
+standard of intellectual and moral competence, what has
+been achieved there would outweigh a good deal of our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>
+Old World defects when we come to drawing up a world's
+balance-sheet.</p>
+
+<p>It will be seen therefore that we dismiss altogether any
+doctrine of an 'illusion of progress' as a necessary decoy
+to progressive action. Progress is a fact as well as an
+ideal, and the ideal, though it springs from an objective
+reality, will always be in advance of it. So it is with all
+man's activities when he comes to man's estate. In
+science he has always an ideal of a more perfect knowledge
+before him though he becomes scientific by experience.
+In art he is always striving to idealize fresh things,
+though he first becomes an artist from the pure spontaneous
+pleasure of expressing what is in him. The
+deliberate projection of the ideal into the future, seeing
+how far it will take us and whether we are journeying in
+the right direction, is a late stage. As to progress, the
+largest general ideal which can affect man's action, it is
+only recently that mankind as a whole has been brought
+to grips with the conception, also enlarged to the full. He
+was standing, somewhat bewildered, somewhat dazzled,
+before it, when the war, like an eclipse of the sun, came
+suddenly and darkened the view. But an eclipse has been
+found an invaluable time for studying some of the
+problems of the sun's nature and of light itself.</p>
+
+<p>One of the most acute critics of the mid-Victorian
+prophets of progress, Dr. John Grote, did very well in
+disentangling the ideal element which is inherent in every
+sound doctrine of progress as a guide to conduct. He took
+the theory of a continuous inevitable progress in human
+affairs, and showed how this by itself might lead to
+a weakening of the will, on which alone in his view
+progress in the proper sense depends. He took the
+mechanical theory of utilitarianism and subjected it
+to a similar analysis. We cannot evaluate progress
+as an increase in a sum-total of happiness. This is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span>
+incapable of calculation, and if we aim directly at it,
+we are likely to lose the higher things on which it depends,
+and which are capable of being made the objects
+of that direct striving which is essential to progress.
+Dr. Grote's analysis has long since passed into current
+philosophical teaching, but he will always be well worth
+reading for his fresh and vigorous reasoning and for
+the way in which he builds up his own position without
+denying the solid contributions of those whom he criticizes.
+Complete truth in the matter seems to us to involve
+a larger share for the historical element than Dr. Grote
+explicitly allows. We grant fully the paramount necessity
+for an ideal of progress and for constantly revising,
+purifying, and strengthening it. But in its formation
+we should trace more than he does to the collective forces
+of mankind as expressed in history. These have given
+us the ideal and will carry us on towards it by a force
+which is greater than, and in one sense independent of, any
+individual will. This is the cardinal truth of sociology,
+and is obvious if we consider how in matters of everyday
+experience we are all compelled by some social force not
+ourselves, as for instance in actions tending to maintain
+the family or in a national crisis such, as the war. This
+general will is not, of course, independent of all the wills
+concerned, but it acts more or less as an outside compelling
+force in the case of every one. Moreover our selves
+are composite as well as wholes, and parts of us are
+active in forming the general will, parts acquiesce and
+parts are overborne. Thus it is clear that a general
+tendency to progress in the human race may be well
+established&mdash;as we hold it to be&mdash;and yet go on in
+ways capable of infinite variation and at very various
+speed. We are all, let us suppose, being carried onward
+by one mighty and irresistible stream. We may combine
+our strength and skill and make the best use of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>
+the surrounding forces. This is working and steering
+to the chosen goal. Or we may rest on our oars and
+let the stream take us where it will. This is drifting,
+and we shall certainly be carried on somewhere;
+but we may be badly bruised or even shipwrecked in
+the process, and in any case we shall have contributed
+nothing to the advance. Some few may even waste their
+strength in trying to work backwards against the stream.
+We seem to have reached the point in history when for
+the first time we are really conscious of our position, and
+the problem is now a possible and an urgent one to mark
+the goal clearly and unitedly and bend our common efforts
+to attaining it.</p>
+
+<p>If this be so, the work of synthesis may be thought to
+have a higher practical value for the moment than the
+analysis which has prevailed in European thought for
+the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part of the nineteenth
+century the great formative ideas which had been
+gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary
+period, took shape in complete systems of religious and
+philosophic truth&mdash;Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They
+have been followed by a period of criticism which has left
+none of them whole, but on the other hand has produced
+a mass of contradictions and specialisms highly confusing
+and even hopeless to the public mind and veiling the more
+important and profound agreements which have been
+growing all the time beneath. There are now abundant
+signs of a reaction towards unity and construction of
+a broad and solid kind. In no respect is such a knitting
+up more desirable than in this idea of progress itself.
+Are we to say that there is no such thing as all-round
+continuous progress, but only progress in definite branches
+of thought and activity, progress in science or in particular
+arts, social progress, physical progress, progress in popular
+education and the like, but that any two or more branches<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>
+only coincide occasionally and by accident, and that
+when working at one we can and should have no thought
+of working at them all? This is no doubt a prevalent
+view and we may hope that some things said in this book
+may modify it. Another school of critical thinkers,
+approaching the question from the point of view of the
+ultimate object of action, asks what is the one thing for
+which all others are to be pursued as means? Is increase
+of knowledge the absolute good or increase of happiness?
+Or if it is increase of love, is it quite indifferent what we
+love? A few words on this may fitly conclude this
+chapter.</p>
+
+<p>The task of mankind, and of every one of us so far as
+he is able to enter into it, is to bring together these
+various aspects of human excellence, to see them as parts
+of one ideal and labour to approach it. This approach is
+progress, and if you say 'progress of what, and to what
+end', the answer can only be, the progress of humanity,
+and the end further progress. Some of the writers
+in this book will indicate the point at which in their
+view this progress is in contact with the infinite, with
+something not given in history; but, whatever our
+view of the transcendental problem may be, it is of
+the utmost importance for all of us to realize that
+we have given to us in the actual process of time, in
+concrete history, a development of humanity, a growth
+from a lower to a higher state of being, which may be
+most perfectly realized in the individual consciousness,
+fully awake and fully socialized, but is also clearly
+traceable in the doings of the human race as a whole.
+Such is in fact the uniting thread of these essays, and when
+we proceed to the converse of this truth and apply this
+ideal which we have shown to be the course of realization,
+as a governing motive in our lives, it is even more
+imperative to strive constantly to keep the whole to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span>gether,
+and not to regard either knowledge or power or
+beauty or even love as an ultimate and supreme thing to
+which all other ends are merely means. The end is a
+more perfect man, developed by the perfecting of all
+mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Such a conception embraces all the separate aspects
+of our nature each in its place, and each from its own angle
+supreme. Love and knowledge inseparable and fundamental,
+freedom and happiness essential conditions of
+healthy growth, personality developed with the development
+of the greater personality in which we all live and
+grow. This greater personality is at its highest immeasurably
+above us, and has no assignable limits in time or in
+capacity to know, to love, or to enjoy. We cannot fix
+its origin at any known point in the birth of planets,
+nor does the cooling of our sun nor of all the suns seem
+to put any limit in our imagination to the continuous
+unfolding of life like our own. While thus practically
+infinite, the ideal of human nature is revealed to us
+concretely in countless types of goodness and truth and
+beauty which we may know and love and imitate. To all
+it is open to study the lineaments of this ideal in the
+records and figures of the past; to most it is revealed in
+some fellow beings known in life. From these, the human
+spirits which embody the strivings, the hopes, the conquered
+failings of the past, we may form our better selves
+and build the humanity of the future.</p>
+
+<p>There is a famous and magnificent passage in Dante's
+<i>Purgatorio</i> which Catholic commentators interpret in
+sacramental terms but we may well apply in a wider
+sense to the progress of the human spirit towards the ideal.
+It occurs at that crucial point where the ascending poet
+leaves the circles of sad repentance to reach the higher
+regions of growing light.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'And when we came there, to the first step, it was of
+white marble, so polished that I could see myself just
+as I am.</p>
+
+<p>'And the second was coloured dark, a rugged stone,
+cracked lengthwise and across. And the third piled above
+it was flaming porphyry, red like the blood from a vein.</p>
+
+<p>'Above this one was the angel of God, sitting on the
+threshold, bright as a diamond.</p>
+
+<p>'Up the three steps my master led me with goodwill
+and then he said, "Beg humbly that he unlock the door."'<a name="FNanchor_4_4" id="FNanchor_4_4"></a><a href="#Footnote_4_4" class="fnanchor">[4]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Like this, the path man has to tread is not an easy
+progress. But he is rising all the time and he rises on
+steps of his own past. He sees reflected in them the image
+of himself, and he sees too the deep faults in his nature,
+and the rough surface of his path through time. The last
+step, tinged by his own blood, gives access to a higher
+dwelling, firm and bright and leading higher still. But
+it is open only after a long ascent, and to the human
+spirit that has worked faithfully, with love for his comrades
+and leaders, and reverence for the laws which bind
+both the world and him.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books for Reference</span></h3>
+
+<div class='indent2'>
+<p>John Grote, <i>Examination of Utilitarian Philosophy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Kant, <i>Principles of Politics</i> (translated by Hastie and published
+by Clark) contains his smaller works on Universal History, Perpetual
+Peace, and the Principle of Progress. See also the <i>Essay on
+Herder</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Comte's <i>Positive Polity</i>, vols. i. and ii, passim.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_1_1" id="Footnote_1_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_1_1"><span class="label">[1]</span></a></p>
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">'usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientes.'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_2_2" id="Footnote_2_2"></a><a href="#FNanchor_2_2"><span class="label">[2]</span></a> Comte, <i>Positive Polity</i>, ii 116.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_3_3" id="Footnote_3_3"></a><a href="#FNanchor_3_3"><span class="label">[3]</span></a> See Delisle Burns, <i>Morality of Nations</i>, and <i>The Unity of
+Western Civilization</i>, passim.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_4_4" id="Footnote_4_4"></a><a href="#FNanchor_4_4"><span class="label">[4]</span></a> <i>Purgatorio</i>, ix. 94-108.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span></p>
+<h2>II</h2>
+
+<h2>PROGRESS IN PREHISTORIC TIMES</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">R. R. Marett</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>If I am unable to deliver this lecture in person, it will
+be because I have to attend in Jersey to the excavation
+of a cave once occupied by men of the Glacial Epoch.
+Now these men knew how to keep a good fire burning
+within their primitive shelter; their skill in the chase
+provided them with a well-assorted larder; their fine
+strong teeth were such as to make short work of their
+meals; lastly, they were clever artisans and one may even
+say artists in flint and greenstone, not only having the
+intelligence to make an economic use of the material at
+their disposal, but likewise having enough sense of form
+to endow their implements with more than a touch of
+symmetry and beauty. All this we know from what they
+have left behind them; and the rest is silence.</p>
+
+<p>And now let us imagine ourselves possessed of one of
+those time-machines of which Mr. H. G. Wells is the
+inventor. Transported by such means to the Europe of
+that distant past, could we undertake to beat the record
+of those cave-men?</p>
+
+<p>Clearly, all will depend on how many of us, and how
+much of the apparatus of civilization, our time-machine
+is able to accommodate. If it were simply to drop a pair
+of us, naked and presumably ashamed, into the midst of
+the rigours of the great Ice Age, the chances surely are
+that the unfortunate immigrants must perish within a
+week. Adam could hardly manage to kindle a fire without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span>
+the help of matches. Eve would be no less sorely troubled
+to make clothes without the help of a needle. On the
+other hand, if the time-machine were as capacious as
+Noah's Ark, the venture would undoubtedly succeed,
+presenting no greater difficulty than, let us say, the
+planting of a settlement in Labrador or on the Yukon.
+Given numbers, specialized labour, tools, weapons, books,
+domesticated animals and plants, and so forth, the civilized
+community would do more than hold its own with
+the prehistoric cave-man, devoid of all such aids to life.
+Indeed, it is tolerably certain that, willingly or unwillingly,
+our colonists would soon drive the ancient type of man
+clean out of existence.</p>
+
+<p>On the face of it, then, it would seem that we, as
+compared with men of Glacial times, have decidedly
+'progressed'. But it is not so easy to say off-hand in
+what precisely such progress consists.</p>
+
+<p>Are we happier? As well ask whether the wild wolf
+or the tame dog is the happier animal. The truth would
+seem to be that wolf and dog alike can be thoroughly
+happy each in its own way; whereas each would be as
+thoroughly miserable, if forced to live the life of the
+other. In one of his most brilliant passages Andrew
+Lang, after contrasting the mental condition of one of
+our most distant ancestors with yours or mine, by no
+means to our disadvantage, concludes with these words:
+'And after all he was probably as happy as we are; it
+is not saying much.'<a name="FNanchor_5_5" id="FNanchor_5_5"></a><a href="#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor">[5]</a></p>
+
+<p>But, if not happier, are we nobler? If I may venture
+to speak as a philosopher, I should reply, confidently,
+'Yes.' It comes to this, that we have and enjoy more
+soul. On the intellectual side, we see farther afield. On
+the moral side, our sympathies are correspondingly wider.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span>
+Imaginatively, and even to no small extent practically,
+we are in touch with myriads of men, present and past.
+We participate in a world-soul; and by so doing are
+advanced in the scale of spiritual worth and dignity as
+members of the human race. Yet this common soul of
+mankind we know largely and even chiefly as something
+divided against itself. Not only do human ideals contradict
+each other; but the ideal in any and all of its forms
+is contradicted by the actual. So it is the discontent
+of the human world-soul that is mainly borne in upon him
+who shares in it most fully. A possibility of completed
+good may glimmer at the far end of the quest; but the
+quest itself is experienced as a bitter striving. Bitter
+though it may be, however, it is likewise ennobling. Here,
+then, I find the philosophic, that is, the ultimate and truest,
+touchstone of human progress, namely, in the capacity
+for that ennobling form of experience whereby we become
+conscious co-workers and co-helpers in an age-long,
+world-wide striving after the good.</p>
+
+<p>But to-day I come before you, not primarily as a philosopher,
+but rather as an anthropologist, a student of
+prehistoric man. I must therefore define progress, not
+in the philosophic or ultimate way, but simply as may
+serve the strictly limited aims of my special science. As
+an anthropologist, I want a workable definition&mdash;one
+that will set me working and keep me working on promising
+lines. I do not ask ultimate truth of my anthropological
+definition. For my science deals with but a single aspect
+of reality; and the other aspects of the real must likewise
+be considered on their merits before a final account
+can be rendered of it.</p>
+
+<p>Now anthropology is just the scientific history of man;
+and I suppose that there could be a history of man that
+did without the idea of human progress altogether.
+Progress means, in some sense, change for the better.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span>
+But, strictly, history as such deals with fact; and is not
+concerned with questions of better or worse&mdash;in a word,
+with value. Hence, it must always be somewhat arbitrary
+on the part of an historian to identify change in a given
+direction with a gain or increase in value. Nevertheless,
+the anthropologist may do so, if he be prepared to take
+the risk. He sees that human life has on the whole
+grown more complex. He cannot be sure that it will
+continue to grow more complex. Much less has he a right
+to lay it down for certain that it ought to grow more
+complex. But so long as he realizes that he is thereby
+committing himself by implication to a prophetic and
+purposive interpretation of the facts, he need not hesitate
+to style this growth of complexity progress so far as man
+is concerned. For if he is an anthropologist, he is also
+a man, and cannot afford to take a wholly external and
+impartial view of the process whereby the very growth of
+his science is itself explained. Anthropologists though we
+be, we run with the other runners in the race of life, and
+cannot be indifferent to the prize to be won.</p>
+
+<p>Progress, then, according to the anthropologist, is
+defined as increase in complexity, with the tacit assumption
+that this somehow implies betterment, though it is
+left with the philosopher to justify such an assumption
+finally and fully. Whereas in most cases man would seem
+to have succeeded in the struggle for existence by growing
+more complex, though in some cases survival has been
+secured by way of simplification, anthropology concentrates
+its attention on the former set of cases as the more
+interesting and instructive even from a theoretical point
+of view. Let biology by all means dispense with the
+notion of progress, and consider man along with the other
+forms of life as subject to mere process. But anthropology,
+though in a way it is a branch of biology, has a right to
+a special point of view. For it employs special methods<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span>
+involving the use of a self-knowledge that in respect to
+the other forms of life is inevitably wanting. Anthropology,
+in short, like charity, begins at home. Because
+we know in ourselves the will to progress, we go on to
+seek for evidences of progress in the history of mankind.
+Nor need we cease to think of progress as something to
+be willed, something that concerns the inner man, even
+though for scientific purposes we undertake to recognize
+it by some external sign, as, for instance, by the sign of
+an increasing complexity, that is, such differentiation as
+likewise involves greater cohesion. All history, and more
+especially the history of early man, must deal primarily
+with externals. Thence it infers the inner life; and
+thereby it controls the tendency known as 'the psychologist's
+fallacy', namely, that of reading one's own mind
+into that of another man without making due allowance
+for differences of innate capacity and of acquired outlook.
+In what follows, then, let us, as anthropologists, be content
+to judge human progress in prehistoric times primarily
+by its external and objective manifestations; yet let us
+at no point in our inquiries forget that these ancient men,
+some of whom are our actual ancestors, were not only
+flesh of our flesh, but likewise spirit of our spirit.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>A rapid sketch such as this must take for granted on
+the part of the audience some general acquaintance with
+that succession of prehistoric epochs which modern
+research has definitely established. Pre-history, as distinguished
+from proto-history, may, in reference to Europe
+as a whole, be made coextensive with the Stone Age.
+This divides into the Old Stone Age and the New. The
+Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic Period, yields three well-marked
+subdivisions, termed Early, Middle, and Late.
+The New Stone Age, or Neolithic Period, includes two
+sub-periods, the Earlier or Transitional, and the Later or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span>
+Typical. Thus our historical survey will fall naturally
+into five chapters.</p>
+
+<p>There are reasons, however, why it will be more convenient
+to move over the whole ground twice. The material
+on which our judgements must be founded is not all of
+one kind. Anthropology is the joint work of two departments,
+which are known as Physical Anthropology and
+Cultural Anthropology respectively. The former, we may
+say, deals with man as an organism, the latter with him
+as an organizer. Here, then, are very different standpoints.
+For, in a broad way of speaking, nature controls man
+through his physical organization, whereas through his
+cultural organization man controls nature. From each
+of these standpoints in turn, then, let us inquire how far
+prehistoric man can be shown to have progressed. First,
+did the breed improve during the long course of the
+Stone Age in Europe? Secondly, did the arts of life
+advance, so that by their aid man might establish himself
+more firmly in his kingdom?</p>
+
+<p>Did the breed improve during prehistoric times? I
+have said that, broadly speaking, nature controls man as
+regards his physical endowment. Now in theory one must
+admit that it might be otherwise. If Eugenics were to
+mature on its purely scientific side, there is no reason why
+the legislator of the future should not try to make a practical
+application of its principles; and the chances are
+that, of many experiments, some would prove successful.
+But that conscious breeding was practised in prehistoric
+times is out of the question. The men of those days
+were one and all what we are ourselves&mdash;nature's mongrels,
+now broken up into varieties by casual isolation, and now
+by no less casual intermixture recompounded in a host
+of relatively unstable forms. Whatever progress, therefore,
+may have occurred in this respect has been unconscious.
+Man cannot take the credit for it, except in so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>
+far as it is indirectly due to that increase and spread
+of the race which have been promoted by his achievements
+in the way of culture.</p>
+
+<p>The barest outline of the facts must suffice. For the
+Early Pleistocene, apart from the Java fossil, <i>Pithecanthropus
+erectus</i>, a veritable 'missing link', whom we may
+here disregard as falling altogether outside our world of
+Europe, there are only two individuals that can with
+certainty be referred to this distant period. These are
+the Piltdown and the Heidelberg specimens. The former
+consists of a fragmentary brain-case, thick-boned and
+narrow-fronted, but typically human in its general
+characters, and of the greater part of a lower jaw, which,
+as regards both its own elongated and curiously flanged
+structure, and that of the teeth it contained, including
+an enormous pointed canine, is conversely more appropriate
+to an ape-like being than to a man. The latter
+consists only of a lower jaw, of which the teeth, even the
+canines, are altogether human, whereas the jaw itself is
+hardly less simian than that of the Sussex skull. If we
+add the Java example to the list of very primitive forms,
+it is remarkable to note how, though differing widely
+from each other, all alike converge on the ape. Nevertheless,
+even in Pithecanthropus, the brute is passing into the
+man. We note the erect attitude, to be inferred from his
+thigh-bone, and the considerably enlarged, though even
+so hardly human, brain. The Piltdown individual, on the
+other hand, has crossed the Rubicon. He has a brain-capacity
+entitling him to rank as a man and an Englishman.
+Such a brain, too, implies a cunning hand, which
+doubtless helped him greatly to procure his food, even if
+his massive jaw enabled him to dispose of the food in
+question without recourse to the adventitious aids of
+knife and fork. For the matter of that, if our knowledge
+made it possible to correlate these rare finds of bones more<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span>
+exactly with the innumerable flint implements ascribable
+to this period (and, indeed, not without analogies among
+the spoil from the Piltdown gravels), it might turn out
+that even the equivalent of knife and fork was not
+wanting to the Early Pleistocene supper-party, or, at any
+rate, that the human hand was already advanced from the
+status of labourer to the more dignified position of superintendent
+of the tool.</p>
+
+<p>The Middle Pleistocene Epoch belongs to the men of
+the Neanderthal type. Some thirty specimens, a few
+of them more or less complete, have come down to us,
+and we can form a pretty clear notion of the physical
+appearance of the race. Speaking generally, we may say
+that it marks a stage of progress as compared with the
+Piltdown type; though, if the jaw, heavy and relatively
+chinless as it is, has become less simian, the protruding
+brow-ridge lends a monstrous look to the face, while the
+forehead is markedly receding&mdash;a feature which turns
+out, however, to be not incompatible with a weight of
+brain closely approaching our own average. Whether
+this type has disappeared altogether from the earth, or
+survives in certain much modified descendants, is an
+open question. The fact remains that during the last
+throes of the Glacial Epoch this rough-hewn kind of man
+apparently had Northern Europe as his exclusive province;
+and it is by no means evident what <i>Homo Sapiens</i>, the
+supposed highly superior counterpart and rival of <i>Homo
+Neanderthalensis</i>, was doing with himself in the meantime.
+Moreover, not only in respect of space does the population
+of that frozen world show remarkable homogeneity; but
+also in respect of time must we allow it an undisputed
+sway extending over thousands of years, during which
+the race bred true. The rate of progress, whether reckoned
+in physical terms or otherwise, is so slow as to be almost
+imperceptible. A type suffices for an age. Whereas in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>
+the life-history of an individual there is rapid development
+during youth, and after maturity a steadying
+down, it is the other way about in the life-history of the
+race. Man, so to speak, was born old and accommodated
+to a jog-trot. We moderns are the juveniles, and it is
+left for us to go the pace.</p>
+
+<p>Yet Late Pleistocene Period introduces us to more
+diversity in the way of human types. Only one race,
+however, that named after the rock-shelter of Cr&ocirc;-Magnon
+in the Dordogne, is represented by a fair number of
+specimens, namely, about a dozen. At this point we come
+suddenly and without previous warning on as pretty
+a kind of man as ever walked this earth. In his leading
+characters he is remarkably uniform. Six feet high and
+long-legged, he likewise possessed a head well stocked
+with brains and a face that, if rather broad and short, was
+furnished by way of compensation with a long and narrow
+nose. If the present world can show nothing quite like
+him, it at least cannot produce anything more shapely
+in the way of the 'human form divine'. Apart from the
+Cr&ocirc;-Magnons, the remains of an old woman and a youth
+found at the lowest level of the Grotte des Enfants at
+Mentone are usually held to belong to a distinct stock
+known as the Grimaldi. The physical characters of the
+pair are regarded as negroid, verging on the Pygmy;
+but if we could study an adult male of the same stock,
+it might possibly turn out not to be so very divergent
+from the Cr&ocirc;-Magnon. Again, a single specimen does
+duty for the so-called Chancelade race. The skeleton is
+of comparatively low stature, and is deemed to show
+close affinities to the type of the modern Eskimo. Without
+being unduly sceptical, one may once more wonder if
+the Cr&ocirc;-Magnon stock may not have produced this somewhat
+aberrant form. Even on such a theory, however&mdash;and
+it is hardly orthodox&mdash;diversity of physical structure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span>
+would seem to be on the increase. On the other hand,
+there are reasons of considerable cogency for referring
+to the end of this period skeletons of what Huxley termed
+the 'River-bed type', the peculiarity of which consists
+in the fact that they are more or less indistinguishable
+from the later Neolithic men and indeed from any of
+those slight-built, shortish, long-headed folk who form
+the majority in the crowded cities of to-day. Some
+authorities would ascribe a far greater antiquity to this
+type, but, I venture to think, on the strength of doubtful
+evidence. The notorious Galley Hill skeleton, for instance,
+found more or less intact in an Early Pleistocene bed in
+which the truly contemporary animals are represented by
+the merest battered remnants, to my mind reeks of
+modernity. Be these things as they may, however,
+when we come to Neolithic times a race of similar physical
+characters has Europe to itself, though it would seem to
+display minor variations in a way that suggests that the
+reign of the mongrel has at length begun. And here we
+may close our enumeration of the earliest known branches
+of our family tree, since the coming of the broad-heads
+pertains to the history of the Bronze Age, and hence
+falls outside the scope of the present survey.</p>
+
+<p>Now what is the bearing of these somewhat scanty
+data on the question of progress? It is not easy to extract
+from them more than the general impression that, as
+time went on, the breed made persistent headway as
+regards both the complexity of its organization and the
+profusion of its forms. After all, we must not expect
+too much from this department of the subject. For one
+thing, beyond the limits of North-western Europe the
+record is almost blank; and yet we can scarcely hope
+to discover the central breeding-place of man in what is,
+geographically, little more than a blind alley. In the next
+place, Physical Anthropology, not only in respect to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>
+human palaeontology, but in general, is as barren of
+explanations as it is fertile in detailed observations. The
+systematic study of heredity as it bears on the history
+of the human organism has hardly begun. Hence, it
+would not befit one who is no expert in relation to such
+matters to anticipate the verdict of a science that needs
+only public encouragement in order to come into its own.
+Suffice it to suggest here that nature as she presides over
+organic evolution, that is, the unfolding of the germinal
+powers, may be conceived as a kindly but slow-going and
+cautious liberator. One by one new powers, hitherto
+latent, are set free as an appropriate field of exercise is
+afforded them by the environment. At first divergency
+is rarely tolerated. A given type is extremely uniform.
+On the other hand, when divergency is permitted, it
+counts for a great deal. The wider variations occur nearest
+the beginning, each for a long time breeding true to itself.
+Later on, such uncompromising plurality gives way to
+a more diffused multiplicity begotten of intermixture.
+Mongrelization has set in. Not but what there may
+spring up many true-breeding varieties among the
+mongrels; and these, given suitable conditions, will
+be allowed to constitute lesser types possessed of fairly
+uniform characters. Such at least is in barest outline
+the picture presented by the known facts concerning the
+physical evolution of man, if one observe it from outside
+without attempting to explore the hidden causes of the
+process. Some day, when these causes are better understood,
+man may take a hand in the game, and become,
+in regard to the infinite possibilities still sleeping in the
+transmitted germ, a self-liberator. Nature is but a
+figurative expression for the chances of life, and the wise
+man faces no more chances than he needs must. Scientific
+breeding is no mere application of the multiplication table
+to a system of items. We must make resolutely for the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span>
+types that seem healthy and capable, suppressing the
+defectives in a no less thorough, if decidedly more considerate,
+way than nature has been left to do in the past.
+Here, then, along physical lines is one possible path of
+human progress, none the less real because hitherto
+pursued, not by the aid of eyes that can look and choose,
+but merely in response to painful proddings at the
+tail-end.</p>
+
+<p>Our remaining task is to take stock of that improvement
+in the arts of life whereby man has come gradually to
+master an environment that formerly mastered him. For
+the Early Palaeolithic Period our evidence in respect
+of its variety, if not of its gross quantity, is wofully
+disappointing. Not to speak of man's first and rudest
+experiments in the utilization of stone, which are doubtless
+scattered about the world in goodly numbers if only we
+could recognize them clearly for what they are, the
+Chellean industry by its wide distribution leads one to
+suppose that mankind in those far-off days was only
+capable of one idea at a time&mdash;a time, too, that lasted
+a whole age. Yet the succeeding Acheulean style of workmanship
+in flint testifies to the occurrence of progress
+in one of its typical forms, namely, in the form of what
+may be termed 'intensive' progress. The other typical
+form I might call 'intrusive' progress, as happens when
+a stimulating influence is introduced from without. Now
+it may be that the Acheulean culture came into being
+as a result of contact between an immigrant stock and
+a previous population practising the Chellean method
+of stone-work. We are at present far too ill-informed to
+rule out such a guess. But, on the face of it, the greater
+refinement of the Acheulean handiwork looks as if it
+had been literally hammered out by steadfastly following
+up the Chellean pattern into its further possibilities.
+Explain it as we will, this evolution of the so-called<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>
+<i>coup-de-poing</i> affords almost the sole proof that the
+human world of that remote epoch was moving at all.
+If we could see their work in wood, we might discern
+a more diversified skill or we might not. As it is, we can
+but conclude in the light of our very imperfect knowledge
+that in mind no less than in body mankind of Early
+Palaeolithic times displayed a fixity of type almost
+amounting to that of one of the other animal species.</p>
+
+<p>During Middle Palaeolithic times the Mousterian
+culture rules without a rival. The cave-period has begun;
+and, thanks to the preservation of sundry dwelling-places
+together with a goodly assortment of their less
+perishable contents, we can frame a fairly adequate
+notion of the home-life of Neanderthal man. I have
+already alluded to my excavations in Jersey, and need
+not enter into fuller details here. But I should like to
+put on record the opinion borne in upon me by such
+first-hand experience as I have had that cultural advance
+in Mousterian days was almost as portentously slow as
+ever it had been before. The human deposits in the
+Jersey cave are in some places about ten feet thick, and
+the fact that they fall into two strata separated by a sterile
+layer that appears to consist of the dust of centuries
+points to a very long process of accumulation. Yet
+though there is one kind of elephant occurring amid the
+bone refuse at the bottom of the bed, and another and,
+it would seem, later kind at the top, one and the same
+type of flint instrument is found at every level alike;
+and the only development one can detect is a certain gain
+in elegance as regards the Mousterian 'point', the reigning
+substitute for the former <i>coup-de-poing</i>. Once more there
+is intensive progress only, so far at least as most of the
+Jersey evidence goes. One <i>coup-de-poing</i>, however, and
+that hardly Acheulean in conception but exactly what
+a hand accustomed to the fashioning of the Mousterian<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span>
+'point' would be likely to make by way of an imitation
+of the once fashionable pattern, lay at lowest floor-level;
+as if to remind one that during periods of transition the
+old is likely to survive by the side of the new, and may
+even survive in it as a modifying element. As a matter
+of fact, the <i>coup-de-poing</i> is frequent in the earliest
+Mousterian sites; so that we cannot but ask ourselves
+how it came to be in the end superseded. Whether the
+Mousterians were of a different race from the Acheuleans
+is not known. Certain it is, on the other hand, that the
+industry that makes its first appearance in their train
+represents a labour-saving device. The Mousterian had
+learned how to break up his flint-nodule into flakes,
+which simply needed to be trimmed on one face to yield
+a cutting edge. The Acheulean had been content to
+attain this result more laboriously by pecking a
+pebble on both faces until what remained was sharp
+enough for his purpose. Here, then, we are confronted
+with that supreme condition of progress, the inventor's
+happy thought. One of those big-brained Neanderthal
+men, we may suppose, had genius; nature, the liberator,
+having released some latent power in the racial constitution.
+Given such a culture-hero, the common herd was
+capable of carrying on more or less mechanically for an
+aeon or so. And so it must ever be. The world had better
+make the most of its geniuses; for they amount to no
+more than perhaps a single one in a million. Anyway,
+Neanderthal man never produced a second genius, so far
+as we can tell; and that is why, perhaps, his peculiar
+type of brow-ridge no longer adorns the children of
+men.</p>
+
+<p>Before we leave the Mousterians, another side of their
+culture deserves brief mention. Not only did they provide
+their dead with rude graves, but they likewise furnished
+them with implements and food for use in a future life.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span>
+Herein surely we may perceive the dawn of what I do not
+hesitate to term religion. A distinguished scholar and
+poet did indeed once ask me whether the Mousterians,
+when they performed these rites, did not merely show
+themselves unable to grasp the fact that the dead are
+dead. But I presume that my friend was jesting. A
+sympathy stronger than death, overriding its grisly terror,
+and converting it into the vehicle of a larger hope&mdash;that
+is the work of soul; and to develop soul is progress.
+A religious animal is no brute, but a real man with the
+seed of genuine progress in him. If Neanderthal man
+belonged to another species, as the experts mostly declare
+and I very humbly beg leave to doubt, we must even so
+allow that God made him also after his own image,
+brow-ridges and all.</p>
+
+<p>The presence of soul in man is even more manifest
+when we pass on to the Late Palaeolithic peoples. They
+are cave-dwellers; they live by the chase; in a word,
+they are savages still. But they exhibit a taste and a
+talent for the fine arts of drawing and carving that, as
+it were, enlarge human existence by a new dimension.
+Again a fresh power has been released, and one in which
+many would seem to have participated; for good artists
+are as plentiful during this epoch as ever they were in
+ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. They must have
+married-in somewhat closely, one would think, for this
+special aptitude to have blossomed forth so luxuriantly.
+I cannot here dwell at length on the triumphs of Aurignacian
+and Magdalenian artistry. Indeed, what I have seen
+with my own eyes on the walls of certain French caves
+is almost too wonderful to be described. The simplicity
+of the style does not in the least detract from the fullness
+of the charm. On the contrary, one is tempted to doubt
+whether the criterion of complexity applies here&mdash;whether,
+in fact, progress has any meaning in relation to fine <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span>art&mdash;since,
+whether attained by simple or by complex means,
+beauty is always beauty, and cannot further be perfected.
+Shall we say, then, with Plato that beauty was revealed
+to man from the first in its absolute nature, so that the
+human soul might be encouraged to seek for the real in
+its complementary forms of truth and goodness, such as
+are less immediately manifest? For the rest, the soul
+of these transcendently endowed savages was in other
+respects more imperfectly illuminated; as may be
+gathered from the fact that they carved and drew partly
+from the love of their art, but partly also, and, perhaps,
+even primarily, for luck. It seems that these delineations
+of the animals on which they lived were intended to help
+them towards good hunting. Such is certainly the object
+of a like custom on the part of the Australian aborigines;
+there being this difference, however, that the art of the
+latter considered as art is wholly inferior. Now we know
+enough about the soul of the Australian native, thanks
+largely to the penetrating interpretations of Sir Baldwin
+Spencer, to greet and honour in him the potential lord
+of the universe, the harbinger of the scientific control
+of nature. It is more than half the battle to have willed
+the victory; and the picture-charm as a piece of moral
+apparatus is therefore worthy of our deepest respect.
+The chariot of progress, of which the will of man is the
+driver, is drawn by two steeds, namely, Imagination and
+Reason harnessed together. Of the pair, Reason is the
+more sluggish, though serviceable enough for the heavy
+work. Imagination, full of fire as it is, must always set
+the pace. So the soul of the Late Palaeolithic hunter,
+having already in imagination controlled the useful
+portion of the animal world, was more than half-way
+on the road to its domestication. But in so far as he mistook
+the will for the accomplished deed, he was not getting
+the value out of his second horse; or, to drop metaphor,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span>
+the scientific reason as yet lay dormant in his soul. But
+his dream was to come true presently.</p>
+
+<p>The Neolithic Period marks the first appearance of the
+'cibi-cultural' peoples. The food-seekers have become
+food-raisers. But the change did not come all at once.
+The earlier Neolithic culture is at best transitional. There
+may even have been one of those set-backs in culture
+which we are apt to ignore when we are narrating the
+proud tale of human advance. Europe had now finally
+escaped from the last ravages of an Arctic climate;
+but there was cruel demolition to make good, and in
+the meantime there would seem, as regards man, to have
+been little doing. Life among the kitchen-middens of
+Denmark was sordid; and the Azilians who pushed up
+from Spain as far as Scotland did not exactly step into
+a paradise ready-made. Somewhere, however, in the
+far south-east a higher culture was brewing. By steps
+that have not yet been accurately traced legions of
+herdsmen and farmer-folk overspread our world, either
+absorbing or driving before them the roving hunters
+of the older dispensation. We term this, the earliest of
+true civilizations, 'neolithic', as if it mattered in the
+least whether your stone implement be chipped or polished
+to an edge. The real source of increased power and
+prosperity lay in the domestication of food-animals and
+food-plants. The man certainly had genius and pluck
+into the bargain who first trusted himself to the back of
+an unbroken horse. It needed hardly less genius to
+discover that it is no use singing charms over the seed-bearing
+grass in order to make it grow, unless some of
+the seed is saved to be sowed in due season. Society
+possibly brained the inventor&mdash;such is the way of the
+crowd; but, as it duly pocketed the invention, we have
+perhaps no special cause to complain.</p>
+
+<p>By way of appreciating the conditions prevailing in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span>
+the Later Neolithic Age, let us consider in turn the Lake-dwellers
+of Switzerland and the Dolmen-builders of our
+Western coast-lands. I was privileged to assist, on the
+shore of the Lake of Neuch&acirc;tel, in the excavation of a site
+where one Neolithic village of pile-dwellings had evidently
+been destroyed by fire, and at some later date, just falling
+within the Stone Age, had been replaced by another.
+Here we had lighted on a crucial instance of the march
+of cultural progress. The very piles testified to it, those
+of the older settlement being ill-assorted and slight,
+whereas the later structure was regularly built and
+heavily timbered. It was clear, too, that the first set
+of inhabitants had lived narrow lives. All their worldly
+goods were derived from strictly local sources. On the
+other hand, their successors wore shells from the Mediterranean
+and amber beads from the Baltic among their
+numerous decorations; while for their flint they actually
+went as far afield as Grand Pressigny in West-Central
+France, the mines of which provided the butter-like
+nodules that represented the <i>ne plus ultra</i> of Neolithic
+luxury. Commerce must have been decidedly flourishing
+in those days. No longer was it a case of the so-called
+'silent trade', which the furtive savage prosecutes with
+fear and trembling, placing, let us say, a lump of venison
+on a rock in the stream dividing his haunts from those
+of his dangerous neighbours, and stealing back later on
+to see if the red ochre for which he pines has been deposited
+in return on the primitive counter. The Neolithic trader,
+on the other side, must have pushed the science of barter
+to the uttermost limits short of the invention of a circulating
+medium, if indeed some crude form of currency was
+not already in vogue.</p>
+
+<p>When we turn to the Dolmen-builders, and contemplate
+their hoary sanctuaries, we are back among the problems
+raised by the philosophic conception of progress as an<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>
+advance in soul-power. Is any religion better than none?
+Does it make for soul-power to be preoccupied with the
+cult of the dead? Does the imagination, which in alliance
+with the scientific reason achieves such conquests over
+nature, give way at times to morbid aberration, causing
+the chill and foggy loom of an after-life to obscure the
+honest face of the day? I can only say for myself that
+the deepening of the human consciousnesses due to the
+effort to close with the mystery of evil and death, and to
+extort therefrom a message of hope and comfort, seems
+to me to have been worth the achievement at almost any
+cost of crimes and follies perpetrated by the way. I do
+not think that progress in religion is progress towards its
+ultimate abolition. Rather, religion, if regarded in the
+light of its earlier history, must be treated as the parent
+source of all the more spiritual activities of man; and
+on these his material activities must depend. Else the
+machine will surely grind the man to death; and his
+body will finally stop the wheels that his soul originally
+set in motion.</p>
+
+<p>The panorama is over. It has not been easy, at the
+rate of about a millennium to a minute, to present
+a coherent account of the prehistoric record, which at
+best is like a jig-saw puzzle that has lost most of the
+pieces needed to reconstitute the design. But, even
+on this hasty showing, it looks as if the progressive nature
+of man were beyond question. There is manifest gain in
+complexity of organization, both physical and cultural;
+and only less manifest, in the sense that the inwardness of
+the process cannot make appeal to the eye, is the corresponding
+gain in realized power of soul. In short, the men
+of the Stone Age assuredly bore their full share in the
+work of race-improvement; and the only point on which
+there may seem to be doubt is whether we of the age of
+metal are as ready and able to bear our share. But let<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span>
+us be optimistic about ourselves. As long as we do not
+allow our material achievements to blind us to the need
+of an education that keeps the spiritual well to the fore,
+then progress is assured so far as it depends on culture.</p>
+
+<p>Yet if we could likewise breed for spirituality, humanity's
+chances, I believe, would be bettered by as much
+again or more. But how is this to be done? Science
+must somehow find out. To leave it to nature is treason
+to the mind. Man may be an ass on the whole, but nature
+is even more of an ass, especially when it stands for human
+nature minus its saving grace of imaginative, will-directed
+intelligence. So let us hope that one day people will
+marry intelligently, and that the best marriages will be
+the richest in offspring. I believe that the spiritual is
+not born of the sickly; and at any rate should be prepared
+to make trial of such a working principle in my New
+Republic.</p>
+
+<p>So much for the practical corollaries suggested by our
+flying visit to Prehistoric Europe. But, even if any
+detailed lessons to be drawn from such fragmentary
+facts have to be received with caution, you need not
+hesitate to pursue this branch of study for its own sake
+as part of the general training of the mind. Accustom
+yourselves to a long perspective. Cultivate the eagle's
+faculty of spacious vision. It is only thus that one can
+get the values right&mdash;see right and wrong, truth and error,
+beauty and ugliness in their broad and cumulative effects.
+Analytic studies, as they are termed, involving the exploration
+of the meaning of received ideas, must come first
+in any scheme of genuine education. We must learn
+to affirm before we can go on to learn how to criticize.
+But historical studies are a necessary sequel. Other
+people's received ideas turn out in the light of history
+to have sometimes worked well, and sometimes not so
+well; and we are thereupon led to revise our own opinions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>
+accordingly. Now the history of man has hitherto stood
+almost exclusively for the history of European civilization.
+Being so limited, it loses most of its value as an instrument
+of criticism. For how can a single phase of culture
+criticize itself? How can it step out of the scales and
+assess its own weight? Anthropology, however, will
+never acquiesce in this parochial view of the province
+of history. History worthy of the name must deal with
+man universal. So I would have you all become anthropologists.
+Let your survey of human progress be age-long
+and world-wide. You come of a large family and an
+ancient one. Learn to be proud of it, and then you will
+seek likewise to be worthy of it.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books for Reference</span></h3>
+
+<div class='indent2'>
+<p>W. J. Sollas, <i>Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives</i>,
+2nd edition, 1915.</p>
+
+<p>E. A. Parkyn, <i>Introduction to the study of Prehistoric Art</i>.</p>
+
+<p>R. R. Marett, <i>Anthropology</i> (Home University Library).</p>
+
+<p>J. L. Myres, <i>Dawn of History</i> (Home University).</p>
+</div>
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_5_5" id="Footnote_5_5"></a><a href="#FNanchor_5_5"><span class="label">[5]</span></a> Presidential Address to the International Folk-Lore Congress,
+1891, p. 9.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span></p>
+<h2>III</h2>
+
+<h2>PROGRESS AND HELLENISM</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">F. Melian Stawell</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>To speak the truth about national characteristics it is
+often necessary to speak in paradoxes, for of all unities
+on earth nothing contains so many contradictions as
+a nation. So it is here: it may be said quite truly that
+the Greeks had at once the most profound conceptions
+about Progress and no faith in it: that they were at once
+the most hopeful and the most despairing of peoples.
+Let me try to explain. When we speak of a faith in
+Progress, whatever else we mean, we must mean, I take
+it, that there is a real advance in human welfare throughout
+time from the Past to the Future, that 'the best is
+yet to be', and that the good wine is kept to the last.
+But if we are to have a philosophy underlying that faith
+we must be able to say something more. What, in the
+first place, do we mean by 'a real advance'? Or by
+'human welfare'? Progress, yes, but progress towards
+what? What is the standard? And if we cannot
+indicate a standard, what right have we to say that one
+life is any better than another? The life of the scientific
+man any better than the life of the South Sea Islander&mdash;content
+if only he has enough bananas to eat? Or than
+the life of a triumphant conqueror, a Zenghis Khan or
+a Tamberlaine&mdash;exultant if he has enough human heads
+before him? Or, indeed, any of these rather than the
+blank of Nirvana or the life of a vegetable?</p>
+
+<p>Our first need, then, is the need of a standard for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span>
+good over and above the conflicting opinions of men,
+and some idea as to what that standard implies.</p>
+
+<p>And the next question is, why we should hold that any
+of this good is going to be realized in human life at all?
+If it is, there must be some connexion of cause and effect
+between goodness and human existence. What is the
+nature of that connexion? Finally, why should we hope
+that this goodness is realized more and more fully as time
+goes on?</p>
+
+<p>The Greeks faced these questions, as they faced so
+many, with extraordinary daring and penetration and
+with an intimate mixture of sadness and hope.</p>
+
+<p>They themselves, of all nations known to us in history,
+had made the greatest progress in the shortest space of
+time. A long course of preparation, it is true, underlay
+that marvellous growth. The classical Greeks,&mdash;and when
+I speak of Hellenism I mean the flower of classical Greek
+culture,&mdash;the classical Greeks entered into the labours
+of the island peoples, who, whether kindred to them or
+not, had built up from neolithic times a great civilization,
+the major part of which they could, and did, assimilate.
+They found the soil already worked. None the
+less it is to their own original genius that we owe
+those great discoveries of the spirit which, to quote
+a recent writer, 'created a new world of science and art,
+established an ideal of the sane mind in the sane body
+and the perfect man in the perfect society, cut out a new
+line of progress between anarchy and despotism, and
+made moral ends supreme over national in the State.'<a name="FNanchor_6_6" id="FNanchor_6_6"></a><a href="#Footnote_6_6" class="fnanchor">[6]</a></p>
+
+<p>But these practical achievements of theirs have been
+already summed up by Professor J. A. Smith in his lecture<a name="FNanchor_7_7" id="FNanchor_7_7"></a><a href="#Footnote_7_7" class="fnanchor">[7]</a>
+at this school last year, and it is to that lecture that
+I would refer you. I will take it as a basis and proceed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>
+for my own purposes to discuss the Greek conceptions
+about progress. Those conceptions were complex, and,
+speaking roughly, we may say this: if belief in real
+progress implies belief in three things, namely, (1) an
+absolute standard apprehended, however dimly, by
+man, (2) a causal connexion between existence and
+perfection, and (3) a persistent advance through time,
+then the Greeks held to the first two and doubted,
+or even denied, the third. Their two great thinkers,
+Plato and Aristotle, worked out systems based on the
+conviction that there really was an absolute standard of
+perfection, that man could really apprehend something
+of this perfection, and that the effort towards it was
+essential to the very existence of the world, part of the
+stuff, as it were, that made the universe. These systems
+have had an effect not to be exaggerated on the whole
+movement of thought since their day. Moreover, many
+of their fundamental conceptions are being revived in
+modern science and metaphysics. And the convictions
+that underlie them are calculated, one would say, to lead
+at once to a buoyant faith in progress. But with Plato,
+and Aristotle, and the Greeks generally, they did not so
+lead. The Greeks could not feel sure that this effort
+towards perfection, though it is part of existence, is strong
+enough to deliver man in this world from the web of evil
+in which also he is involved, nor even that he makes any
+approach on the whole towards the loosening of the toils.
+The spectre of world-destruction, as Whitman says of
+Carlyle, was always before them. And I wish to ask
+later on if we may not surmise definite reasons in their
+own history for this recurring note of discouragement.
+But let us first look at the positive side, and first in
+Plato. Plato came to his system by several lines of
+thought, and to understand it we ought to take account
+of all.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span></p>
+<p>1. In the first place no thinker, I suppose, ever felt
+more keenly than he felt the desire for an absolute
+standard of truth, especially in matters of right and wrong,
+if only to decide between the disputes of men. And, in
+Greece men disputed so boldly and so incessantly that
+there was no possibility of forgetting the clash of opinion
+in any 'dogmatic slumber'. Thus Plato is always
+asking, like Robert Browning in 'Rabbi Ben Ezra',&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">Now, who shall arbitrate?<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ten men love what I hate,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Ten who in ears and eyes<br /></span>
+<span class="i1">Match me: we all surmise,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They this thing, and I that; whom shall my soul believe?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>In one of his very earliest dialogues, the 'Euthyphro',
+Plato puts the question almost in so many words. What is
+it, he asks (7 <span class="smcap">a-e</span>), that men quarrel over most passionately
+when they dispute? Is it not over the great questions
+of justice and injustice, of beauty, goodness, and the
+like? They do not quarrel thus over a question of
+physical size, simply because they can settle such a dispute
+by reference to an unquestioned standard, a standard
+measure, let us say.</p>
+
+<p>If there is no corresponding standard for right and
+wrong, if each man is really the judge and the measure
+for himself, then there is no sense, Plato feels, in claiming
+that one man is wiser than another in conduct, or indeed
+any man wiser than a dog-faced baboon (<i>Theaet.</i> 161 <span class="smcap">c-e</span>).</p>
+
+<p>2. Again, Plato feels most poignantly the inadequacy
+of all the goodness and beauty we have ever actually seen
+in this world of space and time, compared with the ideal
+we have of them in their perfection. How can we have
+this sense of deficiency, he asks, unless somehow we
+apprehend something supreme, over and above all the
+approaches to it that have as yet appeared? (<i>Phaedo</i>,
+74 <span class="smcap">e</span>).<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This vision of an absolute perfection, as yet unrealized
+on earth, so dominates all his thinking, and has such
+peculiar features of its own, that even familiar quotations
+must be quoted here. You will find an exquisite
+translation of a typical passage in our Poet Laureate's
+Anthology, <i>The Spirit of Man</i> (No. 37). Specially to be
+noted here is the stress on the unchanging character of
+this eternal perfection and the suggestion that it cannot
+be fully realized in the world. At the same time, Plato
+is equally sure that it is only through the study of this
+world that our apprehension of that perfection is
+awakened at all:&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'He who has thus been instructed in the science of Love,
+and has been led to see beautiful things in their due order
+and rank, when he comes toward the end of his discipline,
+will suddenly catch sight of a wondrous thing, beautiful
+with the absolute Beauty ... he will see a Beauty eternal,
+not growing or decaying, not waxing or waning, nor will
+it be fair here and foul there ... as if fair to some and foul
+to others ... but Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and
+everlasting; which lending of its virtue to all beautiful
+things that we see born to decay, itself suffers neither
+increase nor diminution, nor any other change' (<i>Symp.</i> 211).</p></div>
+
+<p>All beautiful things remind man, Plato tells us in his
+mythological fashion, of this perfect Beauty, because we
+had seen it once before in another life, before our souls
+were born into this world, 'that blissful sight and spectacle'
+(<i>Phaedrus</i>, 250 <span class="smcap">b</span>) when we followed Zeus in his
+winged car and all the company of the gods, and went out
+into the realm beyond the sky, a realm 'of which no
+mortal poet has ever sung or ever will sing worthily'.</p>
+
+<p>3. But, beside this passion for the ideal, Plato was
+intensely interested in our knowledge of the actual world
+of appearances around us. And one of the prime questions
+with which he was then concerned was the question,
+what we mean when we talk about the nature or character<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>
+of the things we see, a plant, say, or an animal, or a man.
+We must mean something definite, otherwise we could
+not recognize, for example, that a plant <i>is</i> a plant through
+all its varieties and all the different stages of its growth.
+Plato's answer was, that in all natural things there is
+a definite principle that copies, as it were, a definite Type
+or Form, and this Type he calls an Idea. Thus in some
+sense it is this Type, this Idea, this Form, that brings the
+particular thing into being.</p>
+
+<p>4. But it was not enough for Plato to say that every
+natural thing had in some sense a certain type for its basis,
+unless he could believe that this type was good, and that
+all the types were harmonious with each other. He could
+only be satisfied with the world, in short, if he could feel
+that it came about through a movement towards perfection.
+He makes his Socrates say that in asking about
+'the causes of things, what it is that makes each thing
+come into being', it was not enough for him if he could
+only see that the thing was there because something had
+put it there: he also wanted to see that it was good for it
+to be there. Socrates tells us that what he needed he
+thought he had found in a book by Anaxagoras, which
+announced 'that Mind was the disposer and cause of all'
+because, 'I said to myself, If this be so&mdash;if Mind is the
+orderer, it will have all in order, and put every single thing
+in the place that is best for it'.<a name="FNanchor_8_8" id="FNanchor_8_8"></a><a href="#Footnote_8_8" class="fnanchor">[8]</a></p>
+
+<p>It is the same feeling as that which underlies the words
+of Genesis about the Creation, 'And God saw that it was
+good'. And there is no doubt that such a view of the
+world would be supremely satisfying if we could count
+it true. There may be considerable intellectual satisfaction,
+no doubt, in merely solving a puzzle as to how
+things come about, but it is as nothing compared to the
+joy there would be in contemplating their goodness.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span></p>
+<p>5. But is it true? Can we possibly say so in view of the
+hideous imperfection round us? The writers of Genesis
+spoke of a Fall. Plato, in his own way, speaks of a
+Fall himself. He never gives up the belief in an
+Absolute Perfection, a system of Perfect Types somehow&mdash;he
+does not say exactly how&mdash;influencing the
+structure of things in this world. But he holds that on
+earth this perfection is always thwarted by a medium
+which prevents its full manifestation. This medium is
+the medium of Space and Time, and therefore the medium
+of history&mdash;and therefore history is always and inevitably
+a record of failure. 'While we are in the body,' Plato
+writes, 'and while the soul is contaminated with its
+evils, our desire will never be thoroughly satisfied.'<a name="FNanchor_9_9" id="FNanchor_9_9"></a><a href="#Footnote_9_9" class="fnanchor">[9]</a> 'The
+body is a tomb,' he writes elsewhere, quoting a current
+phrase.</p>
+
+<p>This is sad enough: yet if we put against it Plato's
+vision of what Man might be, we get as inspiring words
+as ever were written:</p>
+
+<p>'We have spoken of Man', he says at the end of the
+<i>Republic</i>, 'as he appears to us now, but now he looks as
+Glaucus looked after he had been cast into the sea, and
+his original nature was scarcely to be discerned, for his
+limbs were broken and crushed and defaced by the waters,
+and strange things had grown round him, shells and
+seaweed and stones, so that he was more like a beast than
+a man. That is how the soul looks to us now encompassed
+by all her evils. It is elsewhere, my friend, that we ought
+to look.' Where? asks Plato's friend, and Plato answers,
+'We should look to her love of wisdom and realize what
+she clings to, what company she desires, for she is akin
+to the Divine and Immortal and Eternal, and we should
+understand what she would become if she followed after
+it, with all her strength, and were lifted by that effort<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>
+out of the sea where she now lies.... Then we should
+understand her real nature.' (<i>Republic</i>, 611.)</p>
+
+<p>Somewhere, Plato believes, this true nature of man
+may be realized. The Principle of Good is something
+active, not a dead helpless thing, with no effect on the
+rest of the universe (<i>Sophist</i>, 248, 249); it is a living power,
+which desires that everything everywhere should be as
+glorious as possible (<i>Tim.</i> 29 <span class="smcap">d</span>). There is no envy, Plato
+says, in the Divine, that grudging spirit has no part in
+the heavenly company. Only it is not on earth that the
+glory can be realized. It is towards the life after death
+that Plato's real hopes are directed.</p>
+
+<p>None the less, and this is important, this world does
+not cease to be significant for him. He does not turn
+aside,&mdash;as some souls, intoxicated with the Divine, have
+done,&mdash;from this world altogether.</p>
+
+<p>Because he holds that man can only advance by
+struggling to make this world better. Man's ordinary
+life may be like the life in a cave, as he says in his famous
+myth, but the true philosopher who has once risen out of
+the cave must go back into it again and teach the prisoners
+there what the universe really is (<i>Republic</i>, Book vi,
+<i>fin.</i>; vii, <i>init.</i>). The very passage that I quoted about
+man's real nature comes at the end of the <i>Republic</i>. Now
+the <i>Republic</i> is a Utopia, and no one writes a Utopia
+unless he believes that the effort to reach it is of prime
+importance to man and helps him to advance.</p>
+
+<p>Only, for Plato, the advance is not marked in the successive
+stages of history, as the modern faith in progress
+asserts. The life on earth, for Plato, is like a school
+through which men pass and in which they may learn and
+grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is
+not that he does not envisage change in history, but what
+he seems to hope for at the best is nothing more hopeful
+than recurring cycles of better and worse. He tells a fable,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span>
+in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at one time the
+world is set spinning in the right direction by God and
+then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control
+it, and then it gradually forgets the divine teaching and
+slips from good to bad and from bad to worse, until at
+last God takes pity on it once more to save it from utter
+destruction (<i>Polit.</i> 269 ff.). No doubt in this idea of
+cycles Plato is influenced by the popular thought of his
+time: this feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age
+in the past was deeply rooted in Greek mythology. We
+get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and there are similar
+touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have
+sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever
+they recover it they will lose it again. And with Plato
+this dread is reinforced by his sense of something incurable
+in the world, the thwarting influence of spatial and
+temporal matter (<i>Theaet.</i> 176 <span class="smcap">a</span>).</p>
+
+<p>It is strange that, though he is always thinking of the
+individual soul as learning through experience in its
+passage from one life to another, Plato does not seem to
+have the idea of mankind learning by the lessons of
+history, of knowledge being handed down from one age
+to another, and growing in the process. That is one of
+the most inspiring ideas in modern thought: a German
+writer has spoken of history as the long Odyssey of the
+human spirit, the common mind of Man coming at last
+through its wanderings to find out what it really wants,
+and where its true home lies.</p>
+
+<p>And here, significantly enough, we find we are brought
+back in our modern way to something very like Plato's
+own conception of an eternal unchanging Reality. There
+are endless problems in the whole conception of the
+Eternal that I am quite unable even to attempt; but
+this much at least seems clear to me, that the whole idea
+of mankind learning by the experience of History, implies<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>
+something of permanent value running through that
+experience. The very thought of continued progress
+implies that man can look back at the successive stages
+of the Past and say of each: In that lay values which
+I, to-day and always, can recognize as good, although
+I believe we have more good now. Seeley speaks in a noble
+passage of how religion might conceive a progressive
+revelation which was, in a sense, the same through all its
+stages, and yet was a growing thing:&mdash;'each new revelation
+asserts its own superiority to those which went before,'
+but the superiority is 'not of one thing to another thing&mdash;but
+of the developed thing to the undeveloped'. 'It is
+thus', he writes, 'that the ages should behave to one
+another.' This is the true 'understanding and concert
+with time'.<a name="FNanchor_10_10" id="FNanchor_10_10"></a><a href="#Footnote_10_10" class="fnanchor">[10]</a> And though Plato does not live in the
+thought of historic progress, yet such a conception of
+progress which recognizes at different stages different
+expressions, more or less adequate, of one eternal value,
+such a way of thinking is entirely Platonic. When we
+look back at history in this mood we think not only of
+grasping the right principles for the Future, but of rejoicing
+in the definite achievements of the Past, and we feel this
+most poignantly, I think, of the achievements won by the
+spirit of Beauty. Great works of Art we are accustomed
+actually to call immortal, and we mean by this not
+merely that we think they will always be famous, but that
+there is something in them that makes it impossible for
+them ever to be superseded. In themselves they are inexhaustible:
+if they cease to interest us, it is our fault and
+not theirs. We may want more, we do want more, where
+they came from, but we never want to lose them, any more
+than we could bear to lose our old friends, though we may
+desire to make new ones. Of all the divine Ideas, said
+Plato, Beauty is the one that shows itself most plainly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span>
+in the world of sense and speaks to us most plainly of the
+eternal realities.</p>
+
+<p>This, however, is perhaps trenching on the subject of
+Progress in Art, and I should like to return to the general
+Greek conception of the tendency in all nature towards
+the Good, the perfect realization of perfect types.</p>
+
+<p>Plato does not expressly insist that this tendency is of
+the nature of effort, though I think that is involved in his
+view. But Aristotle does. Following Plato in essentials,
+he makes bold to say outright that every natural thing
+in its own way longs for the divine and desires to share
+in the divine life, so far as it can.<a name="FNanchor_11_11" id="FNanchor_11_11"></a><a href="#Footnote_11_11" class="fnanchor">[11]</a> Every such thing in
+this world of space and time has to cope with difficulties
+and is imperfect, but everything struggles towards the
+good. That good is in the life of God, a thinking life, an
+activity of thought, existing in some sense beyond this
+imperfect world; and this life is so supremely desirable
+that it makes everything else struggle to reach it. It
+moves the whole world, Aristotle says, in a famous
+passage, because it is loved. It is the world's desire.<a name="FNanchor_12_12" id="FNanchor_12_12"></a><a href="#Footnote_12_12" class="fnanchor">[12]</a></p>
+
+<p>Now this idea of effort&mdash;or of something analogous to
+effort&mdash;constituting the inner nature of every natural
+thing reappears, with pregnant consequences, in modern
+thought, though seldom with these vast theological
+consequences. The idea of an upward effort through
+nature lies at the base of our most hopeful theories of
+evolution, and forms the true support of our modern
+faith in progress. Broadly speaking, our evolutionists
+are now divided into two schools: the adherents of the
+one believe that variations are purely accidental, and
+may occur in any direction whatsoever, the useful ones
+being preserved only because they happen to be useful for
+the life of the species, while the adherents of the <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>other&mdash;the
+school that I would call the school of hope&mdash;believe
+that accident, even with natural selection to aid it, is
+utterly inadequate to account for the ordered beauty and
+harmony that we do see in natural things. They admit,
+as Plato and Aristotle admit, imperfection and difficulty
+in the world, but they insist on a movement towards
+value: in short, they conceive an order emerging that is
+brought about, to quote a modern writer, both in nature
+and in society, by 'a principle of movement and progress
+conflicting with a principle of inertia.'<a name="FNanchor_13_13" id="FNanchor_13_13"></a><a href="#Footnote_13_13" class="fnanchor">[13]</a></p>
+
+<p>Aristotle, in words that are strikingly modern, raises
+the very question at issue here.<a name="FNanchor_14_14" id="FNanchor_14_14"></a><a href="#Footnote_14_14" class="fnanchor">[14]</a> He asks whether we can
+suppose that nature does not aim at the good at all, but
+that variations arise by chance and are preserved just
+because they are useful, and he scouts the idea that
+chance could do more, as Zeller says, than 'bring about
+isolated and abnormal results'. He chooses instead the
+conception of purpose and effort, and this in spite of the
+difficulties in conceiving a purpose and an effort that are
+not definitely conscious. The sort of thing that is in
+Aristotle's mind when he speaks of nature aiming at the
+good, comes out in a passage by Edward Carpenter in
+his little book <i>The Art of Creation</i>. Carpenter plunges
+boldly and compares the principle that makes a tree grow
+and propagate its kind with the impulse that makes
+a man express himself. Man, he says,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>has a Will and Purpose, a Character, which, do what you
+will, tends to push outwards towards expression. You
+put George Fox in prison, you flog and persecute him, but
+the moment he has a chance he goes and preaches just
+the same as before.... But take a Tree and you notice
+exactly the same thing. A dominant Idea informs the
+life of the Tree; persisting, it forms the tree. You may
+snip the leaves as much as you like to a certain pattern,
+but they will only grow in their own shape. Finally, you<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span>
+may cut the tree down root and branch and burn it,
+but, if there is left a single seed, within that seed ... lurks
+the formative ideal, which under proper conditions will
+again spring into life and expression.<a name="FNanchor_15_15" id="FNanchor_15_15"></a><a href="#Footnote_15_15" class="fnanchor">[15]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Aristotle would have endorsed almost every word of
+this. In his pithy way, speaking of the distinction between
+natural and artificial objects, he says himself that if you
+planted a wooden bed and the wood could still grow, it
+would grow up, not a bed, but a tree.<a name="FNanchor_16_16" id="FNanchor_16_16"></a><a href="#Footnote_16_16" class="fnanchor">[16]</a></p>
+
+<p>He would not have gone so far as to talk about the
+<i>Will</i> of a tree, but he would have admitted that what made
+the tree grow was the same sort of thing as Will. And in
+one respect he goes farther than Edward Carpenter does.
+For he considers that not only growth but even the movement
+of natural things through space is somehow an
+expression of a tendency towards the good and the divine,
+a tendency which, when consciousness supervenes, we can
+call effort, an activity, even though, at its best, only
+an imperfect activity. He looks up at the splendour of
+the circling stars and asks if it is possible that so glorious
+an order can be anything but a manifestation of something
+akin to the divine. Here indeed he is speaking
+of movements made by existences he reckoned among the
+highest in the world, for he thought the stars were living
+beings higher than man. But he recognized a rudimentary
+form of such activity even in what we now call inanimate
+matter. Here we come to a leading conception of Aristotle's,
+and one most important for our purpose: the
+conception of a hierarchy of natural existences, all of them
+with some value, less or more. When Aristotle is truest
+to himself, he will tell us not to be afraid of studying the
+meanest forms of natural existence, because in everything
+there is something marvellous and divine. He quotes
+with much satisfaction the story of Heracleitus, who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>
+welcomed his friends into the bakehouse with the saying
+that 'there were gods in the bakehouse too'.<a name="FNanchor_17_17" id="FNanchor_17_17"></a><a href="#Footnote_17_17" class="fnanchor">[17]</a></p>
+
+<p>Thus, at the lowest end of the scale, we have what we
+call inanimate matter, which Aristotle thinks of much as
+we do, namely, as something occupying space, the different
+parts of it being endowed with different powers of movement,
+and with different properties, such as warmth or
+coldness, wetness or dryness. A natural thing, he says,
+is a thing that has a principle of activity in itself, something
+that makes it act in a definite way, whenever it
+is not interfered with by anything else.<a name="FNanchor_18_18" id="FNanchor_18_18"></a><a href="#Footnote_18_18" class="fnanchor">[18]</a> Aristotle speaks,
+for example, of fire having a natural tendency to mount
+up, much as we might speak of solids having a natural
+tendency to gravitate towards one another. Go back as
+far as we like, and, Aristotle thinks, we still find certain
+primitive differences which constitute what we call the
+primitive elements. This, I imagine, is much the point
+of view of modern science.</p>
+
+<p>And these primitive elements in Aristotle's view
+influence each other, unite with each other, or change
+into each other. As a rule, however, they exhibit no
+new powers. But given a happy concurrence of qualities,
+say a certain union of heat and cold, and a new power
+does become manifest: the power of life. Thus, in
+a sense, Aristotle does envisage the spontaneous generation
+of life; and he knows, roughly, what he means by
+life. The living thing can go through far more changes
+than the non-living, while yet remaining recognizably the
+same thing. For example, it shows in itself a greater
+advance to richness and also a decline, it uses other
+things to foster this advance, and it sends out fresh
+things, like itself, but independent of itself: in short, it
+grows, decays, feeds itself, and propagates its kind.<a name="FNanchor_19_19" id="FNanchor_19_19"></a><a href="#Footnote_19_19" class="fnanchor">[19]</a></p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span></p><p>As I understand Aristotle, for him there is not an entire
+and absolute difference between ordinary matter and living
+things, and yet there is a real difference, and one not to
+be explained away, for there is a new manifestation of
+active energy. And if we consider life of more value
+than mere motion, then we are right in saying there is a
+higher energy. The quality of growth is a quality which
+could not be deduced from the quality of warmth or
+from the quality of mere movement in space, and
+yet all three qualities are alike in this, that they
+are all manifestations of an energy which is somehow
+inherent in things, and not merely imposed on them
+from without. The manifestations of life are started,
+in a sense, by the different movements, 'mechanical',
+if you like to call them so, in the rudimentary forms of
+matter, the elements meeting each other in space. The
+process of life could not have begun without such movements.
+But neither could it have begun if the elements,
+just as they appear, had been all there was. There had
+to be latent, that is, the possibility of a different and
+higher mode of action. This higher mode of action
+Aristotle calls a higher Form, a higher Idea. And
+I think it is true to him to say that he believes the lower
+Forms, the lower Ideas, do their most perfect work
+when they bring about the conditions under which the
+higher ones can operate. For when he speaks of that
+concurrence of elements that conditions life he speaks
+of the 'warmth and cold' as 'having mastered the
+matter'.<a name="FNanchor_20_20" id="FNanchor_20_20"></a><a href="#Footnote_20_20" class="fnanchor">[20]</a></p>
+
+<p>In any case he conceives a whole series of higher and
+lower Forms, the higher coming nearer and nearer to that
+full and glorious activity which he conceives to be the
+life of God. Above the power of the thing to grow as
+a plant grows appears the power of sensation as it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span>
+present in animals, and above that again the power,
+first seen in man, of living the life of thought, perceiving
+what is beautiful and true in the 'forms', the characters,
+of all the things around him, and with this that further
+power of setting consciously before himself what he really
+wants to be and to do, the power of moral action strictly
+so-called.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout this series, in every higher stage the lower
+is present as a kind of basis. In the man who thinks
+there is active not only the power of thought, but also
+the power of sensation, the faculty of growth, and the
+physical properties of the body. It would seem that
+Aristotle has only to take one step, and he would be a
+thoroughgoing evolutionist. He has only to say that the
+different stages are successive in time, the lower regularly
+preceding the higher. But this step he hesitates to take.</p>
+
+<p>He often comes very near it. He speaks of nature passing
+gradually from inanimate things through living things
+to living animals. He speaks of what is first in itself, first
+inherently, 'prior' in the logical sense because it is the goal
+and the completion of the thing, as appearing later in time.
+For instance, he believes that man can only find his real
+happiness and develop his real nature in the State, but
+the State appears later in time than the primitive associations
+of the household and the family.<a name="FNanchor_21_21" id="FNanchor_21_21"></a><a href="#Footnote_21_21" class="fnanchor">[21]</a> What came earlier
+in history were barbarous communities such as those of the
+Cyclopes, where 'each man laid down the law for his wife
+and children and obeyed no other law'.</p>
+
+<p>But Aristotle does not go on from this belief to the
+belief in a universal upward process throughout all
+history. The developed State, it is true, may always have
+been preceded by a lower form, but that lower form may
+itself have been preceded by a higher.</p>
+
+<p>Aristotle, in short, is haunted, like Plato, by the idea<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>
+of cycles, alternations, decline and progress, progress and
+decline. He feels this both in the life of States and in the
+whole life of the world. He speaks of the same discoveries
+being made over and over again, an infinite number of
+times, in the history of civilization. And his words
+recall the sad passage in Plato's <i>Laws</i> (676) referring to
+the numberless nations and states, ten thousand times
+ten thousand, that had risen and fallen all over the world,
+passing from worse to better and from better to worse.
+Similarly Aristotle will speak of degraded animal forms,
+and sometimes write as though the animal world could
+sink back into the vegetable altogether.</p>
+
+<p>Admitting, however, something like progress within the
+different cycles, we must ask a little more about the kind of
+progress which Aristotle would have desired. (I take
+Aristotle again as a typical Greek.) Man at his best, he
+clearly holds, in trying to realize his true nature should aim
+at a happiness which involves a harmony of all his faculties,
+a harmony inspired and led by the highest faculty of all,
+the Reason which rejoices in the contemplation of what
+is at once true and good and beautiful.</p>
+
+<p>Now in this aim, we must ask, does a man need other
+men and other creatures, and in what sense does he need
+them? Here, I think, we come on two inconsistent
+tendencies in Aristotle's thought, connected with two
+different ways of regarding the hierarchy of existences.
+We say that one existence is higher than another. Does
+this mean that what we call the lower are only so many
+blundering attempts to reach the higher? That every
+creature, for example, which is not a thinking man is, on
+the whole, a mistake? Aristotle often does speak like that.
+Woman, he says in one passage, is only a mutilated male.<a name="FNanchor_22_22" id="FNanchor_22_22"></a><a href="#Footnote_22_22" class="fnanchor">[22]</a>
+The principle which ought to develop into the active
+power of thought could not, he explains, in women<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>
+master the recalcitrant element which is always thwarting
+perfection, and thus woman is man <i>manqu&eacute;</i>. On these
+lines of thought it is easy to slip into looking on all other
+forms of existence as merely valuable in so far as they
+serve the direct purposes of men, and indeed only of a few
+men, those namely who are able to think as philosophers.
+This is the kind of view according to which, as the satirist
+suggests, cork-trees only grow in order to make corks
+for champagne-bottles, and the inferior races of mankind
+only exist to furnish slaves for the higher. And Aristotle
+does, on occasion, lend himself to such a view: he
+justifies a slavery in which, as he says, some men are to
+be treated merely as living tools. And yet on his own
+principles every man ought to aim at realizing his own
+end, and not merely the ends of others.</p>
+
+<p>But there is a widely different view, also present in
+Aristotle, and truer to the essence of his thought. It is a
+view instinct with that reverence for all existence of which
+I spoke at first, and it holds that all the different natural
+types, high or low, could all be united in one harmony,
+like an ordered army, as Aristotle himself would say,
+in which the divine spirit was present even as the spirit
+of a general is present in his men. The greatest thing in
+man, Aristotle thinks, is the godlike power of apprehending
+the different characters of all the things around
+him, and this of itself suggests the belief that all these
+characters have a value of their own, unique and indispensable,
+each aiming at a distinct aspect of the Divine,
+each, if it fulfilled its inner nature, finding, as Plato might
+have said, the place where it was best for it to be. Again,
+it is clear from Aristotle's whole treatment of the State,
+that when he wrote his famous phrase, 'Man is by nature
+a political animal', he meant that man, as we should say,
+is essentially social. It is part of man's goal to live with
+others; it is not merely a means to the goal. His highest<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span>
+happiness lies in the contemplation of the good, and the
+good, Aristotle says, can be contemplated far better in
+others than in ourselves. This is a profound saying, and
+from this thought springs the deep significance of friendship
+in Aristotle's system. The crown of the civic life
+he takes to be the community of friends who recognize
+the good in each other, and enjoy each other through
+this. The wider this community, then, we must surely
+say, the better.</p>
+
+<p>For Aristotle then, man's perfection ought to mean the
+perfection of every individual, and progress, so far as
+he conceives it, involve progress towards this end. This
+should lead on to belief in the supreme importance of
+the individual soul, and to Kant's great principle that we
+should always treat each man as an end in himself.</p>
+
+<p>Thus, if we concentrate on the hopeful elements in
+Plato and Aristotle, we may fairly say, I think, that we
+can see outlined in their philosophies something like the
+following belief: every natural thing in this world, and
+every natural creature, so far as it is good,&mdash;and all are
+more or less good,&mdash;tends to express some distinct aspect
+of a perfect harmony: we human beings are the first
+on earth to be definitely conscious of such a tendency,
+the first to be able definitely to direct it to its true goal,
+and our business in life is therefore threefold: to make
+actual our own function in this harmony, to help other
+creatures to actualize theirs, and to contemplate every
+such manifestation, in men or in things, with reverence
+and rejoicing.</p>
+
+<p>The harmony, if complete, would be a manifestation
+of a divine reality, and thus the love of God, the love of
+our neighbour, the love of nature, self-development,
+political life, scientific study, poetic contemplation, and
+philosophic speculation, would all unite in one comprehensive
+and glorious task.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>This, surely, is hopeful enough. But the Greek hope
+faltered and sank. Could this harmony ever be realized?
+Would not the thwarting element in the world always
+drag it down again and again, and drag some men down
+always, so that after all progress was impossible, and for
+some men should not even be attempted? As a matter
+of fact, Plato and Aristotle do limit their exhortations
+to a narrow circle of cultured Greeks, and even with them
+they doubt of success.</p>
+
+<p>Now this despondency came partly, I think, through
+the very sensitiveness of the Hellenic nature. The spectacle
+of the ever-baffled struggle in Nature and Man they
+felt at times almost intolerable. Aristotle saw that this
+perpetual failure in the heart of glorious good made the
+very essence of tragedy. The tragic hero is the man of
+innate nobleness who yet has some one defect that lays
+him open to ruin. Man is set in a world full of difficulties,
+a world much of which is dark and strange to him: his
+action and those of others have results which he did not,
+and in his ignorance could not, foresee; he is not strong
+enough for his great task.</p>
+
+<p>All the Greek poets have this deep sadness. Homer
+has it, in and through his intense feeling for the beauty
+and energy of life. There has never been such war-poetry
+as Homer's, and yet there has never been any
+which felt more poignantly the senselessness in war.
+'And I must come here', Achilles says to his noble enemy
+at the close, 'to torture you and your children.'</p>
+
+<p>In the next place, the sadness of the world could not be
+lightened for the Greeks by the vision that the modern
+theory of evolution has opened up to us of the long advance
+in the history of life on the planet. Even their knowledge
+of history in the strict sense was scanty, and it is only
+a long view of history that is likely to be comforting.
+What history they did know could bring them little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>
+comfort. In the first place it showed them a series of
+great civilizations, rising and falling, and those that had
+fallen seemed at least as good as those that followed
+them. A Greek like Plato knew of the Homeric civilization,
+simpler indeed, but fresher and purer than his own.
+And he believed, what we now know to be the fact, that
+even before the Homeric there had been a wonderful
+island-culture, what we call the Minoan, flourishing
+before the Homeric. 'There had been kings before
+Agamemnon.'</p>
+
+<p>And behind Minos and Agamemnon lay the great, and
+by that time the ossifying, kingdom of Egypt, compared
+to which the Greeks were, and felt themselves to be, but
+children. Plato had seen, finally, the degeneration of
+the Persian Empire&mdash;once so magnificent and mighty.</p>
+
+<p>This fact of recurrent decay is one of the heaviest that
+the human spirit can shoulder. Any theory of progress
+must come to terms with it, for Progress through history is
+certainly not an uninterrupted ascent; a spiral is the better
+image. And the weight must lie most heavily on a generation
+which feels its own self to be in peril of decay. Now
+Plato and Aristotle lived at such a period. Greece had
+gone through the bitter experiences of the Peloponnesian
+War, and the shadow of it lay on them, as on its
+historian Thucydides. In that fratricidal conflict Greece
+tore herself to pieces. It was a struggle between the
+two leaders of the then civilized world, and it has
+a terrible likeness to the struggle that is going on now.
+From its devastating influence Greece never recovered.
+Historians still dispute, and always will, as to the
+exact proportion of praise and blame between the two.
+But Thucydides himself, a true-hearted Athenian, brings
+out the tyrannical side in the Athenian temper. Not indeed
+towards her own people, but towards all who were not of
+her own immediate stock. Because Athens thought herself<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span>
+the fairest city in the world, as indeed she was, because
+she thought herself menaced by Sparta, and menaced
+she was, she allowed herself to tyrannize and lightly
+took up the burden of war between brethren. There are
+few passages in history more stately than the Funeral
+Oration of Pericles in which he calls Athens the School
+of Hellas, but even in it there is a certain deadly coldness
+of heart. And few things are more terrible than the
+coarsening of temper which Thucydides depicts as the
+war goes on and Pericles is succeeded by his caricature
+Cleon, the man who means to prosecute the war vigorously,
+and by vigour means ruthlessness. Nor was there ever
+a sterner indictment of aggression than that given in the
+dialogue between the spokesmen of Melos, the little island
+that desired to stand out of the conflict, and the Athenian
+representatives who were determined to force her into
+their policy. And after that dialogue comes, in Thucydides'
+great drama, the fall of Athens.</p>
+
+<p>The city recovered in some measure from her fall, but
+only to face another disaster. If she sinned in the
+Peloponnesian War through the spirit of aggression, she
+sinned in the struggle with Macedon through slackness
+and cowardice. In the one struggle she lost comradeship;
+in the other she lost liberty. And with the loss of the two
+she lost buoyancy. In a deeper sense than Pericles used
+the phrase, 'the springtime went out of her year'. Ultimately,
+perhaps, we cannot explain why this should be so.
+Other nations have had as disheartening experiences and yet
+risen above them. Some of the most inspired prophecies
+in the Hebrew writings came after the tiny state of Judaea
+had been torn in pieces by the insensate conflict between
+North and South, and after the whole people had been
+swept into captivity. But whatever the ultimate reason,
+Athens did not recover. We must not end, however,
+on a note of despair. Far from it. The work of Aristotle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span>
+and Plato and of the Greeks generally, was cramped for
+lack of sympathy and lack of hope, and, strangely enough,
+it was after they had passed and their glory with them
+that sympathy grew in the world, and after sympathy
+grew, hope returned.</p>
+
+<p>For it is exactly in those failing years, when the Hellenic
+gave way to the Hellenistic, that men first grasped, and
+grasped so firmly that it could hardly be lost again, one of
+the fundamental principles on which the whole fabric of
+our later civilization has rested, or ought to rest, the great
+principle of personal equality, the claim of every individual
+to transcendent value, irrespective of race and creed and
+endowment. The conquering rule of Alexander, whatever
+else it did, broke down the barriers of the little city-states
+and made men of different races feel themselves
+members of mankind. There rose among the Stoics the
+conviction that all men do belong together and are all
+made for each other. And with the advent of Christianity
+came the belief that every man, however mean and unworthy,
+can receive a power that will make him all he
+ought to be. The highest is within his reach. There is
+no reason now why the glorious life that Hellenism
+conceived for a few should not lie open to all men.</p>
+
+<p>Finally, we might say, and truly, that the vast political
+organization built up by Rome gave us Europeans, once
+and for all, the vision of a united Europe.</p>
+
+<p>That dream has never left it. Even to-day, here and
+now, in spite of our disasters, our blunders, and our crimes,
+let us not forget it, that dream which is 'not all a dream',
+the dream of once again constructing a system in which
+we might, all of us, all nations and all men and women,
+make progress together in the common task.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books for Reference</span></h3><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span></p>
+
+
+<div class='indent2'>
+<p>G. L. Dickinson, <i>The Greek View of Life</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Zeller, <i>Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Edited by Evelyn Abbott, <i>Hellenica</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Bury, <i>History of Greece</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Davies and Vaughan, <i>Plato's Republic</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Welldon, <i>Aristotle's Politics</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Peters, <i>Aristotle's Ethics</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Bridges, <i>The Spirit of Man</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_6_6" id="Footnote_6_6"></a><a href="#FNanchor_6_6"><span class="label">[6]</span></a> G. H. Perris, <i>History of War and Peace</i>, p. 54.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_7_7" id="Footnote_7_7"></a><a href="#FNanchor_7_7"><span class="label">[7]</span></a> 'The Unity of Western Civilization,' c. <span class="smcap">iii.</span></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_8_8" id="Footnote_8_8"></a><a href="#FNanchor_8_8"><span class="label">[8]</span></a> <i>The Spirit of Man</i>, 40; <i>Phaedo</i>, 96.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_9_9" id="Footnote_9_9"></a><a href="#FNanchor_9_9"><span class="label">[9]</span></a> <i>The Spirit of Man</i>, 16; <i>Phaedo</i>, 66.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_10_10" id="Footnote_10_10"></a><a href="#FNanchor_10_10"><span class="label">[10]</span></a> <i>Natural Religion</i>, part ii, c. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_11_11" id="Footnote_11_11"></a><a href="#FNanchor_11_11"><span class="label">[11]</span></a> <i>De An.</i> ii. 4, 415, p. 35.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_12_12" id="Footnote_12_12"></a><a href="#FNanchor_12_12"><span class="label">[12]</span></a> <i>The Spirit of Man</i>, 39; Aristotle, <i>Met.</i> 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_13_13" id="Footnote_13_13"></a><a href="#FNanchor_13_13"><span class="label">[13]</span></a> T. W. Rolleston, <i>Parallel Paths</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_14_14" id="Footnote_14_14"></a><a href="#FNanchor_14_14"><span class="label">[14]</span></a> <i>Phys.</i> ii. 8, 198 16-34.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_15_15" id="Footnote_15_15"></a><a href="#FNanchor_15_15"><span class="label">[15]</span></a> Pp. 28-9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_16_16" id="Footnote_16_16"></a><a href="#FNanchor_16_16"><span class="label">[16]</span></a> <i>Phys.</i> ii, c. <span class="smcap">i</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_17_17" id="Footnote_17_17"></a><a href="#FNanchor_17_17"><span class="label">[17]</span></a> <i>De Part. An.</i>, Bk. i, c. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_18_18" id="Footnote_18_18"></a><a href="#FNanchor_18_18"><span class="label">[18]</span></a> <i>Phys.</i> ii. <span class="smcap">i</span>, <i>init.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_19_19" id="Footnote_19_19"></a><a href="#FNanchor_19_19"><span class="label">[19]</span></a> <i>De Anima</i>, <i>init.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_20_20" id="Footnote_20_20"></a><a href="#FNanchor_20_20"><span class="label">[20]</span></a> <i>Meteor</i>, iv. 1. 378. See Zeller's <i>Aristotle</i>, vol. i, <i>fin.</i></p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_21_21" id="Footnote_21_21"></a><a href="#FNanchor_21_21"><span class="label">[21]</span></a> <i>Polit.</i> 1253 a; <i>Eth.</i> 1162 a.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_22_22" id="Footnote_22_22"></a><a href="#FNanchor_22_22"><span class="label">[22]</span></a> <i>Gen. An.</i> ii. 3. 737.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IV</h2>
+
+<h2>PROGRESS IN THE MIDDLE AGES</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">A. J. Carlyle</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>There still survives, not indeed among students of
+history, but among some literary persons, the notion
+that the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed and
+unprogressive; that the conditions of these centuries
+were wholly different from those of the ancient world and
+of modern time; that there was little continuity with the
+ancient world, and little connexion with the characteristic
+aspects of progress in the modern world.</p>
+
+<p>The truth is very different. It may be doubted whether
+at any other time, except perhaps in those two marvellous
+centuries of the flower of Greek civilization, there has
+been a more rapid development of the most important
+elements of civilization than in the period from the end of
+the tenth to the end of the thirteenth centuries. While
+it is true that much was lost in the ruin of the ancient
+world, much also survived, and there was a real continuity
+of civilization; indeed some of the greatest conceptions
+of the later centuries of the ancient world are exactly
+those upon which mediaeval civilization was built. And
+again, it was in the Middle Ages that the foundations
+were laid upon which the most characteristic institutions
+of the modern world have grown.</p>
+
+<p>Indeed this notion that the civilization of the Middle
+Ages was fixed and unprogressive is a mere literary
+superstition, and its origin is to be found in the ignorance
+and perversity of the men of the Renaissance; and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span>
+hardly less, it must be added, in the foolishness of many
+of the conceptions of the Romantic revival.</p>
+
+<p>There are, indeed, excuses for these mistakes and confusions.
+The Renaissance represents, among other things,
+a great and necessary movement of revolt against a religious
+and intellectual civilization which had once been living
+and moving, but had tended from the latter years of the
+thirteenth century to grow stiff and rigid. It was probably
+a real misfortune that the great thinkers and scholars
+of the thirteenth century, like Alexander of Hales and
+Thomas Aquinas, had embarked upon what was a premature
+attempt at the systematization of all knowledge;
+they made the same mistake as the Encyclopaedists of
+the eighteenth century or Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth,
+but with more disastrous results. For this work
+unhappily encouraged the mediaeval Church in its most
+fatal mistake, its tendency to suspect and oppose the
+apprehensions of new aspects of truth.</p>
+
+<p>The men of the Renaissance had to break the forms
+under which the schoolmen had thought to express all
+truth, they had to carry forward the great enterprise
+and adventure of the discovery of truth, and they had
+to do this in the teeth of a violent resistance on the part
+of those who thought themselves the representatives of
+the mediaeval civilization. There are, therefore, excuses
+for them in their contempt for the intellectual life of the
+past; but there is no real excuse for them in their contempt
+for mediaeval art and literature. When they
+turned their back upon the immediate past, and endeavoured
+pedantically to reproduce the ancient world,
+they were guilty of an outrageous ignorance and stupidity,
+a stupidity which is expressed in that unhappy phrase of
+Pope, the 'Gothic night'. Happily neither the great
+artists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nor the
+great poets of England and Spain were much affected<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>
+by the classical pedantry of which unhappily Petrarch
+was the begetter.</p>
+
+<p>It is this foolishness of the Renaissance which is the
+best excuse for the foolishness of the Romantic revival;
+the new classical movement had in such a degree
+interrupted the continuity of European art that it was
+very difficult for men in the eighteenth century to
+recover the past, and we must make allowance for the
+often ludicrous terms and forms of the new mediaevalism.
+Indeed it is a strange and often absurd art&mdash;the half-serious,
+half-parodying imitations of Thomson and Walpole
+and Wieland, this ludicrous caricature Gothic of Strawberry
+Hill and All Souls, the notion of Gothic architecture
+as a mass of crockets, battlements, crypts, and dungeons&mdash;and
+all in ruins. Indeed, the Romantic conception of the
+Middle Ages was often as absurd as that of the Renaissance,
+and if we are to get at the truth, if we are to make any
+serious attempt to understand the Middle Ages, we must
+clear our minds of two superstitions; the one, which we
+derive from the Renaissance, that mediaeval civilization
+was sterile, ignorant, and content to be ignorant; the
+other, which survives from the Romantic movement, that
+it was essentially religious, chivalrous and adventurous,
+that men spent their time in saying their prayers, making
+reverent love to their ladies, or carving the heads of the
+infidel.</p>
+
+<p>What I should desire to do is to persuade you that
+the more you study the Middle Ages the more you will see
+that these men and women were really very much like
+ourselves, ignorant, no doubt, of much which is to us
+really or superficially important, gifted on the other hand
+with some qualities which for the time we seem to have in
+a large measure lost, but substantially very like ourselves,
+neither very much better nor very much worse. Let me
+illustrate this by considering for a moment the figure<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>
+which to us is typical of the Middle Ages. What was the
+mediaeval knight? We think of him as a courteous,
+chivalrous person of a romantic and adventurous temper,
+whose business it was to fight for his lady or in the service
+of religion against the infidel. In reality he was usually
+a small landowner, who held his land on condition of
+military service to some lord; the title 'knight' means in
+its Latin form (<i>miles</i>), simply a soldier, in its Germanic
+form a servant, and distinguishes him from the older type
+of landowner who held his land in absolute ownership
+and free of all service except of a national kind. In
+virtue of his holding a certain amount of land he had to
+present himself for military service on those occasions
+and for those periods for which he could be legally summoned.
+But even this description implies a wholly
+wrong emphasis, for he was not primarily a soldier, but
+a small landowner and cultivator, very much what we
+should call a squireen. He was normally much more
+concerned about his crops, his cattle and pigs, than about
+his lord's affairs and his lord's quarrels. He was ignorant,
+often rather brutal, and turbulent, very ready for a quarrel
+with his neighbour, but with no taste for national wars,
+and the prolonged absence from his home which they
+might involve, unless indeed there was a reasonable
+prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact
+person, with very little sense of romance, and little
+taste for adventure unless there was something to be got
+out of it. We must dismiss from our minds the pretty
+superstitions of romance from Chaucer and Spenser to
+the time of the Romantic revival, and we must understand
+that the people of the Middle Ages were very much like
+ourselves; the times were rougher, more disorderly, there
+was much less security, but on the whole the character
+of human life was not very different.</p>
+
+<p>What was it, then, that happened with the end of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_76" id="Page_76">[76]</a></span>
+ancient world? Well, the civilization of the Roman Empire
+was overthrown by our barbarous ancestors, the old
+order, and tranquillity, and comfort disappeared, and the
+world fell back into discomfort and turbulence, and disorder;
+the roads fell into disrepair and were not mended,
+the drains were neglected, and the towns dwindled and
+shrank. We must remember, however, that this great civilization
+was dying out, was failing by some internal weakness,
+and that the barbarians only hastened the process.</p>
+
+<p>Much of the achievement of Greece and Rome was
+lost, much both material and intellectual, but not all,
+and the new civilization which began rapidly to grow
+up on the ruins of the old was in many respects
+continuous with it. In order, however, that we may
+understand this we must remember that the form of
+civilization with which the Middle Ages were continuous
+was the Graeco-Roman civilization of the later Empire,
+and not the great Hellenic civilization itself. What
+the Middle Ages knew was primarily that which the
+Christian Fathers like St. Augustine and St. Gregory
+the Great, St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus learned
+at their schools and universities. Some of these Fathers
+were educated at the great universities, like Athens,
+others at comparatively humble provincial institutions;
+some of them were men of powerful intellect, while others
+were more commonplace. What they learned was the
+general intellectual system of the late Empire, and what
+they learned they handed on to the Middle Ages; but
+it was not the great intellectual culture of Greece. We
+have still too strong an inclination to think of the ancient
+world as one and homogeneous; we have not yet sufficiently
+apprehended the great changes both in the form
+and in the temper of that world. And yet the varieties, the
+changes, are very diverse, the outlook, the artistic methods
+of the Homeric poetry are very different from the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_77" id="Page_77">[77]</a></span>
+emotional and intellectual modernity of Euripides. The
+philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is very different from
+that of the Stoics and Neoplatonists. In that picturesque
+but perhaps not very felicitous phrase which Mr. Murray
+has borrowed from Mr. Cornford, there was a 'failure of
+nerve' which separates the earlier from the later stages
+of the moral and intellectual culture of the ancient world.
+However this may be, and we shall have more to say
+about this presently, the civilization of the Middle Ages
+was made up on the one hand of elements drawn from
+the later Empire, and on the other of characteristics and
+principles which seem to have belonged to the Barbarian
+races themselves.</p>
+
+<p>With the end of the sixth century the ancient world
+had passed away and the mediaeval world had begun,
+and we have to consider the nature and movement of
+the new order, or rather we have to consider some of its
+elements, and their development, especially during the
+period from the end of the tenth century to the end of
+the thirteenth, during which it reached its highest level.
+We have to pass over the great attempt of the ninth
+century, for we can only deal with a small part of a large
+subject, and we shall only deal with a few aspects of it,
+and chiefly with the development of the spiritual conception
+of life which we call religion, with the reconstruction
+of the political order of society, with the beginning
+of a new intellectual life and the pursuit of truth, and with
+the development under new forms of the passion for beauty.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>I have been compelled to warn you against the romantic
+superstition that the Middle Ages were specifically
+religious, and yet it is quite true that the first aspect of
+mediaeval life which compels our attention is exactly
+the development of the sense of the significance of the
+spiritual quality of life. This was the first great task of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_78" id="Page_78">[78]</a></span>
+the men of the Middle Ages, and this was in a real sense
+their achievement; but not as contradicting the characteristic
+developments of the Hellenic civilization, but rather
+as completing and fulfilling it. It is indeed a singular
+superstition that the Hellenic world was lacking in
+spiritual insight, but I need only refer you to Miss Stawell's
+lecture, as serving to show you how great and how real
+this was. It really was not a mistake when an honest but
+rather stupid man like Justin Martyr, and the more
+acute and penetrating minds of the Alexandrian Fathers
+like Clement and Origen, thought that they heard the
+authentic accents of the 'Word' of God in the great
+philosophers of Greece, and especially in Plato.</p>
+
+<p>The apprehension of the spiritual element in human
+experience was not wanting in Hellenic civilization, but
+it needed a further development and especially in relation
+to those new apprehensions of personality and individuality,
+whose appearance we can trace both in the post-Aristotelian
+philosophy, and in the later Hebrew prophets and poets,
+which Christianity found in the world, and to which
+in its conception of the human in the Divine, and the
+Divine in the human, it gave a new force and breath. It
+is easy for us to smile at what may well be the over-rhetorical
+phrases of Seneca when he speaks of the
+self-sufficingness (<span class='correction' title='autarkeia'>&#945;&#965;&#964;&#945;&#961;&#954;&#949;&#953;&#945;</span>) of the wise man, or when he
+says that the wise man is, but for his mortality, like
+God himself; and yet these rhetorical phrases are, after
+all, the forms of an apprehension which has changed and
+is changing the world. And, it must be remembered that
+to understand the full significance of these phrases, we
+must bear in mind that the men of the Graeco-Roman
+civilization had put aside once and for all the 'natural'
+distinction between the 'Greek' and the 'Barbarian',
+had recognized that men were equal and alike, not
+different and unequal, that all men were possessed of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_79" id="Page_79">[79]</a></span>
+reason, and all were capable of virtue,<a name="FNanchor_23_23" id="FNanchor_23_23"></a><a href="#Footnote_23_23" class="fnanchor">[23]</a> or, in the Christian
+terms, all men are the children of God and capable of
+communion with Him.</p>
+
+<p>It is this new apprehension of life for which the Middle
+Ages found a new form in the great organization of the
+Church, and it is this which justifies our sense of the
+great and permanent significance of the tremendous
+conflict of the Papacy and the Empire. It is true that at
+times some of the representatives of the Church seem to
+have fallen into the mistake of aiming at a tyranny of the
+Church over the State, which would have been in the end
+as disastrous to the Church itself as to the State. But the
+normal principle of the Church was that which was first
+fully stated by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century,
+that the two great authorities, the spiritual and the
+temporal, are each divine, each draws its authority
+ultimately from God himself, each is supreme and
+independent in its own sphere, while each recognizes
+the authority of the other within its proper sphere.</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, the freedom of the spiritual life which the
+mediaeval Church was endeavouring to defend; it was
+the apprehension that there was some ultimate quality in
+human nature which stands and must stand outside of the
+direct or coercive control of society, which lies behind all
+the confused clamour of the conflicts of Church and State.</p>
+
+<p>It is true that in this great and generous effort to secure
+the freedom of the human soul men in some measure
+lost their way. They demanded and in a measure they
+succeeded in asserting the freedom of the religious
+organization, as against the temporal organization, but
+in doing this they went perilously near to denying the
+freedom of the individual spiritual experience. They
+went perilously near to denying it, but they never wholly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_80" id="Page_80">[80]</a></span>
+forgot it. The Church claimed and exercised an immense
+authority in religion, so immense an authority that it
+might easily seem as though there were no place left for
+the freedom of the individual judgement and conscience.
+And yet that was not the case. The theory of excommunication
+that is set out in the canonical literature of the
+Middle Ages has generally been carelessly studied and
+imperfectly understood. It was the greatest and most
+masterful of the Popes, Innocent III, who laid down in
+memorable phrases which are embodied in the great collection
+of the Decretals, that if a Christian man or woman
+is convinced in his own mind and conscience that it
+would be a mortal sin to do or to leave undone some
+action, he must follow his own conscience even against
+the command of the authorities of the Church, and
+must submit patiently to Church censures and even
+excommunication; for it may well happen that the
+Church may condemn him whom God approves, or
+approve him whom God condemns.<a name="FNanchor_24_24" id="FNanchor_24_24"></a><a href="#Footnote_24_24" class="fnanchor">[24]</a> This is no isolated
+or exceptional opinion, but is the doctrine which is
+constantly laid down in the canonical literature.<a name="FNanchor_25_25" id="FNanchor_25_25"></a><a href="#Footnote_25_25" class="fnanchor">[25]</a> It is,
+I think, profoundly true to say that when men at last
+revolted against what seemed to them the exaggerated
+claims of the Church, when they slowly fought their way
+towards toleration and religious freedom, they were only
+asserting and carrying out its one most vital principle,
+the principle of the independence or autonomy of the
+spiritual life; the modern world is only fulfilling the
+Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>I do not continue to develop this aspect of the progress
+of western civilization, not because it is unimportant,
+for indeed it is perhaps the greatest and most significant
+aspect of mediaeval life, but because it is well known<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_81" id="Page_81">[81]</a></span>
+to you, and indeed, it has generally been insisted on to
+such a degree as to obscure the other aspects of progress
+in the Middle Ages, with which we must deal.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>And first I would ask you to observe that it was in
+these centuries that there were laid over again the foundations
+of the social and political order of civilization, and
+that there were devised those forms of the political order
+upon which the structure of modern society is founded.</p>
+
+<p>We are familiar with the conception of the divine
+nature of political authority, the normal and fundamental
+mediaeval view of the State. If we translate this into
+more general terms we shall find that its meaning is that
+the State has an ethical or moral purpose or function; the
+State exists to secure and to maintain justice. You
+must not, indeed, confuse this great conception with that
+foolish perversion of it which was suggested, I think, by
+some characteristically reckless phrases of St. Augustine,
+stated in set terms by St. Gregory the Great, almost
+forgotten in the Middle Ages, and unhappily revived by
+the perversity of some Anglicans and Gallicans in the
+seventeenth century. This foolish perversion, which we
+know as the theory of the 'Divine Right of Kings', is
+indeed the opposite of the great Pauline and mediaeval
+conception of the divine nature of political authority, for
+to St. Paul, to the more normal Fathers like St. Ambrose,
+and to the political theory of the Middle Ages authority
+is divine just because, and only in so far as, its aim and
+purpose is the attainment and maintenance of justice.
+Indeed, it is not only the notion of the 'Divine Right'
+which was inconsistent with the mediaeval conception
+of the State, but the notion of an absolute sovereignty
+inherent in the State, that notion with which some
+eccentric or ignorant modern political theorists, ignorant
+of Rousseau as well as of Aristotle, have played, to the great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_82" id="Page_82">[82]</a></span>
+danger of society; we have, indeed, got beyond the theory
+of the sovereignty of the king, but we are in some danger
+of being hag-ridden by the imposture of the sovereignty of
+the majority. Whatever mistakes the people of the Middle
+Ages may have made, they were, with rare exceptions,
+clear that there was no legitimate authority which was
+not just, and which did not make for justice.</p>
+
+<p>It is here that we find the real meaning of the second
+great political principle of the Middle Ages, that is the
+supremacy of law; that it is the law which is the supreme
+authority in the State, the law which is over every
+person in the State. When John of Salisbury, the secretary
+of Thomas &agrave; Becket, wishes to distinguish between the
+prince and the tyrant, he insists that the prince is one
+who rules according to law, while the tyrant is one who
+ignores and violates the law.<a name="FNanchor_26_26" id="FNanchor_26_26"></a><a href="#Footnote_26_26" class="fnanchor">[26]</a> And in a memorable
+phrase, Bracton, the great English jurist of the latter
+part of the thirteenth century, lays it down dogmatically
+that the king has two superiors, God and the law.<a name="FNanchor_27_27" id="FNanchor_27_27"></a><a href="#Footnote_27_27" class="fnanchor">[27]</a> There
+is an absurd notion still current among more ignorant
+persons&mdash;I have even heard some theologians fall into
+the mistake&mdash;that men in the Middle Ages thought
+of authority as something arbitrary and unintelligible,
+while the truth is that such a conception was wholly
+foreign to the temper of that time. It is quite true that
+the political life of the Middle Ages seems constantly to
+oscillate between anarchy and despotism, but this is not
+because the men of those days did not understand the
+meaning of law and of freedom, but because they were only
+slowly working out the organization through which these
+can be secured. The supreme authority in the mediaeval
+state was the law, and it was supreme because it was
+taken by them to be the embodiment of justice.</p>
+
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_83" id="Page_83">[83]</a></span></p><p>It is again out of this principle that there arose another
+great conception which is still often thought to be modern,
+but which is really mediaeval, the conception that the
+authority of the ruler rests upon and is conditioned by an
+agreement or contract between him and the people. For
+this agreement was not an abstract conception, but was
+based upon the mutual oaths of the mediaeval coronation
+ceremony, the oath of the king to maintain the law, and
+to administer justice, and the oath of the people to serve
+and obey the king whom they had recognized or elected.
+The people do, indeed, owe the king honour and loyal
+service, but only on the condition that he holds inviolable
+his oath. The ruler who breaks this is a tyrant, and for
+him there was no place in mediaeval political theory.
+This conception was expressed in very plain and even
+crude terms by Manegold in the eleventh century when he
+said that the king was in the same relation to the community
+as the man who is hired to keep the pigs to his
+master. If the swineherd fails to do his work the master
+turns him off and finds another. And if the king or prince
+refuses to fulfil the conditions on which he holds his
+power he must be deposed.<a name="FNanchor_28_28" id="FNanchor_28_28"></a><a href="#Footnote_28_28" class="fnanchor">[28]</a> John of Salisbury in the
+twelfth century expressed this in even stronger terms when
+he said that if the prince became a tyrant and violated the
+laws, he had no rights, and should be removed, and if
+there were no other way to do it, it was lawful for any
+citizen to slay him.<a name="FNanchor_29_29" id="FNanchor_29_29"></a><a href="#Footnote_29_29" class="fnanchor">[29]</a></p>
+
+<p>These are, no doubt, extreme forms of the mediaeval
+conception, but the principle that the authority of the
+ruler was conditioned by his faithful discharge of his
+obligations is the normal doctrine of the Middle Ages, is
+maintained by the compilers of the feudal law-books of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_84" id="Page_84">[84]</a></span>
+the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by the great English jurist
+Bracton, by St. Thomas Aquinas, and even by some of
+the most representative of the Roman jurists of Bologna,
+like Azo.</p>
+
+<p>These were the fundamental principles of the conception
+of the nature of political authority whose development
+we can trace in the Middle Ages, and it is out of these
+conceptions that there grew the system of the control
+of the common affairs of the community by means of
+the representation of the community. For it should be
+more clearly understood than it is, that the representative
+system was the creation of the mediaeval political genius, it
+was these men&mdash;to whom even yet the more ignorant would
+deny the true political instinct&mdash;it was these men who
+devised that method upon which the structure of modern
+civilized government has been built up.</p>
+
+<p>There is, however, yet another aspect of the development
+of political civilization which deserves our attention
+if we are to understand the nature of political progress
+in the Middle Ages. It was in these centuries that there
+were created the elementary forms of the administrative
+system of government. And indeed, there is perhaps
+no clearer distinction between a barbarian and a civilized
+government than this, that while the barbarian government
+hangs precariously on the life of the capable king,
+the civilized government is carried on continuously by an
+organized civil service. It would be impossible here to
+discuss the earlier forms of this in the organization of
+government by Charles the Great, or the very interesting
+developments of the royal or imperial chapel as the nucleus
+of a civil service in Germany, it is enough here to remind
+ourselves that it is the creation of this organized administration
+by Henry I and Henry II of England which laid
+the foundations of our national order. Enough has,
+I think, been said to illustrate the reality and significance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_85" id="Page_85">[85]</a></span>
+of the progressive reconstruction of the political order of
+Western society in the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>It may, however, be said that this may all be true, but
+that in all this we have after all only an example of the
+preoccupation of the Middle Ages with conduct and religion.
+I must, therefore, ask you to consider the character and
+development of the intellectual movement of the Middle
+Ages. And here, fortunately, we can find the best of
+guidance in Dr. Rashdall's great work on <i>The Universities
+of Europe in the Middle Ages</i>, and in Dr. R. L. Poole's
+<i>Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought</i>. Indeed I could wish that
+a little more attention was given to the history and character
+of the intellectual movement which the Universities
+represent, and perhaps a little less to reading and discussing
+the great scholastic works of the thirteenth century,
+which are almost impossible to understand except in relation
+to the intellectual movements of the twelfth century.</p>
+
+<p>The new intellectual movement came very suddenly
+in the last years of the eleventh century; why it should
+have come then is hard to determine, but it seems reasonable
+to say that it represents the reawakening of the
+desire for knowledge which had been in abeyance during
+the stormy centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire
+in the West, when men had little leisure for anything but
+the constant labour to secure a little decent order and
+peace. For a few years, indeed, in the ninth century
+the genius of Charlemagne had almost restored the order
+of civilization, and even in those few years the human
+mind reasserted itself, and for a moment the learning and
+culture which had been preserved mainly by the Irish
+and their pupils in Britain, and in Central Europe, flowered
+and bore fruit; but with his death Western Europe
+plunged again into anarchy and misery, and it was only
+slowly that the genius of the great German emperors<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_86" id="Page_86">[86]</a></span>
+in Central Europe, and of the Norman settlers in France
+and England, rebuilt the commonwealth of European
+civilization. By the end of the eleventh century the
+work was not indeed done, but was being done, and men
+had again a little leisure, and the desire for knowledge
+reawakened, but indeed it was no mere gentle desire, but
+a veritable passion which possessed the men of the twelfth
+century, and it was this spontaneous passion which
+produced the universities.</p>
+
+<p>The first thing, indeed, which we must observe about
+the oldest universities of Europe, especially Bologna, Paris,
+and Oxford, is just this, that they were not made by any
+external authority, that they did not derive their being
+from Church or State, from pope or king, but that they
+were formed by the enthusiasm and passion which drew
+men from every quarter of Europe to sit at the feet of
+some man or another who could give them the knowledge
+which they desired, and, in their turn, to become teachers.
+It is quite true that as time went on, and they found
+that popes and kings were friendly and interested, these
+groups of students procured for themselves bulls and
+charters of recognition and protection, but while later
+universities may trace their foundation to these respectable
+patrons, the older universities recognize them indeed as
+benefactors and friends, but not as founders, but rather
+claim that they grew out of men's desire for knowledge,
+and that they were recognized by the general consent of
+the civilized world.</p>
+
+<p>In the second place it is important, and especially I think
+in these days, to understand that the men who thus
+created the universities in their eagerness to learn, were
+of every class and condition, rich and poor, noble and
+simple, and they lived as they could, in comfortable
+quarters if they were wealthy men, or in the garrets and
+cellars of the citizens if they were poor, and for the most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_87" id="Page_87">[87]</a></span>
+part they were poor; but neither poverty nor riches
+could destroy their noble thirst for knowledge. The life of
+the universities was indeed turbulent and disorderly, the
+students were always at war with the citizens, and, when
+they were not breaking the heads of the citizens or having
+their heads broken by them, they were at war with each
+other, the men of the north with the southerners, the
+western with the eastern; for the universities were not
+local or national institutions, but were made up of a cosmopolitan
+crowd of men of every nation in Europe, intelligible
+to each other, as unhappily we are not, by the
+universal knowledge and use of that mediaeval Latin,
+which might distress the Ciceronian ears of a pedant of
+the Renaissance, but was a good, useful, and adaptable
+language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate,
+and drunken world, for the students were as hard
+drinkers as the citizens, but it was animated, it was made
+alive by a true passion for knowledge, by an unwearied
+and never satisfied intellectual curiosity.</p>
+
+<p>But it will be asked, what did they learn? Well, the
+only answer that one can give is that they learned whatever
+there was to learn. Our literary friends have often
+still the impression that in the Middle Ages men spent
+their whole time in learning theology, and were afraid of
+other forms of knowledge, but this is a singular delusion.
+As the universities developed a system, their studies were
+arranged in the main under four heads, the general studies
+of what came to be called the Faculty of Arts, and the
+professional studies of the three superior Faculties of Law,
+Medicine, and Theology, but the student was not normally
+allowed to study in the three superior Faculties until he
+had spent some years in the studies of the Faculty of Arts.
+It is therefore with this latter that we are primarily
+occupied. The studies in the Faculty of Arts consisted,
+to use our modern terminology, of literature, philosophy,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_88" id="Page_88">[88]</a></span>
+and science, and the accomplished mediaeval student was
+expected to know whatever there was to know.</p>
+
+<p>And this means&mdash;what is strangely often forgotten&mdash;that
+the studies of the mediaeval universities were
+primarily based upon the literature which had survived
+from the ancient world. The Latin poets and orators
+were their models of literary art, the surviving treatises
+of the ancients their text-books in medicine, and the Greek
+philosophers in Latin translations, or in Latin works
+founded on them, their masters in thought. To understand
+the extent of the influence and the knowledge of
+antiquity of a twelfth-century scholar we need only turn
+again to John of Salisbury, and we shall find him as
+familiar as any Renaissance scholar with Latin literature,
+and possessing a very considerable acquaintance with
+Greek literature so far as it could be obtained through the
+Latin.<a name="FNanchor_30_30" id="FNanchor_30_30"></a><a href="#Footnote_30_30" class="fnanchor">[30]</a> Indeed, so much is he possessed by the literature
+of antiquity that in works like the <i>Policraticus</i> he can
+hardly write two lines together without a quotation from
+some classical author. This type of literary scholarship
+has been too much overlooked, and, as I said before, too
+exclusive an attention has been given to the thirteenth-century
+schoolmen, who are neither from a literary nor
+from a philosophical point of view as representative of
+mediaeval scholars, and philosophically they are often
+really unmediaeval, for the general quality of mediaeval
+thought is its Platonism: the Aristotelian logic was indeed
+known to the Middle Ages through B&#339;thius, but the
+other Aristotelian works were not known till towards the
+middle of the thirteenth century.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_89" id="Page_89">[89]</a></span></p>
+<p>It would be impossible here, even if I were competent,
+which I am not, to discuss the character of mediaeval
+thought, but one thing we can observe, one aspect of the
+intellectual method which may serve to clear away some
+confusion. The great intellectual master of the Middle
+Ages was Abelard, and the method which he elaborated
+in his <i>Sic et Non</i> is the method which imposed itself upon
+all aspects of mediaeval thought.</p>
+
+<p>It has often been supposed that mediaeval thinkers
+were in such a sense the creatures of authority that it was
+impossible for them to exercise any independent judgement;
+how far this may have been true of the decadent
+scholasticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries
+I do not pretend to say, but such a judgement is a ludicrous
+caricature of the living and active thought of the twelfth
+and thirteenth centuries, and a little consideration of the
+critical method which Abelard developed is sufficient to
+correct this. This is as follows: first some general
+principle is enunciated for consideration, then all the
+authorities which may seem to support it are cited, then
+all the authorities against, and finally the writer delivers
+his own judgement, criticizing and explaining the opinions
+which may seem contrary to it. The method has its
+defects and its limitations, but its characteristic is rather
+that of scepticism than of credulity. And it is on this
+method that the most important systems of knowledge of
+the Middle Ages are constructed. It was applied by
+Gratian in his <i>Decretum</i>, the first great reasoned treatise
+on Church law, and leads there often to somewhat unexpected
+conclusions, such as that even the legislative
+authority of the Pope is limited by the consenting custom
+of the Christian people;<a name="FNanchor_31_31" id="FNanchor_31_31"></a><a href="#Footnote_31_31" class="fnanchor">[31]</a> and it is this method upon
+which the great systematic treatises, like the <i>Suma</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_90" id="Page_90">[90]</a></span>
+<i>Theologica</i> of St. Thomas Aquinas, were constructed in
+the thirteenth century. Whatever its defects may be the
+method cannot fairly be accused of ignoring difficulties
+and of a submission to authority which leaves no place
+for the critical reason.</p>
+
+<p>I have, I hope, said enough to make it clear that there
+was a real and living intellectual movement in the Middle
+Ages, and that even in those days men had resumed the
+great adventure of the pursuit of truth.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We can only for a moment consider the significance
+and the character of mediaeval civilization as it expresses
+itself in Art, and we must begin by noticing a distinction
+between mediaeval art and mediaeval learning, which is
+of the first importance.</p>
+
+<p>The intellectual movement of the Middle Ages was
+related to the ancient world, both in virtue of that
+continuity which was mediated by the Christian Fathers,
+whose education was that of the later Empire, and also in
+virtue of the intense and eager care with which mediaeval
+scholars studied all that they possessed of ancient literature.
+The relation of the art of the Middle Ages to the
+ancient world was quite different. There was no continuity
+between the vernacular poetry of the Middle Ages
+and that of the ancient world, and while there was
+a certain continuity in architecture and in mosaic painting,
+this amounted to little more than that the mediaeval
+artists took the formal structure or method as the starting-point
+of their own independent and original work. For
+the western art of the third and fourth centuries was
+conventional and decadent, and had apparently lost its
+power of recovery, while the art of the centuries which
+followed was at first rude and imperfect, but was full of
+new life, determined in its reality and dominated by some
+intimate sense of beauty; it was in no sense imitative of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_91" id="Page_91">[91]</a></span>
+ancient art, but grew and changed under the terms of its
+own inherent life and power.</p>
+
+<p>Mediaeval art, whatever else is to be said about it, was
+new and independent, and it had all the variety, the
+audacious experiments, characteristic of a living art.
+Nothing is so foolish as to imagine that it was uniform
+and unchanging. Indeed, from the historical point of
+view, the interest of the study of it is curiously contrasted
+with that of the art of the ancient world. There we have
+only an imperfect and fragmentary knowledge of the
+earlier and ruder form; its history, as we know it, might
+almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth
+and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the
+history of a long decadence, not indeed without new
+developments of importance, as for instance in the
+architectural structure of Roman building, and perhaps
+in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and
+in certain aspects of Latin literature on another. The
+history of mediaeval art is the history of the long development
+from what are generally rude forms to the highly
+developed art of the thirteenth century, a development
+full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have
+called the early form rude, but the phrase is not very
+happy, as those who know either the early mosaic or the
+early epic will understand.</p>
+
+<p>There are still some people, I suppose, who think that
+mediaeval poetry was all of one kind, cast in one mould,
+but the truth is that it is of every form and character.
+It ranges from the bold imaginative realism of the Epic
+of England, Iceland, Germany, and France, to the exquisite
+and gracious but somewhat artificial allegory of the
+<i>Romance of the Rose</i>. It includes the first great emotional
+poetry of the modern world&mdash;the sense of the greatness
+and tragedy of human passion has perhaps never been
+expressed in more moving terms than in the <i>Tristan and</i><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_92" id="Page_92">[92]</a></span>
+<i>Iseult</i> of Thomas or Beroul&mdash;but it also includes the
+mordant satire of the Renard poetry and of Jean de
+Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the Fabliaux.
+The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development
+we have to trace many strands, probably represents in
+its oldest forms the coarse farcical buffoonery which may
+be related to the last fashions of the ancient world; it
+received a new impulse from the dramatization of scripture
+history in the twelfth century; but in the thirteenth
+and fourteenth centuries, at least in France, it had already
+become substantially a drama of romantic or contemporary
+life, as we can see in Jean Bodel's <i>Jeu de St. Nicholas</i>,
+in Adam de la Halle's <i>Jeu de la Feuill&eacute;e</i> and <i>Robin et Marion</i>,
+and in dramas like the <i>Empress of Rome</i> or the <i>Otho</i>.
+Whatever criticism we might want to make on mediaeval
+literature, at least we cannot say that it was of one type
+and of one mood.</p>
+
+<p>It is hardly necessary to point out the movement and
+changes in the other forms of art in the Middle Ages; it
+is only necessary to remind ourselves that, while we can
+see that the artists were often hampered by inadequate
+technical knowledge, they were not conventional or
+merely imitative.</p>
+
+<p>It would be impossible here to consider the history of
+mosaic painting, and its development from the decadent
+Graeco-Roman work of Santa Pudenziana in Rome, to
+the magnificent and living decorations of St. Mark's in
+Venice, or of the cathedral of Monreale. It is enough to
+remind ourselves of the immense interval which lies
+between the rude but living sculpture of the ninth century,
+and the exquisite grace of Chester or Wells, and of that
+development of architecture which culminates in the
+majesty of Durham, and in the beauty of Chartres and
+Westminster Abbey.</p>
+
+<p>It is doubtful if we have yet at all fully or correctly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_93" id="Page_93">[93]</a></span>
+appreciated the nature of mediaeval art; there has been
+a good deal of foolish talk about 'primitives', which
+usually goes with a singular ignorance of mediaeval
+civilization; the one thing which is already clear, and
+which grows clearer, is that the men of those ages had an
+instinct and a passion for beauty which expressed itself
+in almost every thing that they touched; and, whatever
+we have gained, we have in a large measure lost this.</p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>The mediaeval world was then a living growing world,
+neither cut off from the past, nor unrelated to the future.
+It was a rough and turbulent world, our ancestors were
+dogged, quarrelsome, and self-assertive, and the first
+task of civilization was to produce some sort of decent
+order. The world was a long way off from the firm
+urbanity of the English policeman. And yet the men of
+the Middle Ages never fell into that delusion which, as it
+would seem, has ruined other civilizations; the great effort
+for order was not in their mind to be fulfilled by any mere
+mechanical discipline, by any system imposed from
+outside, the only system of order which they were prepared
+to accept was one which should express the character,
+the tradition, and finally the will of the whole community.
+The great phrase of Edward I's summons to
+Parliament, 'Quod omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur'
+(That which concerns all, must be approved by all), was
+not a mere tag, as some foolish people have thought, but
+expressed the character and the genius of a living political
+civilization.</p>
+
+<p>And this rough turbulent world was inspired by a great
+breath of spiritual and intellectual and artistic life and
+freedom.</p>
+
+<p>It might well seem as though the Church and religion
+were merely a new bondage, and in part that is true, but
+it is not the whole truth. With all its mistakes the religion<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_94" id="Page_94">[94]</a></span>
+of the Middle Ages meant the growing apprehension of the
+reality of that 'love which moves the sun and other stars',
+it meant the growth of reverence for that which is beyond
+and above humanity and which is also within it. For it
+is the last truth of the Christian faith that we know God
+only under the terms of human life and nature. And with
+all the cruelty and brutality of the Middle Ages they
+taught men love as well as obedience.</p>
+
+<p>Again, it was in these ages, as soon as the confusion
+of the outer world was a little reduced, that the passion
+for knowledge awoke again in men's hearts. It is true
+that some were afraid lest the eager inquiry of men's
+minds should destroy the foundations of that order which
+men were slowly achieving, but still the passionate
+pursuit of knowledge has rarely been more determined.
+And once again the world was rough, but these men had
+an instinct, a passion for beauty which expressed itself
+in almost everything which they touched. They had
+not, indeed, the almost miraculous sense and mastery of
+the great artists of Greece, that did not come again till
+the time of the great Italian artists of the fifteenth
+century. But they were free from pedantry, from
+formalism, they left the dying art of the ancient world
+and made their own way. Their sense of colour was
+almost infallible, as those who have seen the mosaics of
+the older Roman basilicas and of St. Mark's in Venice
+will know; but, indeed, we have only to look at the
+illuminated manuscripts which are to be found in all our
+libraries. And in that great art in which, above all
+perhaps, they expressed themselves, in their great architecture,
+we see the growth of a constructive genius which
+is only overshadowed by the superb beauty of its form.</p>
+
+<p>A rough, disorderly, turbulent, greedy, cruel world, but
+it knew the human soul, and it knew the human heart.
+The ancient world had ended in a great destruction, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_95" id="Page_95">[95]</a></span>
+the sadness and emptiness of its last days compel us to
+feel that it was well that it should end. And the new
+world was a world of life, of crude force and restless
+energy, and from it we have received the principles and
+the forms of a great civilization, and the temper which
+is never satisfied, for there is no end to life.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books for Reference</span></h3>
+
+<div class='indent2'>
+<p>H. W. C. Davis, <i>Mediaeval Europe</i> (Home University Library).</p>
+
+<p>Lord Bryce, <i>History of Roman Empire</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Rashdall, <i>Universities of Empire in the Middle Ages</i>.</p>
+
+<p>R. L. Poole, <i>Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Gierke, <i>Political Theories of the Middle Ages</i>.</p>
+
+<p>W. P. Ker, <i>Epic and Romance</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_23_23" id="Footnote_23_23"></a><a href="#FNanchor_23_23"><span class="label">[23]</span></a> Cf. Cicero, <i>De Legibus</i>, i. 10-12; and Seneca, <i>De Beneficiis</i>,
+iii. 18.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_24_24" id="Footnote_24_24"></a><a href="#FNanchor_24_24"><span class="label">[24]</span></a> Cf. Decretals, v. 39. 44, 28.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_25_25" id="Footnote_25_25"></a><a href="#FNanchor_25_25"><span class="label">[25]</span></a> Cf. Carlyle, <i>Mediaeval Political Theory</i>, vol. ii. pp. 244-9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_26_26" id="Footnote_26_26"></a><a href="#FNanchor_26_26"><span class="label">[26]</span></a> Cf. John of Salisbury, <i>Policraticus</i>, iv. 1.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_27_27" id="Footnote_27_27"></a><a href="#FNanchor_27_27"><span class="label">[27]</span></a> Cf. Bracton, <i>De Legibus et Consuetudinibus</i>, i. 8, 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_28_28" id="Footnote_28_28"></a><a href="#FNanchor_28_28"><span class="label">[28]</span></a> Cf. Manegold, <i>Ad Gebehardum</i>, c. <span class="smcap">xxx</span>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_29_29" id="Footnote_29_29"></a><a href="#FNanchor_29_29"><span class="label">[29]</span></a> Cf. John of Salisbury, <i>Policraticus</i>, iii. 15, viii. 17, 18, 20.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_30_30" id="Footnote_30_30"></a><a href="#FNanchor_30_30"><span class="label">[30]</span></a> Cf. C. C. J. Webb's edition of John of Salisbury's <i>Policraticus</i>,
+introduction.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_31_31" id="Footnote_31_31"></a><a href="#FNanchor_31_31"><span class="label">[31]</span></a> Cf. Gratian, <i>Decretum</i>, D. iv. c. 3.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_96" id="Page_96">[96]</a></span></p>
+<h2>V</h2>
+
+<h2>PROGRESS IN RELIGION</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Baron Friedrich von H&uuml;gel</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>The difficulties are deep and delicate which confront
+any man at all well acquainted with the fuller significance
+of Religion and of Progress, who attempts clearly and
+shortly to describe or define the ultimate relations between
+these two sets of fact and conviction. It is plain that
+Religion is the deeper and richer of the two terms; and
+that we have here, above all, to attempt to fathom the
+chief elements and forces of Religion as such, and then to
+see whether Progress is really traceable in Religion at all.
+And again it is clear that strongly religious souls will, as
+such, hold that Religion answers to, and is occasioned
+by, the action, within our human life and needs, of great,
+abiding, living non-human Realities; and yet, if such
+souls are at all experienced and sincere, they will also
+admit&mdash;as possibly the most baffling of facts&mdash;that the
+human individuals, families, races, are relatively rare in
+whom this sense and need of Religion is strongly, sensitively
+active. Thus the religion of most men will
+either all but completely wither or vanish before the
+invasion of other great facts and interests of human life&mdash;Economics
+or Politics or Ethics, or again, Science, Art,
+Philosophy; or it will, more frequently, become largely
+assimilated, in its conception, valuation, and practice, to
+the quite distinct, and often subtly different, conceptions,
+valuations, and practices pertaining to such of these other
+ranges and levels of human life as happen here to be<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_97" id="Page_97">[97]</a></span>
+vigorously active. And such assimilations are, of course,
+effected with a particular Philosophy or Ethic, mostly
+some passing fashion of the day, which does not reach the
+deepest laws and standards even of its own domain, and
+which, if taken as Religion, will gravely numb and mar
+the power and character of such religious perception as
+may still remain in this particular soul.</p>
+
+<p>I will, then, first attempt some discriminations in
+certain fundamental questions concerning the functioning
+of our minds, feelings, wills. I will next attempt short,
+vivid descriptions of the chief stages in the Jewish and
+Christian Religions, with a view to tracing here what may
+concern their progress; and will very shortly illustrate the
+main results attained by the corresponding main peculiarities
+of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism.
+And I will finally strive to elucidate and to
+estimate, as clearly as possible, the main facts in past and
+present Religion which concern the question of religious
+'Progressiveness'.</p>
+
+
+<h3>I</h3>
+
+<p>I begin with insisting upon some seven discriminations
+which, even only forty years ago, would have appeared
+largely preposterous to the then fashionable philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>First, then, our Knowledge is always wider and deeper
+than is our Science. I know my mother, I know my dog,
+I know my favourite rose-tree; and this, although I am
+quite ignorant of the anatomical differences between
+woman and man; of the psychological limits between
+dog and human being; or of the natural or artificial
+botanical order to which my rose-plant belongs. Any
+kind or degree of consciousness on my part as to these
+three realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge
+is not simply the reduction of phenomena to law
+and their resolution into abstract elements; since thus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_98" id="Page_98">[98]</a></span>
+the unknowable would be found well within the facts of
+experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete
+character which refuses translation into abstract relations.'
+So Professor Aliotta urges with unanswerable truth.<a name="FNanchor_32_32" id="FNanchor_32_32"></a><a href="#Footnote_32_32" class="fnanchor">[32]</a></p>
+
+<p>And next, this spontaneous awareness of other realities
+by myself, the reality Man, contains always, from the
+first, both matter and form, and sense, reason, feeling,
+volition, all more or less in action. Sir Henry Jones
+insists finely: 'The difference between the primary and
+elementary data of thought on the one hand, and the
+highest forms of systematized knowledge on the other, is
+no difference in kind, analogous to a mere particular and
+a mere universal; but it is a difference of articulation.'<a name="FNanchor_33_33" id="FNanchor_33_33"></a><a href="#Footnote_33_33" class="fnanchor">[33]</a></p>
+
+<p>Thirdly, direct, unchallengeable Experience is always
+only experience of a particular moment; only by means
+of Thought, and trust in Thought, can such Experience
+be extended, communicated, utilized. The sceptic, to be
+at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his
+opponent. Thought, taken apart from Experience, is
+indeed artificial and arid; but Experience without
+Thought, is largely an orderless flux. Philosophers as
+different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist
+Bergson, do indeed attempt to construct systems composed
+solely of direct Experience and pure Intuition; and,
+at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist upon the sheer
+novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct Experience,
+and the entire artificiality of the constructions of Thought&mdash;constructions
+which alone adulterate our perceptions
+of reality with the non-realities repetition, uniformity,
+foreseeableness. Yet the amazing success of the application
+of such constructions to actual Nature stares us all
+in the face. 'It is, indeed, strange,' if that contention
+be right, 'that facts behave as if they too had a turn for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_99" id="Page_99">[99]</a></span>
+mathematics.' Assuredly 'if thought, with its durable
+and coherent structure, were not the reflection of some
+order of stable relations in the nature of things, it would
+be worthless as an organ of life'.<a name="FNanchor_34_34" id="FNanchor_34_34"></a><a href="#Footnote_34_34" class="fnanchor">[34]</a></p>
+
+<p>Fourthly, both Space and Time are indeed essential
+constituents of all our perceptions, thoughts, actions, at
+least in this life. Yet Time is perhaps the more real, and
+assuredly the richer, constituent of the two. But this
+rich reality applies only to Concrete or Filled Time,
+Duration, in which our experiences, although always
+more or less successive, interpenetrate each other in
+various degrees and ways, and are thus more or less
+simultaneous. An absolutely even flow of equal, mutually
+exclusive moments, on the contrary, exists only for our
+theoretical thinking, in Abstract, Empty, or Clock time.
+Already, in 1886, Professor James Ward wrote: 'In
+time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of intensity;
+in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily
+an intensive magnitude.'<a name="FNanchor_35_35" id="FNanchor_35_35"></a><a href="#Footnote_35_35" class="fnanchor">[35]</a> And in 1889 Professor Bergson,
+in his <i>Essai sur les Donn&eacute;es Imm&eacute;diates de la Conscience</i>,
+gave us exquisite descriptions of time as we really
+experience it, of 'duration strictly speaking', which
+'does not possess moments that are identical or exterior
+to each other'.<a name="FNanchor_36_36" id="FNanchor_36_36"></a><a href="#Footnote_36_36" class="fnanchor">[36]</a> Thus all our real soul life, in proportion
+to its depth, moves in Partial Simultaneity; and it
+apprehends, requires and rests, at its deepest, in an
+overflowingly rich Pure Simultaneity.</p>
+
+<p>Fifthly, Man is Body as well as Soul, and the two are
+closely interrelated. The sensible perception of objects,
+however humble, is always necessary for the beginning,
+and (in the long run) for the persistence and growth, of the
+more spiritual apprehensions of man. Hence Historical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_100" id="Page_100">[100]</a></span>
+Persons and Happenings, Institutions, affording Sensible
+Acts and Contacts, and Social Corporations, each
+different according to the different ranges and levels of
+life, can hardly fail to be of importance for man's full
+awakening&mdash;even ethical and spiritual. Professor Ernst
+Troeltsch, so free from natural prejudice in favour of such
+a Sense-and-Spirit position, has become perhaps the most
+adequate exponent of this great fact of life, which is ever
+in such danger of evaporation amidst the intellectual and
+leading minority of men.</p>
+
+<p>Sixthly, the cultivated modern man is still largely
+arrested and stunted by the spell of Descartes, with his
+insistence upon immediate unity of outlook and perfect
+clearness of idea as the sole, universal tests, indeed constituents,
+of truth. 'I judged that I could take for my
+general rule that the things which we conceive very
+clearly and very distinctly are all true'&mdash;these and these
+alone.<a name="FNanchor_37_37" id="FNanchor_37_37"></a><a href="#Footnote_37_37" class="fnanchor">[37]</a> Thus thenceforth Mathematics and Mechanics
+have generally been held to be the only full and typical
+sciences, and human knowledge to be co-extensive with
+such sciences alone. Yet Biology and Psychology now
+rightly claim to be sciences, each with its own special
+methods and tests distinct from those of Mathematics
+and Mechanics. Indeed, the wisest and most fruitful
+philosophy is now coming to see that 'Reality generally
+eludes our thought, when thought is reduced to mathematical
+formulas'.<a name="FNanchor_38_38" id="FNanchor_38_38"></a><a href="#Footnote_38_38" class="fnanchor">[38]</a> Concrete thought, contrariwise, finds
+full room also for History, Philosophy, Religion, for each
+as furnishing rich subject-matters for Knowledge or
+Science, of a special but true kind.</p>
+
+<p>Seventhly. Already Mathematics and Mechanics absolutely
+depend, for the success of their applications to
+actual Nature, upon a spontaneous correspondence<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_101" id="Page_101">[101]</a></span>
+between the human reason and the Rationality of Nature.
+The immensity of this success is an unanswerable proof
+that this rationality is not imposed, but found there, by
+man. But Thought without a Thinker is an absurd
+proposition. Thus faith in Science is faith in God.
+Perhaps the most impressive declaration of this necessary
+connexion between Knowledge and Theism stands at the
+end of that great work, Christoph Sigwart's <i>Logik</i>. 'As
+soon as we raise the question as to the real <i>right</i>', the
+adequate reason, 'of our demands for a correspondence,
+within our several sciences, between the principles and
+the objects of the researches special to each, there emerges
+the need for the Last and Unconditional Reason. And
+the actual situation is not that this Reason appears only
+on the horizon of our finite knowledge,' as Kant would
+have it. 'Not in thus merely extending our knowledge lies
+the significance of the situation, but in the fact that this
+Unconditional Reason constitutes the presupposition
+without which no desire for Knowledge (in the proper and
+strict sense of the word) is truly thinkable.'<a name="FNanchor_39_39" id="FNanchor_39_39"></a><a href="#Footnote_39_39" class="fnanchor">[39]</a></p>
+
+<p>And lastly, all this and more points to philosophical
+Agnosticism as an artificial system, and one hopelessly
+inadequate to the depths of human experience. Assuredly
+Bossuet is right: 'man knows not the whole of anything';
+and mystery, in this sense, is also of the essence of all
+higher religion. But what man knows of anything is
+that thing manifested, not essentially travestied, in that
+same thing's appearances. We men are most assuredly
+realities forming part of a real world-whole of various
+realities; those other realities continuously affect our
+own reality; we cannot help thinking certain things about
+these other realities; and these things, when accepted
+and pressed home by us in action or in science, turn out,
+by our success in this their utilization, to be rightly<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_102" id="Page_102">[102]</a></span>
+apprehended by us, as parts of interconnected, objective
+Nature. Thus our knowledge of Reality is real as far as
+it goes, and philosophical Agnosticism is a <i>doctrinaire</i>
+position. We can say with Herbert Spencer, in spite of
+his predominant Agnosticism, that 'the error' committed
+by philosophers intent upon demonstrating the limits and
+conditions of consciousness 'consists in assuming that
+consciousness contains <i>nothing but</i> limits and conditions,
+to the entire neglect of that which is limited and conditioned'.
+In reality 'there is some thing which alike
+forms the raw material of definite thought and remains
+after the definiteness, which thinking gave to it, has been
+destroyed'.<a name="FNanchor_40_40" id="FNanchor_40_40"></a><a href="#Footnote_40_40" class="fnanchor">[40]</a></p>
+
+
+<h3>II</h3>
+
+<p>Let us next consider five of the most ancient and
+extensively developed amongst the still living Religions:
+the Israelitish-Jewish and the Christian religions shall, as
+by far the best known to us and as the most fully articulated,
+form the great bulk of this short account; the
+Confucian, Buddhist, and Mohammedan religions will
+be taken quite briefly, only as contrasts to, or elucidations
+of, the characteristics found in the Jewish and Christian
+faiths. All this in view of the question concerning the
+relations between Religion and Progress.</p>
+
+<p>1. We can roughly divide the Israelitish-Jewish religion
+into three long periods; in each the points that specially
+concern us will greatly vary in clearness, importance, and
+richness of content.</p>
+
+<p>The first period, from the time of the founder Moses
+and the Jewish exodus out of Egypt to the appearance
+of the first great prophet Elijah (say 1300 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span> to about
+860 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>) is indeed but little known to us; yet it gives
+us the great historical figure of the initial lawgiver, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_103" id="Page_103">[103]</a></span>
+recipient and transmitter of deep ethical and religious
+experiences and convictions. True, the code of King
+Hammurabi of Babylon (in 1958 to 1916 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>; or, according
+to others, in about 1650) anticipates many of the laws
+of the <i>Book of the Covenant</i> (Exod. xx, 22-xxiii. 33), the
+oldest amongst the at all lengthy bodies of laws in the
+Pentateuch; and, again, this covenant appears to presuppose
+the Jewish settlement in Canaan (say in 1250 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>)
+as an accomplished fact. And, indeed, the Law and
+the books of Moses generally have undoubtedly passed
+through a long, deep, wide, and elaborate development,
+of which three chief stages, all considerably subsequent
+to the Covenant-Book, have, by now, been established
+with substantial certainty and precision. The record of
+directly Mosaic sayings and writings is thus certainly
+very small. Yet it is assuredly a gross excess to deny the
+historical reality of Moses, as even distinguished scholars
+such as Edward Meyer and Bernhard Stade have done.
+Far wiser here is Wellhausen, who finds, in the very
+greatness and fixity of orientation of the development
+in the Law and in the figure of the Lawgiver, a conclusive
+proof of the rich reality and greatness of the
+Man of God, Moses. Yet it is Hermann Gunkel, I think,
+who has reached the best balanced judgement in this
+matter. With Gunkel we can securely hold that Moses
+called God Yahweh, and proclaimed Him as the national
+God of Israel; that Moses invoked Him as 'Yahweh is
+my banner'&mdash;the divine leader of the Israelites in battle
+(Exod. xvii. 15); and that Yahweh is for Moses a God of
+righteousness&mdash;of the right and the law which he, Moses,
+brought down from Mount Sinai and published at its
+foot. Fierce as may now appear to us the figure of
+Yahweh, thus proclaimed, yet the soul's attitude towards
+Him is already here, from the first, a religion of the will:
+an absolute trust in God ('Yahweh shall fight for you,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_104" id="Page_104">[104]</a></span>
+and ye shall hold your peace,' Exod. xiv. 14), and a terrible
+relentlessness in the execution of His commands&mdash;as when
+Moses orders the sons of Levi to go to and fro in the camp,
+slaying all who, as worshippers of the Golden Calf, had
+not been 'on Yahweh's side' (Exod. xxxii. 25-29); and
+when the chiefs, who had joined in the worship of Baal-Peor,
+are 'hung up unto Yahweh before the sun' (Num.
+xxv. 1-5). Long after Moses the Jews still believed in
+the real existence of the gods of the heathen; and the
+religion of Moses was presumably, in the first instance,
+'Monolatry' (the adoration of One God among many);
+but already accompanied by the conviction that Yahweh
+was mightier than any other god&mdash;certainly Micah,
+'Who is like Yahweh?,' is a very ancient Israelitish
+name. And if Yahweh is worshipped by Moses on a
+mountain (Sinai) and His law is proclaimed at a spring,
+if Moses perhaps himself really fashioned the brazen
+serpent as a sensible symbol of Yahweh, Yahweh nevertheless
+remains without visible representation in or on
+the Ark; He is never conceived as the sheer equivalent
+of natural forces; and all mythology is absent here&mdash;the
+vehement rejection of the calf-worship shows this
+strikingly. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of fire, understood
+Moses well, Gunkel thinks.<a name="FNanchor_41_41" id="FNanchor_41_41"></a><a href="#Footnote_41_41" class="fnanchor">[41]</a></p>
+
+<p>The second period, from Elijah's first public appearance
+(about 860 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>) to the Dedication of the Second Temple
+(516 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>), and on to the public subscription to the Law
+of Moses, under Ezra (in 444 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>), is surpassed, in spiritual
+richness and importance, only by the classical times of
+Christianity itself. Its beginning, its middle, and its end
+each possess distinctive characters.</p>
+
+<p>The whole opens with Elijah, 'the grandest heroic
+figure in all the Bible,' as it still breathes and burns in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_105" id="Page_105">[105]</a></span>
+the First Book of Kings. 'For Elijah there existed not,
+in different regions, forces possessed of equal rights and
+equal claims to adoration, but everywhere only one
+Holy Power that revealed Itself, not like Baal, in the life
+of Nature, but like Yahweh, in the moral demands of the
+Spirit' (Wellhausen).</p>
+
+<p>And then (in about 750 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>) appears Amos, the first
+of the noble 'storm-birds' who herald the coming national
+destructions and divine survivals. 'Yahweh was for
+these prophets above all the god of justice, and God of
+Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of
+justice. And yet the special relation of Yahweh to Israel
+is still recognized as real; the ethical truth, which now
+stood high above Israel, had, after all, arisen within
+Israel and could still only be found within it.' The two
+oldest lengthy narrative documents of the Pentateuch&mdash;the
+Yahwist (J) and the Ephraemite (E)&mdash;appear to have
+been composed, the first in Judah in the time of Elijah,
+the second in Israel in the time of Amos. J gives us the
+immortal stories of Paradise and the Fall, Cain and Abel,
+Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac;
+and the documents conjointly furnish the more na&iuml;ve and
+picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs
+generally&mdash;the first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch.
+God here gives us some of His most exquisite
+self-revelations through the Israelitish peasant-soul. And
+Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well as deep
+seer, still vividly lives for us in some thirty-six chapters of
+that great collection the 'Book of Isaiah' (i-xii, xv-xx, xxii-xxxix).
+There is his majestic vocation in about 740 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>,
+described by himself, without ambiguity, as a precise,
+objective revelation (chap. vi); and there is the divinely
+impressive close of his long and great activity, when he
+nerves King Hezekiah to refuse the surrender of the Holy
+City to the all-powerful Sennacherib, King of Assyria:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_106" id="Page_106">[106]</a></span>
+that Yahweh would not allow a single arrow to be shot
+against it, and would turn back the Assyrian by the way
+by which he came&mdash;all which actually happens as thus
+predicted (chap. xxxvii).</p>
+
+<p>The middle of this rich second period is filled by
+a great prophet-priest's figure, and a great prophetical
+priestly reform. Jeremiah is called in 628 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>, and dies
+obscurely in Egypt in about 585 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>; and the Deuteronomic
+Law and Book is found in the Temple, and is solemnly
+proclaimed to, and accepted by, the people, under the
+leadership of the High Priest Hilkiah and King Josiah,
+'the Constantine of the Jewish Church,' in 628 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>
+Jeremiah and Deuteronomy (D) are strikingly cognate
+in style, temper, and injunctions; and especially D contrasts
+remarkably in all this with the documents J and E.
+We thus have here the second great development of the
+Mosaic Law. Both Jeremiah and Deuteronomy possess
+a deeply interior, tenderly spiritual, kernel and a fiercely
+polemical husk&mdash;they both are full of the contrast
+between the one All-Holy God to be worshipped in the
+one Holy Place, Jerusalem, and the many impure
+heathen gods worshipped in so many places by the Jewish
+crowd. Thus in Jeremiah Yahweh declares: 'This shall
+be my covenant that I will make with the house of Israel:
+I will write my law in their hearts: and they shall all
+know me, from the least to the greatest: for I will remember
+their sin no more' (xxxi. 33, 34). And Yahweh
+exclaims: 'My people have committed two evils: they
+have forsaken me, the fountain of living waters, and have
+hewn out cisterns that can hold no water.' 'Lift up thine
+eyes unto the high places ... thou hast polluted the land
+with thy wickedness.' 'Wilt thou not from this time
+cry unto me: My Father, thou art the guide of my youth?'
+(ii. 13, iii. 2, 4). And Deuteronomy teaches magnificently:
+'This commandment which I command you this day, is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_107" id="Page_107">[107]</a></span>
+not too hard for thee, neither is it far off. It is not in
+heaven, neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest
+say: Who shall go up for us to heaven or over the sea,
+and bring it unto us? But the word is very nigh unto
+thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest
+do it' (xxx. 11-14). And there are here exquisite injunctions&mdash;to
+bring back stray cattle to their owners; to
+spare the sitting bird, where eggs or fledglings are found;
+to leave over, at the harvest, some of the grain, olives,
+grapes, for the stranger, the orphan, the widow; and not
+to muzzle the ox when treading out the corn (xxii. 1, 6, 7;
+xxiv. 19; xxv. 4). Yet the same Deuteronomy ordains:
+'If thine own brother, son, daughter, wife, or bosom
+friend entice thee secretly, saying, let us go and serve
+other gods, thine hand shall be first upon him to put him
+to death.' Also 'There shall not be found with thee any
+consulter with a familiar spirit ... or a necromancer.
+Yahweh thy God doth drive them out before thee.' And,
+finally, amongst the laws of war, 'of the cities of these
+people (Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite,
+Jebusite) thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth,
+as Yahweh thy God hath commanded thee' (xii. 2-5;
+xiii. 6, 9; xviii. 10-13; xx. 16, 17). Here we must
+remember that the immorality of these Canaanitish tribes
+and cults was of the grossest, indeed largely unnatural,
+kind; that it had copiously proved its terrible fascination
+for their kinsmen, the Jews; that these ancient Easterns,
+e.g. the Assyrians, were ruthlessly cruel at the storming
+of enemy cities; and especially that the morality and
+spirituality, thus saved for humanity from out of a putrid
+flood, was (in very deed) immensely precious. One point
+here is particularly far-sighted&mdash;the severe watchfulness
+against all animism, spiritualism, worship of the dead,
+things in which the environing world of the Jews' fellow
+Semites was steeped. The Israelitish-Jewish prophetic<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_108" id="Page_108">[108]</a></span>
+movement did not first attain belief in a Future Life, and
+then, through this, belief in God; but the belief in God,
+strongly hostile to all those spiritualisms, only very
+slowly, and not until the danger of any infusion of those
+naturalisms had become remote, led on the Jews to
+a realization of the soul's survival with a consciousness
+at least equal to its earthly aliveness. The Second Book
+of Kings (chaps. xxii, xxiii) gives a graphic account of
+King Josiah's rigorous execution of the Deuteronomic law.</p>
+
+<p>The end of this most full second period is marked by
+the now rapid predominance of a largely technical priestly
+legislation and a corresponding conception of past history;
+by the inception of the Synagogue and the religion of the
+Book; but also by writings the most profound of any
+in the Old Testament, all presumably occasioned by the
+probing experiences of the Exile. In 597 and 586 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>
+Jerusalem is destroyed and the majority of the Jews are
+taken captives to Babylon; and in between (in 593) occurs
+the vocation of the prophet-priest Ezekiel, and his book
+is practically complete by 573 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span> Here the prophecies
+as to the restoration are strangely detailed and schematic&mdash;already
+somewhat like the apocalyptic writers. Yet
+Ezekiel reveals to us deathless truths&mdash;the responsibility
+of the individual soul for its good and its evil, and God
+Himself as the Good Shepherd of the lost and the sick
+(xviii. 20-32; xxxiv. 1-6); he gives us the grand pictures
+of the resurrection unto life of the dead bones of Israel
+(chap. xxxvii), and of the waters of healing and of life
+which flow forth, ever deeper and wider, from beneath
+the Temple, and by their sweetness transform all sour
+waters and arid lands that they touch (xlvii. 1-12).
+A spirit and doctrine closely akin to those of Ezekiel
+produced the third, last, and most extensive development
+of the Pentateuchal legislation and doctrinal history&mdash;in
+about 560 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>, the Law of Holiness (Lev., chaps. xvii<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_109" id="Page_109">[109]</a></span>-xxvi);
+and in about 500 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>, the Priestly Code. As with
+Ezekiel's look forward, so here with these Priests' look
+backward, we have to recognize much schematic precision
+of dates, genealogies, and explanations instinct with
+technical interests. The unity of sanctuary and the
+removal from the feasts and the worship of all traces of
+naturalism, which in Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, and the
+Second Book of Kings appear still as the subject-matters
+of intensest effort and conflict, are here assumed as
+operative even back to patriarchal times. Yet it can
+reasonably be pleaded that the life-work of Moses truly
+involved all this development; and even that Monotheism
+(at least, for the times and peoples here concerned)
+required some such rules as are assumed by P throughout.</p>
+
+<p>And P gives us the great six days' Creation Story with
+its splendid sense of rational order pervasive of the
+Universe, the work of the all-reasonable God&mdash;its single
+parts good, its totality very good; and man and woman
+springing together from the Creator's will. But the
+writer nowhere indicates that he means long periods by
+the 'days'; each creation appears as effected in an
+instant, and these instants as separated from each other
+by but twenty-four hours.</p>
+
+<p>In between Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code, or
+a little later still, lies probably the composition of three
+religious works full, respectively, of exultant thanksgiving,
+of the noblest insight into the fruitfulness of suffering,
+and of the deepest questionings issuing in childlike trust
+in God. For an anonymous writer composes (say, in
+550 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>) the great bulk of the magnificent chapters
+forty to fifty-five of our Book of Isaiah&mdash;a paean of
+spiritual exultation over the Jews' proximate deliverance
+from exile by the Persian King Cyrus. In 538 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>
+Cyrus issues the edict for the restoration to Judaea, and
+in 516 the Second Temple is dedicated. Within this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_110" id="Page_110">[110]</a></span>
+great Consolation stand (xlii. 1-4; xlix. 1-6; l. 4-9;
+lii. 13-liii. 12) the four poems on the Suffering Servant
+of Yahweh&mdash;the tenderest revelation of the Old Testament&mdash;apparently
+written previously in the Exile, say
+in 570-560 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span> The Old Law here reaches to the very
+feet of the New Law&mdash;to the Lamb of God who taketh
+away the sins of the world. And the Book of Job, in
+its chief constituents (chaps. i-xxxi, xxxviii-xlii), was
+probably composed when Greek influences began&mdash;say in
+about 480 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>, the year of the battle of Thermopylae.
+The canonization of this daringly speculative book
+indicates finely how sensitive even the deepest faith and
+holiness can remain to the apparently unjust distribution
+of man's earthly lot.</p>
+
+<p>Our second period ends in 444 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>, when the priest
+and scribe Ezra solemnly proclaims, and receives the
+public subscription to, the Book of the Law of Moses&mdash;the
+Priestly Code, brought by him from Babylon.</p>
+
+<p>The Jewish last period, from Ezra's Proclamation
+444 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span> to the completion of the Fourth Book of Ezra,
+about <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 95, is (upon the whole) derivative. Amos,
+Isaiah, Jeremiah were absorbed in the realities of their
+own epoch-making times, and of God's universal governance
+of the world past and future; Daniel now, with
+practically all the other Apocalyptic writers in his train,
+is absorbed in those earlier prophecies, and in ingenious
+speculations and precise computations as to the how and
+the when of the world's ending. The Exile had given
+rise to the Synagogue, and had favoured the final development
+and codifying of the Mosaic law; the seventy years
+intermission of the Temple sacrifices and symbolic acts
+had turned the worship, which had been so largely
+visible, dramatic, social, into the praying, singing, reading,
+preaching of extant texts, taken as direct and final rules
+for all thought and action, and as incapable of additions<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_111" id="Page_111">[111]</a></span>
+or interpretations equal in value to themselves. Yet thus
+priceless treasures of spiritual truth and light were handed
+down to times again aglow with great&mdash;the greatest
+religious gifts and growths; and indeed this literature
+itself introduced various conceptions or images destined
+to form a largely fitting, and in the circumstances attractive,
+garment for the profound further realities brought
+by Christianity.</p>
+
+<p>In the Book of Daniel (written somewhere between
+163 and 165 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>) all earthly events appear as already
+inscribed in the heavenly books (vii. 10), and the events
+which have still really to come consist in the complete
+and speedy triumph of the Church-State Israel against
+King Antiochus Epiphanes. But here we get the earliest
+clear proclamation of a heightened life beyond death&mdash;though
+not yet for all (xii. 2). The noble vision of the
+four great beasts that came up from the sea, and of one
+like unto a Son of Man that came with the clouds of
+heaven (chap. vii), doubtless here figures the earthly
+kingdoms, Babel, Media, Persia, Greece (Alexander), and
+God's kingdom Israel. The Psalter appears to have been
+closed as late as 140 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>; some Psalms doubtless date
+back to 701&mdash;a few perhaps to David himself, about
+1000 <span class="smcap">b.c.</span> The comminatory Psalms, even if spoken as
+by representatives of God's Church and people, we cannot
+now echo within our own spiritual life; any heightened
+consciousness after death is frequently denied (e.g. vi. 5:
+'in the grave who shall give thee thanks?' and cxv. 17:
+'the dead praise not the Lord')&mdash;we have seen the impressive
+reason of this; and perhaps a quarter of the
+Psalms are doubles, or pale imitations of others. But,
+for the rest, the Psalter remains as magnificently fresh
+and powerful as ever: culminating in the glorious self-commitment
+(Ps. lxxiii), 'I was as a beast before Thee.
+Nevertheless I am continually with Thee. Whom have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_112" id="Page_112">[112]</a></span>
+I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth
+that I desire beside Thee.' The keen sense, present
+throughout this amazingly rich collection, of the reality,
+prevenience, presence, protection&mdash;of the central importance
+for man, of God, the All-Abiding, finds thus its full,
+deathless articulation.</p>
+
+<p>Religiously slighter, yet interesting as a preparation
+for Christian theology, are the writings of Philo, a devout,
+Greek-trained Jew of Alexandria, who in <span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 40 appeared
+before the Emperor Caligula in Rome. Philo does not
+feel his daringly allegorical sublimations as any departures
+from the devoutest Biblical faith. Thus 'God
+never ceases from action; as to burn is special to fire, so
+is action to God'&mdash;this in spite of God's rest on the seventh
+day (Gen. ii. 2). 'There exist two kinds of men: the
+heavenly man and the earthly man.'<a name="FNanchor_42_42" id="FNanchor_42_42"></a><a href="#Footnote_42_42" class="fnanchor">[42]</a> The long Life
+of Moses<a name="FNanchor_43_43" id="FNanchor_43_43"></a><a href="#Footnote_43_43" class="fnanchor">[43]</a> represents him as the King, Lawgiver, High
+Priest, Prophet, Mediator. The Word, the Logos (which
+here everywhere hovers near, but never reaches, personality)
+is 'the firstborn son of God', 'the image of
+God'<a name="FNanchor_44_44" id="FNanchor_44_44"></a><a href="#Footnote_44_44" class="fnanchor">[44]</a>; its types are 'the Rock', the Manna, the High
+Priest's Coat; it is 'the Wine Pourer and Master of the
+Drinking Feast of God'.<a name="FNanchor_45_45" id="FNanchor_45_45"></a><a href="#Footnote_45_45" class="fnanchor">[45]</a> The majority of the Jews,
+who did not accept Jesus as the Christ, soon felt they
+had no need for so much allegory, and dropped it, with
+advantage upon the whole, to the Jewish faith. But
+already St. Paul and the Fourth Gospel find here noble
+mental raiment for the great new facts revealed by Jesus
+Christ.</p>
+
+<p>2. The Christian Religion we will take, as to our points,
+at four stages of its development&mdash;Synoptic, Johannine,
+Augustinian, Thomistic.</p>
+
+<p>The Synoptic material here specially concerned we<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_113" id="Page_113">[113]</a></span>
+shall find especially in Mark i. 1 to xv. 47; but also in
+Matt. iii. 1 to xxvii. 56, and in Luke iii. 1 to xxiii. 56.
+Within the material thus marked off, there is no greater
+or lesser authenticity conferred by treble, or double, or
+only single attestation; for this material springs from
+two original sources&mdash;a collection primarily of doings
+and sufferings, which our Mark incorporates with some
+expansions; and a collection primarily of discourses,
+utilized especially by Matthew and Luke in addition to
+the original Mark. Both these sources contain the records
+of eyewitnesses, probably Saints Peter and Matthew.</p>
+
+<p>The chronological order and the special occasions of
+the growths in our Lord's self-manifestation, or in the
+self-consciousness of His human soul, are most carefully
+given by Mark and next by Luke. Matthew largely
+ignores the stages and occasions of both these growths,
+and assumes, as fully explicit from the beginning of the
+Ministry, what was manifested only later on or at the last;
+and he already introduces ecclesiastical and Christological
+terms and discriminations which, however really implicit
+as to their substance in Jesus's teaching, or inevitable
+(as to their particular form) for the maintenance and
+propagation of Christianity in the near future, are nevertheless
+still absent from the accounts of Mark and Luke.</p>
+
+<p>The chief rules for the understanding of the specific
+character of our Lord's revelation appear to be the
+following. The life and teaching must be taken entire;
+and, within this entirety, each stage must be apprehended
+in its own special peculiarities. The thirty years in the
+home, the school, the synagogue, the workshop at
+Nazareth, form a profoundly important constituent of
+His life and teaching&mdash;impressively contrasted, as they
+are, with the probably not full year of the Public
+Ministry, even though we are almost completely bereft
+of all details for those years of silent preparation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_114" id="Page_114">[114]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The Public Ministry, again, consists of two strongly
+contrasted stages, divided by the great scene of Jesus
+with the Apostles alone at Caesarea Philippi (Mark viii.
+27-33; Luke ix. 18-22; Matt. xvi. 13-23). The stage
+before is predominantly expansive, hopeful, peacefully
+growing; the stage after, is concentrated, sad, in conflict,
+and in storm. To the first stage belong the plant parables,
+full of exquisite sympathy with the unfolding of natural
+beauty and of slow fruitfulness; to the second stage
+belong the parables of keen watchfulness and of the
+proximate, sudden second coming. Both movements are
+essential to the physiognomy of our Lord. And they
+are not simply differences in self-manifestation; they
+represent a growth, a relatively new element, in His
+human soul's experience and outlook.</p>
+
+<p>The central doctrine in the teaching is throughout
+the Kingdom of God. But in the first stage this central
+doctrine appears as especially upheld by Jesus's fundamental
+experience&mdash;the Fatherhood of God. In the
+second stage the central doctrine appears as especially
+coloured by Jesus's other great experience&mdash;of Himself
+as the Son of Man. In the earlier stage the Kingdom
+is presented more in the spirit of the ancient prophets,
+as predominantly ethical, as already come in its beginnings,
+and as subject to laws analogous to those obtaining
+in the natural world. In the second stage the coming
+of the Kingdom is presented more with the form of the
+apocalyptic writers, in a purely religious, intensely
+transcendent, and dualistic outlook&mdash;especially this also
+in the Parables of Immediate Expectation&mdash;as not present
+but future (Matt. xix. 28); not distant but imminent
+(Matt. xvi. 28; xxiv. 33; xxvi. 64); not gradual but
+sudden (Matt. xxiv. 27, 39, 43); not at all achieved by
+man but purely given by God (so still in Rev. xxi. 10).</p>
+
+<p>To the earlier stage belongs the great Rejoicing of Jesus<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_115" id="Page_115">[115]</a></span>
+(Matt. xi. 25-30; Luke x. 21, 22). The splendid opening,
+'I thank Thee, Father&mdash;for so it hath seemed good in
+Thy sight', and the exquisite close, special to Matthew,
+'Come unto Me&mdash;and my burthen is light', raise no grave
+difficulty. But the intermediate majestic declaration,
+'All things are delivered unto Me by the Father&mdash;neither
+knoweth any man the Father save the Son and he to
+whomsoever the Son will reveal him', causes critical
+perplexities.</p>
+
+<p>I take this declaration to be modelled upon actual
+words of Jesus, which genuinely implied rather than
+clearly proclaimed a unique relation between the Father
+and Himself. Numerous other words and acts involve
+such a relation and Jesus's full consciousness of it. His
+first public act, His baptism, is clearly described by Mark
+as a personal experience, 'He saw the heavens opened'
+and heard a heavenly voice 'Thou art my beloved Son,
+in whom I am well pleased' (i. 10, 11). Already in the
+first stage Jesus declares the Baptist to be 'more than
+a prophet' (Matt. xi. 9), yet claims superiority over him
+and over Solomon (xi. 11; xii. 42). His doctrine is new
+wine requiring new bottles (Mark ii. 22); indeed His
+whole attitude towards the law is that of a superior, who
+most really exhorts all, 'Learn of Me'. And soon after
+Caesarea Philippi He insists to the people: 'Whosoever
+shall be ashamed of Me in this generation, of him also shall
+the Son of Man be ashamed, when He cometh in the
+glory of the Father' (Mark viii. 38). The most numerous
+cures, physical, psychical, moral, certainly performed by
+Him, appear as the spontaneous effect of a unique degree
+and kind of spiritual authority; and the sinlessness
+attributed to Him throughout by the apostolic community
+(2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. iv. 15; John viii. 46; 1 John ii. 29)
+entirely corresponds to the absence, in the records of
+Him, of all traits indicating troubles of conscience and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_116" id="Page_116">[116]</a></span>
+the corresponding fear of God. And this His unique
+Sonship is conjoined, in the earliest picture of Him, with
+an endless variety and combination of all the joys,
+admirations, affections, disappointments, desolations,
+temptations possible to such a stainless human soul
+and will. We thus find here a comprehensiveness unlike
+the attitude of the Baptist or St. Paul, and like, although
+far exceeding, the joy in nature and the peace in suffering
+of St. Francis of Assisi.</p>
+
+<p>The Second Stage opens with the great scene at Caesarea
+Philippi and its sequel (given with specially marked
+successiveness in Mark viii. 27-x. 45), when, for the first
+time in a manner beyond all dispute, Mark represents
+Jesus as adopting the designation 'the Son of Man' in
+a Messianic and eschatological sense. For our Lord
+here promptly corrects Peter's conception of 'Messiah'
+by repeated insistence upon 'the Son of Man'&mdash;His
+glory yet also His sufferings. Thus Jesus adopts the
+term of Daniel vii. 13 (which already the Apocalypse
+of Enoch had understood of a personal Messiah) as
+a succinct description of His specific vocation&mdash;its
+heavenly origin and difference from all earthly Messianism;
+its combination of the depths of human weakness,
+dereliction, sufferings with the highest elevation in joy,
+power and glory; and its connexion of that pain with
+this triumph as strictly interrelated&mdash;only with and
+through the Cross, was there here the offer and acceptance
+of the Crown.</p>
+
+<p>As to the Passion and Death, and the Risen Life, four
+points appear to be central and secured. Neither the
+Old Testament nor Jewish Theology really knew of a
+Suffering Messiah. Jesus Himself clearly perceived,
+accepted, and carried out this profound new revelation.
+This suffering and death were conceived by Him as the
+final act and crown of His service&mdash;so in Mark x. 44, 45<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_117" id="Page_117">[117]</a></span>
+and Luke xxii. 24-7. (All this remains previous to, and
+independent of, St. Paul's elaborated doctrine as to the
+strictly vicarious and juridical character of the whole.)
+And the Risen Life is an objectively real, profoundly
+operative life&mdash;the visions of the Risen One were effects
+of the truly living Jesus, the Christ.</p>
+
+<p>The Second Christian Stage, the Johannine writings,
+are fully understandable only as posterior to St. Paul&mdash;the
+most enthusiastic and influential, indeed, of all our
+Lord's early disciples, but a convert, from the activity
+of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly Jesus,
+of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the
+heavenly Spirit-Christ, whom he had so suddenly experienced.
+Saul, the man of violent passions and acute
+interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in a substantially
+<i>pneumatic</i> manner, is henceforth absorbed, not in the
+past Jewish Messiah, but in the present universal Christ;
+not in the Kingdom of God, but in Pneuma, the Spirit.
+Christ, the second Adam, is here a life-giving Spirit,
+an element that surrounds and penetrates the human
+spirit; we are baptized, dipped, into Christ, Spirit; we
+can drink Christ, the Spirit. And this Christ-Spirit
+effects and maintains the universal brotherhood of mankind,
+and articulates in particular posts and functions
+the several human spirits, as variously necessary members
+of the one Christian society and Church.</p>
+
+<p>Now the Johannine Gospel indeed utilizes considerable
+Synoptic materials, and does not, as St. Paul, restrict
+itself to the Passion and Resurrection. Yet it gives us,
+substantially, the Spirit-Christ, the Heavenly Man; and
+the growth, prayer, temptation, appeal for sympathy,
+dereliction, agony, which, in the Synoptists, are still so
+real for the human soul of Jesus Himself, appear here as
+sheer condescensions, in time and space, of Him who,
+as all things good, descends from the Eternal Above, so<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_118" id="Page_118">[118]</a></span>
+that we men here below may ascend thither with Him.
+On the other hand, the Church and the Sacraments,
+still predominantly implicit in the Synoptists, and the
+subjects of costly conflict and organization in the Pauline
+writings, here underlie, as already fully operative facts,
+practically the entire profound work. The great dialogue
+with Nicodemus concerns Baptism; the great discourse
+in the synagogue at Capernaum, the Holy Eucharist&mdash;in
+both cases, the strict need of these Sacraments. And
+from the side of the dead Jesus flow blood and water,
+as those two great Sacraments flow from the everliving
+Christ; whilst at the Cross's foot He leaves His seamless
+coat, symbol of the Church's indivisible unity. The
+Universalism of this Gospel is not merely apparent:
+'God so loved the world' (iii. 16), 'the Saviour of the
+world' (iv. 42)&mdash;this glorious teaching is traceable in
+many a passage. Yet Christ here condemns the Jews&mdash;in
+the Synoptists only the Pharisees; He is from above,
+they are from below; all those that came before Him
+were thieves and robbers; He will not pray for the world&mdash;'ye
+shall die in your sins' (xvii. 9; viii. 24); and the
+commandment, designated here by Jesus as His own and
+as new, to 'love one another', is for and within the
+community to which He gives His 'example' (xv. 12;
+xiii. 34)&mdash;in contrast with the great double commandment
+of love proclaimed by Him, in the Synoptists, as already
+formulated in the Mosaic Law (Mark xii. 28-34), and
+as directly applicable to every fellow-man&mdash;indeed, a
+schismatic Samaritan is given as the pattern of such
+perfect love (Luke x. 25-37).</p>
+
+<p>Deuteronomy gained its full articulation in conflict
+with Canaanite impurity; the Johannine writings take
+shape during the earlier battles of the long war with
+Gnosticism&mdash;the most terrible foe ever, so far, encountered
+by the Catholic Church, and conquered by her in open<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[119]</a></span>
+and fair fight. Also these writings lay much stress upon
+Knowing and the Truth: 'this is life eternal, to know
+Thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom Thou
+hast sent' (xvii. 3); symbolism and mysticism prevail
+very largely; and, in so far as they are not absorbed in
+an Eternal Present, the reception of truth and experience
+is not limited to Christ's earthly sojourn&mdash;'the Father
+will give you another Helper, the spirit of truth who will
+abide with you forever' (xiv. 16). Yet here the knowing
+and the truth are also deeply ethical and social: 'he who
+doeth the truth cometh to the light' (iii. 21); and Christ
+has a fold, and other sheep not of this fold&mdash;them also
+He must bring, there will be one fold, one Shepherd;
+indeed, ministerial gradations exist in this one Church
+(so in xiii. 5-10; xx. 3-8; xxi. 7-19). And the Mysticism
+here is but an emotional intuitive apprehension of the
+great historical figure of Jesus, and of the most specifically
+religious of all facts&mdash;of the already overflowing operative
+existence, previous to all our action, of God, the Prevenient
+Love. 'Not we loved God (first), but He (first)
+loved us,' 'let us love Him, because He first loved us,'
+'no man can come to Me, unless the Father draw him'&mdash;a
+drawing which awakens a hunger and thirst for Christ
+and God (1 John iv. 10, 19; John vi. 44; iv. 14; vi. 35).</p>
+
+<p>The Third Stage we can find in St. Augustine, who,
+born a North African Roman (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 354) and a convert
+from an impure life and Manichaeism, with its spatially
+extended God (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 386), wrote his <i>Confessions</i> in 397,
+lived to experience the capture and sack of Rome by Alaric
+the Goth, 410, composed his great work, <i>The City of God</i>,
+amidst the clear dissolution of a mighty past and the dim
+presage of a problematical future, and died at Hippo, his
+episcopal city, in 430, whilst the Vandals were besieging
+it. St. Augustine is more largely a convert and a rigorist
+even than St. Paul when St. Paul is most incisive. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[120]</a></span>
+here he shall testify only to the natures of Eternity and
+of real time, a matter in which he remains unequalled
+in the delicate vividness and balance of his psychological
+analysis and religious perception. 'Thou, O God, precedest
+all past times by the height of Thine ever-present
+Eternity; and Thou exceedest all future times,
+since they <i>are</i> future, and, once they have come, will
+be past times. All thy years abide together, because
+they abide; but these our years will all be, only when
+they all will have ceased to be. Thy years are but One
+Day&mdash;not every day, but To-Day. This Thy To-Day
+is Eternity'.<a name="FNanchor_46_46" id="FNanchor_46_46"></a><a href="#Footnote_46_46" class="fnanchor">[46]</a> The human soul, even in this life, has
+moments of a vivid apprehension of Eternity, as in the
+great scene of Augustine and Monica at the window in
+Ostia.<a name="FNanchor_47_47" id="FNanchor_47_47"></a><a href="#Footnote_47_47" class="fnanchor">[47]</a> And this our sense of Eternity, Beatitude, God,
+proceeds at bottom from Himself, immediately present
+in our lives; the succession, duration of man is sustained
+by the Simultaneity, the Eternity of God: 'this day of
+ours <i>does</i> pass within Thee, since all these things' of our
+deeper experience 'have no means of passing unless,
+somehow, Thou dost contain them all'. 'Behold, Thou
+wast within, and I was without ... Thou wast with me,
+but I was not with Thee.' 'Is not the blessed life precisely
+<i>that</i> life which all men desire? Even those who only
+hope to be blessed would not, unless they in some manner
+already possessed the blessed life, desire to be blessed, as,
+in reality, it is most certain that they desire to be.'<a name="FNanchor_48_48" id="FNanchor_48_48"></a><a href="#Footnote_48_48" class="fnanchor">[48]</a>
+Especially satisfactory is the insistence upon the futility
+of the question as to what God was doing in Time before
+He created. Time is only a quality inherent in all creatures;
+it never existed of itself.<a name="FNanchor_49_49" id="FNanchor_49_49"></a><a href="#Footnote_49_49" class="fnanchor">[49]</a></p>
+
+<p>And our fourth, last Christian Stage shall be represented
+by St. Thomas Aquinas (<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1225-74), in the one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[121]</a></span>
+great question where this Norman-Italian Friar Noble,
+a soul apparently so largely derivative and abstractive,
+is more complete and balanced, and penetrates to the
+specific genius of Christianity more deeply, than Saints
+Paul and Augustine with all their greater directness and
+intensity. We saw how the deepest originality of our
+Lord's teaching and temper consisted in His non-rigoristic
+earnestness, in His non-Gnostic detachment from things
+temporal and spatial. The absorbing expectation of the
+Second Coming, indeed the old, largely effete Graeco-Roman
+world, had first to go, the great Germanic migrations
+had to be fully completed, the first Crusades had
+to pass, before&mdash;some twelve centuries after Nazareth
+and Calvary&mdash;Christianity attained in Aquinas a systematic
+and promptly authoritative expression of this its
+root-peculiarity and power. No one has put the point
+better than Professor E. Troeltsch: 'The decisive point
+here is the conception, peculiar to the Middle Ages, of
+what is Christian as Supernatural, or rather the full
+elaboration of the consequences involved in the conception
+of the Supernatural. The Supernatural is now recognized
+not only in the great complicated miracle of man's
+redemption from out of the world corrupted by original
+sin. But the Supernatural now unfolds itself as an
+autonomous principle of a logical, religious and ethical
+kind. The creature, even the perfect creature, is only
+Natural&mdash;is possessed of only natural laws and ends;
+God alone is Supernatural. Hence the essence of Christian
+Supernaturalism consists in the elevation of the creature,
+above this creature's co-natural limitations, to God's
+own Supernature'. The distinction is no longer, as in
+the Ancient Church, between two kinds (respectively
+perfect and relative) of the one sole Natural Law; the
+distinction here is between Natural Law in general and
+Supernature generally. 'The Decalogue, in strictness,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[122]</a></span>
+is not yet the Christian Ethic. "Biblical" now means
+revealed, but not necessarily Christian; for the Bible
+represents, according to Aquinas, a process of development
+which moves through universal history and possesses
+various stages. The Decalogue is indeed present in the
+legislation of Christ, but as a stage preliminary to the
+specifically Christian Ethic. The formula, on the contrary,
+for the specifically Christian Moral Law is here the
+Augustinian definition of the love of God as the highest
+and absolute, the entirely simple, Moral end&mdash;an end
+which contains the demand of the love of God in the
+stricter sense (self-sanctification, self-denial, contemplation)
+and the demand of the love of our neighbour (the
+active relating of all to God, the active interrelating of
+all in God, and the most penetrating, mutual self-sacrifice
+for God). This Ethic, a mystical interpretation of the
+Evangelical Preaching, forms indeed a strong contrast
+to the This-World Ethic of the Natural Law, Aristotle,
+the Decalogue and Natural Prosperity; but then this
+cannot fail to be the case, given the entire fundamental
+character of the Christian Ethic'.<a name="FNanchor_50_50" id="FNanchor_50_50"></a><a href="#Footnote_50_50" class="fnanchor">[50]</a></p>
+
+<p>Thus the widest and most primitive contrasts here are,
+not Sin and Redemption (though these, of course, remain)
+but Nature (however good in its kind) and Supernature.
+The State becomes the complex of that essentially good
+thing, Nature; the Church the complex of that different,
+higher good, Supernature; roughly speaking, where the
+State leaves off, the Church begins.</p>
+
+<p>It lasted not long, before the Canonists and certain
+ruling Churchmen helped to break up, in the consciousness
+of men at large, this noble perception of the two-step
+ladder from God to man and from man to God. And the
+Protestant Reformers, as a whole, went even beyond<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[123]</a></span>
+Saints Paul and Augustine in exclusive preoccupation
+with Sin and Redemption. Henceforth the single-step
+character of man's call now more than ever predominates.
+The Protestant Reformation, like the French Revolution,
+marks the existence of grave abuses, the need of large
+reforms, and, especially on this point, the all but inevitable
+excessiveness of man once he is aroused to such 'reforming'
+action. Certainly, to this hour, Protestantism
+as such has produced, within and for religion specifically,
+nothing that can seriously compare, in massive, balanced
+completeness, with the work of the short-lived golden
+Middle Ages of Aquinas and Dante. Hence, for our
+precise present purpose, we can conclude our Jewish
+and Christian survey here.</p>
+
+<p>3. Only a few words about Confucianism, Buddhism,
+Mohammedanism, as these, in some of their main outlines,
+illustrate the points especially brought out by the Jewish
+Christian development.</p>
+
+<p>Confucianism admittedly consists, at least as we have
+it, in a greatly complicated system of the direct worship
+of Nature (Sun, Moon, Stars especially) and of Ancestors,
+and of a finely simple system of ethical rules for
+man's ordinary social intercourse. That Nature-worship
+closely resembles what the Deuteronomic reform fought
+so fiercely in Israel; and the immemorial antiquity and
+still vigorous life of such a worship in China indicates
+impressively how little such Nature-worship tends, of
+itself, to its own supersession by a definite Theism. And
+the Ethical Rules, and their very large observance,
+illustrate well how real can be the existence, and the
+goodness in its own kind, of Natural, This-World morality,
+even where it stands all but entirely unpenetrated or
+supplemented by any clear and strong supernatural
+attraction or conviction.</p>
+
+<p>Buddhism, in its original form, consisted neither in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[124]</a></span>
+the Wheel of Reincarnation alone, nor in <i>Nirvana</i> alone,
+but precisely in the combination of the two; for that
+ceaseless flux of reincarnation was there felt with such
+horror, that the <i>Nirvana</i>&mdash;the condition in which that
+flux is abolished&mdash;was hailed as a blessed release. The
+judgement as to the facts&mdash;that all human experience
+is of sheer, boundless change&mdash;was doubtless excessive;
+but the value-judgement&mdash;that if life be such pure
+shiftingness, then the cessation of life is the one end for
+man to work and pray for&mdash;was assuredly the authentic
+cry of the human soul when fully normal and awake.
+This position thus strikingly confirms the whole Jewish
+and Christian persistent search for permanence in change&mdash;for
+a Simultaneity, the support of our succession.</p>
+
+<p>And Mohammedanism, both in its striking achievements
+and in its marked limitations, indeed also in the presentations
+of it by its own spokesmen, appears as a religion
+primarily not of a special pervasive spirit and of large,
+variously applicable maxims, but as one of precise,
+entirely immutable rules. Thus we find here something
+not all unlike, but mostly still more rigid than, the post-Exilic
+Jewish religion&mdash;something doubtless useful for
+certain times and races, but which could not expand and
+adapt itself to indefinite varieties of growths and peoples
+without losing that interior unity and self-identity so
+essential to all living and powerful religion.</p>
+
+
+<h3>III</h3>
+
+<p>Let us now attempt, in a somewhat loose and elastic
+order, a short allocation and estimate of the facts in past
+and present religion which mainly concern the question
+of Religion and Progress.</p>
+
+<p>We West Europeans have apparently again reached
+the fruitful stage when man is not simply alive to this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[125]</a></span>
+or that physical or psychic need, nor even to the practical
+interest and advantage of this or that Art, Science,
+Sociology, Politics, Ethics; but when he awakens further
+to the question as to why and how these several activities,
+all so costly where at all effectual, can deserve all this
+sacrifice&mdash;can be based in anything sufficiently abiding
+and objective. The history of all the past efforts, and
+indeed all really adequate richness of immediate outlook,
+combine, I think, to answer that only the experience
+and the conviction of an Objective Reality distinct from,
+and more than, man, or indeed than the whole of the
+world apprehended by man as less than, or as equal to,
+man himself, can furnish sufficiently deep and tenacious
+roots for our sense and need of an objective supreme
+Beauty, Truth, and Goodness&mdash;of a living Reality already
+overflowing that which, in lesser degrees and ways, we
+small realities cannot altogether cease from desiring to
+become. It is Religion which, from first to last, but with
+increasing purity and power, brings with it this evidence
+and conviction. Its sense of the Objective, Full Reality
+of God, and its need of Adoration are quite essential to
+Religion, although considerable systems, which are largely
+satisfactory in the more immediate questions raised by
+Aesthetics and even by Ethics, and which are sincerely
+anxious to do justice also to the religious sense, are fully
+at work to explain away these essential characteristics of
+all wideawake Religion. Paul Natorp, the distinguished
+Plato-scholar in Germany, the short-lived pathetically
+eloquent M. Guyau in France, and, above all, Benedetto
+Croce, the large encyclopaedic mind in Italy, have influenced
+or led much of this movement, which, in questions
+of Religion, has assuredly not reached the deepest and
+most tenacious teachings of life.</p>
+
+<p>The intimations as to this deepest Reality certainly
+arise within my own mind, emotion, will; and these my<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[126]</a></span>
+faculties cannot, upon the whole, be constrained by my
+fellow mortals; indeed, as men grow more manysidedly
+awake, all attempts at any such constraint only arrest
+or deflect the growth of these intimations. Yet the
+dispositions necessary for the sufficient apprehension of
+these religious intimations&mdash;sincerity, conscientiousness,
+docility&mdash;are not, even collectively, already Religion, any
+more than they are Science or Philosophy. With these
+dispositions on our part, objective facts and living
+Reality can reach us&mdash;and, even so, these facts reach us
+practically always, at first, through human teachers
+already experienced in these things. The need of such
+facts and such persons to teach them are, in the first
+years of every man, and for long ages in the history
+of mankind, far more pressing than any question of
+toleration. Even vigorous persecution or keen exclusiveness
+of feeling have&mdash;<i>pace</i> Lord Acton&mdash;saved for mankind,
+at certain crises of its difficult development, convictions
+of priceless worth&mdash;as in the Deuteronomic Reform
+and the Johannine Writings. In proportion as men
+become more manysidedly awake, they acquire at least
+the capacity for greater sensitiveness concerning the
+laws and forces intrinsic to the various ranges and
+levels of life; and, where such sensitiveness is really
+at work, it can advantageously replace, by means of
+the spontaneous acceptance of such objective realities,
+the constraints of past ages&mdash;constraints which now,
+in any case, have become directly mischievous for such
+minds. None the less will men, after this change as before,
+require the corporate experience and manifestation of
+religion as, in varying degrees and ways, a permanent
+necessity for the vigorous life of religion. Indeed, such
+corporate tradition operates strongly even where men's
+spiritual sense seems most individual, or where, with the
+retention of some ethical nobility of outlook, they most<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[127]</a></span>
+keenly combat all and every religious institution. So with
+George Fox's doctrine of the Divine Enlightenment of
+every soul separately and without mediation of any kind,
+a doctrine derived by him from that highly ecclesiastical
+document, the Gospel of St. John; and with many
+a Jacobin's fierce proclamation of the rights of Man,
+never far away from reminiscences of St. Paul.</p>
+
+<p>This permanent necessity of Religious Institutions is
+primarily a need for men to teach and exemplify, not
+simply Natural, This-World Morality, but a Supernatural,
+Other-World Ethic; and not simply that abstraction,
+Religion in General or a Religious Hypothesis, but that
+rich concretion, this or that Historical Religion. In
+proportion as such an Historical Religion is deep and
+delicate, it will doubtless contain affinities with all that
+is wholesome and real within the other extant historical
+religions. Nevertheless, all religions are effectual through
+their special developments, where these developments
+remain true at all. As well deprive a flower of its 'mere
+details' of pistil, stamen, pollen, or an insect of its
+'superfluous' antennae, as simplify any Historical Religion
+down to the sorry stump labelled 'the religion of every
+honest man'. We shall escape all bigotry, without
+lapsing into such most unjust indifferentism, if we
+vigorously hold and unceasingly apply the doctrine of
+such a Church theologian as Juan de Lugo. De Lugo
+(<span class="smcap">a.d.</span> 1583-1660), Spaniard, post-Reformation Roman
+Catholic, Jesuit, Theological Professor, and a Cardinal
+writing in Rome under the eyes of Pope Urban VIII,
+teaches that the members of the various Christian sects,
+of the Jewish and Mohammedan communions, and of the
+heathen religions and philosophical schools, who achieve
+their salvation, do so, ordinarily, simply through the aid
+afforded by God's grace to their good faith in its instinctive
+concentration upon, and in its practice of, those<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[128]</a></span>
+elements in their respective community's worship and
+teaching, which are true and good and originally revealed
+by God.<a name="FNanchor_51_51" id="FNanchor_51_51"></a><a href="#Footnote_51_51" class="fnanchor">[51]</a> Thus we escape all undue individualism and
+all unjust equalization of the (very variously valuable)
+religious and philosophical bodies; and yet we clearly
+hold the profound importance of the single soul's good
+faith and religious instinct, and of the worship or school,
+be they ever so elementary and imperfect, which environ
+such a soul.</p>
+
+<p>A man's religion, in proportion to its depth, will move
+in a Concrete Time which becomes more and more
+a Partial Simultaneity. And these his depths then more
+and more testify to, and contrast with, the Fully Simultaneous,
+God. Because man thus lives, not in an ever-equal
+chain of mutually exclusive moments, in Clock
+Time, but in Duration, with its variously close interpenetrations
+of the successive parts; and because these
+interpenetrations are close in proportion to the richness
+and fruitfulness of the durations he lives through; he
+can, indeed he must, conceive absolutely perfect life as
+absolutely simultaneous. God is thus not Unending, but
+Eternal; the very fullness of His life leaves no room or
+reason for succession and our poor need of it. Dr. F. C. S.
+Schiller has admirably drawn out this grand doctrine,
+with the aid of Aristotle's Unmoving Action, in <i>Humanism</i>,
+1903, pp. 204-27. We need only persistently apprehend
+this Simultaneity as essential to God, and Succession as
+varyingly essential to all creatures, and there remains
+no difficulty&mdash;at least as regards the Time-element&mdash;in
+the doctrine of Creation. For only with the existence of
+creatures does Time thus arise at all&mdash;it exists only in
+and through them. And assuredly all finite things, that
+we know at all, bear traces of a history involving a beginning
+and an end. Professor Bernardino Varisco, in his<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[129]</a></span>
+great <i>Know Thyself</i>, has noble pages on this large
+theme.<a name="FNanchor_52_52" id="FNanchor_52_52"></a><a href="#Footnote_52_52" class="fnanchor">[52]</a> In any case we must beware of all more or less
+Pantheistic conceptions of the simultaneous life of God
+and the successive life of creatures as but essential and
+necessary elements of one single Divine-Creaturely existence,
+in the manner, e.g., of Professor Josiah Royce,
+in his powerful work <i>The World and the Individual</i>,
+2nd series, 1901. All such schemes break down under an
+adequate realization of those dread facts error and evil.
+A certain real independence must have been left by God
+to reasonable creatures. And let it be noted carefully:
+the great difficulty against all Theism lies in the terrible
+reality of Evil; and the deepest adequacy of this same
+Theism, especially of Christianity, consists in its practical
+attitude towards, and success against, this most real
+Evil. But Pantheism increases, whilst seeming to surmount,
+the theoretical difficulty, since the world as it
+stands, and not an Ultimate Reality behind it, is held
+to be perfect; and it entirely fails really to transmute
+Evil in practice. Theism, no more than any other outlook,
+really explains Evil; but it alone, in its fullest, Jewish-Christian
+forms, has done more, and better, than explain
+Evil: it has fully faced, it has indeed greatly intensified,
+the problem, by its noble insistence upon the reality and
+heinousness of Sin; and it has then overcome all this
+Evil, not indeed in theory, but in practice, by actually
+producing in the midst of deep suffering, through a still
+deeper faith and love, souls the living expression of the
+deepest beatitude and peace.</p>
+
+<p>The fully Simultaneous Reality awakens and satisfies
+man's deepest, most nearly simultaneous life, by a certain
+adaptation of its own intrinsic life to these human
+spirits. In such varyingly 'incarnational' acts or action
+the non-successive God Himself condescends to a certain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_130" id="Page_130">[130]</a></span>
+successiveness; but this, in order to help His creatures
+to achieve as much simultaneity as is compatible with
+their several ranks and calls. We must not wonder if,
+in the religious literature, these condescensions of God
+largely appear as though they themselves were more or
+less non-successive; nor, again, if the deepest religious
+consciousness tends usually to conceive God's outward
+action, if future, then as proximate, and, if present, then
+as strictly instantaneous. For God in Himself is indeed
+Simultaneous; and if we try to picture Simultaneity
+by means of temporal images at all, then the instant,
+and not any period long or short, is certainly nearest
+to the truth&mdash;as regards the form and vehicle of the
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>The greater acts of Divine Condescension and Self-Revelation,
+our Religious <i>Accessions</i>, have mostly occurred
+at considerable intervals, each from the other, in our
+human history. After they have actually occurred, these
+several acts can be compared and arranged, according to
+their chief characteristics, and even in a series of (upon
+the whole) growing content and worth&mdash;hence the
+Science of Religion. Yet such Science gives us no power
+to produce, or even to foresee, any further acts. These
+great Accessions of Spiritual Knowledge and Experience
+are not the simple result of the conditions obtaining previously
+in the other levels of life, or even in that of religion
+itself; they often much anticipate, they sometimes
+greatly lag behind, the rise or decline of the other kinds
+of life. And where (as with the great Jewish Prophets,
+and, in some degree, with John the Baptist and Our Lord)
+these Accessions do occur at times of national stress, these
+several crises are, at most, the occasion for the demand, not
+the cause of the supply.</p>
+
+<p>The mostly long gaps between these Accessions have
+been more or less filled up, amongst the peoples concerned,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[131]</a></span>
+by varyingly vigorous and valuable attempts to articulate
+and systematize, to apply in practice, and rightly to
+place (within the other ranges of man's total life) these
+great, closely-packed masses of spiritual fact; or to
+elude, to deflect, or directly to combat them, or some
+of their interpretations or applications. Now fairly
+steady improvement is possible, desirable, and largely
+actual, in the critical sifting and appraisement, as to the
+dates and the actual reality, of the historical documents
+and details of these Accessions; in the philosophical
+articulation of their doctrinal and evidential content;
+in the finer understanding and wider application of
+their ethical demands; and in the greater adequacy
+(both as to firmness and comprehensiveness) of the
+institutional organs and incorporations special to these
+same Accessions. All this can and does progress, but
+mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent paroxysms
+of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with one-sidedness,
+travesties, and&mdash;worst of all&mdash;with worldly
+indifference and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the
+Simultaneous Richness are here also always necessary;
+nor can these things ever really progress except through
+a deep religious sense&mdash;all mere scepticism and all levelling
+down are simply so much waste. Still, we can
+speak of progress in the Science of Religion more appropriately
+than we can of progress in the Knowledge of
+Religion.</p>
+
+<p>The Crusades, the Renaissance, the Revolution, no
+doubt exercised, in the long run, so potent a secularizing
+influence, because men's minds had become too largely
+other-worldly&mdash;had lost a sufficient interest in this
+wonderful world; and hence all those new, apparently
+boundless outlooks and problems were taken up largely
+as a revolt and escape from what looked like a prison-house&mdash;religion.
+Yet through all these violent oscillations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[132]</a></span>
+there persisted, in human life, the supernatural need and
+call. In this God is the great central interest, love and
+care of the soul. We must look to it that both these
+interests and Ethics are kept awake, strong and distinct
+within a costingly rich totality of life: the Ethic of the
+honourable citizen, merchant, lawyer&mdash;of Confucius and
+Socrates; and the Ethic of the Jewish Prophets at their
+deepest, of the Suffering Servant, of our Lord's Beatitudes,
+of St. Paul's great eulogy of love, of Augustine and Monica
+at the window in Ostia, of Father Damian's voluntarily
+dying a leper amidst the lepers. The Church is the born
+incorporation of this pole, as the State is of the other.
+The Church indeed should, at its lower limit, also encourage
+the This-world Stage; the State, at its higher limit,
+can, more or less consciously, prepare us for the Other-World
+Stage. Both spring from the same God, at two
+levels of His action; both concern the same men, at
+two stages of their response and need. Yet the primary
+duty of the State is turned to this life; the primary
+care of the Church, to that life&mdash;to life in its deepest
+depths.</p>
+
+<p>Will men, after this great war, more largely again
+apprehend, love, and practise this double polarity of their
+lives? Only thus will the truest progress be possible in
+the understanding, the application, and the fruitfulness of
+Religion, with its great central origin and object, God, the
+beginning and end of all our true progress, precisely
+because He Himself already possesses immeasurably
+more than all He helps us to become,&mdash;He Who, even
+now already, is our Peace in Action, our Joy even in
+the Cross.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books for Reference</span></h3><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[133]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Books1">
+<tr><td align='left'>I.</td><td align='left'>1. Oswold K&uuml;lpe, <i>The Philosophy of the Present in Germany</i>, English translation. London: George Allen, 1913, 3<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i> net.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>2. J. McKeller Stewart, <i>A Critical Exposition of Bergon's Philosophy</i>. London: Macmillan, 1913, 6<i>s.</i> net.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>II.</td><td align='left'>1. R. H. Charles, <i>A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life</i>. London: A. &amp; C. Black, 1899, 10<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i> net.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>2. Ernest T. Scott, <i>The Fourth Gospel</i>. Edinburgh: T. &amp; T. Clark, 1906, 6<i>s.</i> net.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>III.</td><td align='left'>1. Aliotta, <i>The Idealistic Reaction against Science</i>. English translation. Macmillan, 1914, 12<i>s.</i> net.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>2. F. C. Schiller, <i>Humanism</i>, Macmillan, 1903, 7<i>s.</i> 6<i>d.</i> net.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>3. C. C. J. Webb, <i>Group Theories of Religion and the Individual</i>, Allen and Unwin, 1916, 5<i>s.</i> net.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_32_32" id="Footnote_32_32"></a><a href="#FNanchor_32_32"><span class="label">[32]</span></a> <i>The Idealistic Reaction against Science</i>, Engl. tr. 1914, pp. 6, 7.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_33_33" id="Footnote_33_33"></a><a href="#FNanchor_33_33"><span class="label">[33]</span></a> <i>A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze</i>, 1895, p. 104.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_34_34" id="Footnote_34_34"></a><a href="#FNanchor_34_34"><span class="label">[34]</span></a> Aliotta, op. cit., pp. 89, 187.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_35_35" id="Footnote_35_35"></a><a href="#FNanchor_35_35"><span class="label">[35]</span></a> <i>Encyl. Brit.</i>, 'Psychology,' 11th ed., p. 577.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_36_36" id="Footnote_36_36"></a><a href="#FNanchor_36_36"><span class="label">[36]</span></a> Ed. 1898, p. 90.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_37_37" id="Footnote_37_37"></a><a href="#FNanchor_37_37"><span class="label">[37]</span></a> <i>Discours sur la M&eacute;thode</i>, 1637, IV<span class='super'>e</span> Partie.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_38_38" id="Footnote_38_38"></a><a href="#FNanchor_38_38"><span class="label">[38]</span></a> Aliotta, op. cit., p. 408.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_39_39" id="Footnote_39_39"></a><a href="#FNanchor_39_39"><span class="label">[39]</span></a> Ed. 1893, vol. ii, p. 759.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_40_40" id="Footnote_40_40"></a><a href="#FNanchor_40_40"><span class="label">[40]</span></a> <i>First Principles</i>, 6th ed., 1900, vol. i, p. 67.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_41_41" id="Footnote_41_41"></a><a href="#FNanchor_41_41"><span class="label">[41]</span></a> Article, 'Moses,' in <i>Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart</i>,
+1913.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_42_42" id="Footnote_42_42"></a><a href="#FNanchor_42_42"><span class="label">[42]</span></a> Ed. Mangey, vol. i, pp. 44, 49.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_43_43" id="Footnote_43_43"></a><a href="#FNanchor_43_43"><span class="label">[43]</span></a> Ibid., pp. 80-179.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_44_44" id="Footnote_44_44"></a><a href="#FNanchor_44_44"><span class="label">[44]</span></a> Ibid., pp. 308, 427.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_45_45" id="Footnote_45_45"></a><a href="#FNanchor_45_45"><span class="label">[45]</span></a> Ibid., pp. 213, 121, 562, 691.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_46_46" id="Footnote_46_46"></a><a href="#FNanchor_46_46"><span class="label">[46]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i> x, 13, 2.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_47_47" id="Footnote_47_47"></a><a href="#FNanchor_47_47"><span class="label">[47]</span></a> Autumn, 387.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_48_48" id="Footnote_48_48"></a><a href="#FNanchor_48_48"><span class="label">[48]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i> 1, 6, 3; x, 27; x, 20.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_49_49" id="Footnote_49_49"></a><a href="#FNanchor_49_49"><span class="label">[49]</span></a> <i>Conf.</i> xi, 13.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_50_50" id="Footnote_50_50"></a><a href="#FNanchor_50_50"><span class="label">[50]</span></a> <i>Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen</i>, 1912,
+pp. 263-5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_51_51" id="Footnote_51_51"></a><a href="#FNanchor_51_51"><span class="label">[51]</span></a> <i>De Fide</i>, Disp. xix, 7, 10; xx, 107, 194.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_52_52" id="Footnote_52_52"></a><a href="#FNanchor_52_52"><span class="label">[52]</span></a> <i>Cognosci Te Stesso</i>, 1912, pp. 144-7.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[134]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VI</h2>
+
+<h2>MORAL PROGRESS</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">L. P. Jacks</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>From the syllabus of all the lectures in this course
+I gather that every lecturer on the programme is dealing
+with the question of moral progress. This is inevitable.
+Each lecturer must show that the particular sort of
+progress he is dealing with is real or genuine progress, and
+this it cannot be unless it is moral. That is itself a significant
+fact and throws a valuable light on our subject. It
+shows that progress, as it is studied throughout the course,
+is not progress in the abstract, whatever that may mean,
+but progress <i>for us</i> constituted as we are; and since our
+constitution is essentially moral all progress that we can
+recognize as such must be moral also. Science, Industry,
+Government, might all claim progress on their own
+ground and in their own nature, but this would not prove
+progress as we understand the word, unless it could be
+shown further that these things contribute to human
+betterment in the highest sense of the word. <i>Their</i>
+progress might conceivably involve <i>our</i> regress.</p>
+
+<p>To believe in moral progress as an historical fact, as
+a process that has begun, and is going on, and will be
+continued&mdash;that is one thing, and it is my own position.
+To believe that this progress is far advanced is another
+thing, and is not my position. While believing in Moral
+Progress as a fact, I also believe that we are much nearer
+to the beginnings of it than the end. We should do well to
+accustom ourselves to this thought. Many of our despairs,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[135]</a></span>
+lamentations, and pessimisms are disappointments which
+arise from our extravagant notions of the degree of
+progress already attained. There has been a great deal
+of what I have called philosophic pharisaism. Perhaps
+it would be better called aeonic pharisaism. I mean the
+spirit in the present age which seems to say 'I thank thee,
+O God, that I am not as former ages: ignorant, barbaric,
+cruel, unsocial; I read books, ride in aeroplanes, eat my
+dinner with a knife and fork, and cheerfully pay my taxes
+to the State; I study human science, talk freely about
+humanity, and spend much of my time in making speeches
+on social questions'. Now there is truth in all this, but
+not the kind of truth which should lead us to self-flattery.
+A good rule for optimists would be this: 'Believe in
+moral progress, but do not believe in too much of it.'
+I think there would be more optimists in the world, more
+cheerfulness, more belief in moral progress, if we candidly
+faced the fact that morally considered we are still in a neolithic
+age, not brutes indeed any longer, and yet not so far
+outgrown the brutish stage as to justify these trumpetings.
+One of the beneficent lessons of the present war has been
+to moderate our claims in this respect. It has revealed
+us to ourselves as nothing else in history has ever done,
+and it has revealed, among other things, that moral progress
+is not nearly so advanced as we thought it was. It
+has been a terrible blow to the pharisaism of which I have
+just spoken. It has not discredited science, nor philosophy,
+nor government, nor anything else that we value, but it
+has shown that these things have not brought us as far
+as we thought. That very knowledge, when you come to
+think of it, is itself a very distinct step in moral progress.
+Before the war we were growing morally conceited; we
+thought ourselves much better, more advanced in morality,
+than we really were, and this conceit was acting as a real
+barrier to our farther advance. A sharp lesson was needed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[136]</a></span>
+to take this conceit out of us&mdash;to remind us that as yet
+we are only at the bare beginnings of moral advance&mdash;and
+not, as some of us fondly imagined, next door to the goal.
+This sudden awakening to the truth is full of promise for
+the future.</p>
+
+<p>And now what is the cause of these exaggerated notions
+which so many of us have entertained? I think they
+arise from our habit of letting ourselves be guided by
+words rather than by realities, by what men are <i>saying</i>
+rather than by what they are <i>doing</i>, by what teachers
+are teaching than by what learners are learning. If you
+take your stand in the realm of words, of doctrines, of
+theories, of philosophies, of books, preachings, and
+uttered ideals, you might make out a strong case for
+a high degree of moral progress actually attained. But
+if you ask how much of this has been learnt by mankind
+at large, and learnt in such a way as to issue in practice,
+you get a different story. We have attached too much
+importance to the first story and too little to the second.
+There has been a great deal of false emphasis in consequence.
+This false emphasis is especially prominent in
+the education controversy which is now going on&mdash;and
+the question of moral progress, by the way, is the question
+of education in the widest and highest sense of the term.
+People seem quite content so long as they can get the
+right thing taught. They don't always see that unless
+the right thing is taught by the right people and in the
+right way it will not be <i>learnt</i>. Now education is ultimately
+a question of what is being <i>learnt</i>, not of what is
+being <i>taught</i>. The process of learning is a very curious
+and complicated one, and it often happens that what goes
+in at the teacher's end comes out at the pupil's end in
+a wholly different form and with a wholly different value;
+and we have the highest authority for believing that what
+really counts is not so much that which goeth into a man<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[137]</a></span>
+but that which cometh out of him. That applies to all
+education&mdash;especially moral education. So that if you
+argue from what has gone into the human race in the
+way of moral teaching you may be greatly surprised and
+perhaps disappointed when you compare it with what
+has come out of the human race in the meantime. What
+has been taught is not what has been learnt. It has
+suffered a sea change in the process. Nor is the question
+wholly one of learning. There is the further question of
+remembering. I believe that a candid examination of the
+facts would convince us that the human race has proved
+itself a forgetful pupil. It has not always retained what
+it has learnt. Emerson has said that no account of the
+Holy Ghost has been lost. But how did Emerson find
+that out? The only accents Emerson knew of were those
+which the world happened to have remembered. If any
+had been lost in the meantime Emerson naturally would
+not know of their existence. I have heard of a functionary,
+whose precise office I am not able to define, called 'the
+Lord's Remembrancer'. It would be a great help to
+Moral Progress if we had in modern life a People's Remembrancer.
+His place is occupied to some extent by the study
+of history, and for that reason one could wish for the sake
+of Moral Progress that the study of history were universal.
+For my own part I seldom open a book of history without
+recovering what for me is a lost account of the Holy Ghost.
+Next to conceit I reckon forgetfulness as the greatest
+enemy of Moral Progress. I suppose Rudyard Kipling
+had something of this in mind when he wrote his poem&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Lord God of Hosts be with us yet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lest we forget, lest we forget.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Another cause of our over-estimate of Moral Progress
+is that we have thought too much of the abstract State
+and too little of the actual States now in being. Our<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[138]</a></span>
+devotion to 'the' State as an ideal has led us to overlook
+the fact that many actual States represent a form of
+morality so low that it is doubtful if it can be called
+morality at all. In their relations <i>with one another</i> they
+display qualities which would disgrace the brutes. And
+the worst of it is that at times these States drag down to
+their own low level the morality of the individuals belonging
+to them. Thus at the present moment we see quite
+decent Englishmen and quite decent Germans tearing
+one another to pieces like mad dogs, a thing they would
+never dream of doing as between man and man, and
+which they do only because they are in the grip of forces
+alien to their own nature. We have overestimated
+Progress by thinking only of what is happening inside
+each of the States. We have forgotten to consider the
+bearing of the States to one another, which remains on
+a level lower than that of individuals.</p>
+
+<p>The impression has gone abroad that the nations of the
+world need to take <i>only one step</i> from the position where
+they now stand to accomplish the final unity of all mankind.
+Taking any one of these nations&mdash;our own for
+example&mdash;we can trace the steps by which the warring
+elements within it have become reconciled, until finally
+there has emerged that vast unitary corporation&mdash;the
+British Empire. So with all the others. What more is
+required therefore than one step further in the same
+direction, to join up all the States into a single world State.
+But I am bound to think we are too hasty in treating the
+unity of mankind as needing only one step more. It is
+not so easy as all that. When you study the process by
+which unity has been brought about in the various
+European communities you find that motives of conquest
+and corresponding motives of defence have had a great
+deal to do with it. Germany, for example, was built up
+and now holds together as a fighting unit. Whether<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[139]</a></span>
+Germany and the other States would still maintain their
+cohesion when they were no longer fighting units, and
+when the motives of conquest and defence were no longer
+in operation, is a question on which I should not like to
+dogmatize either way. Certainly we have no right to
+assume offhand that the unifying process which has given
+the nations the mass cohesion and efficiency they require
+for holding their own against enemy States would still
+remain in full power when there were no longer any enemy
+States to be considered.</p>
+
+<p>But what do we mean by Progress?</p>
+
+<p>Progress may be defined as that process by which
+a thing advances from a less to a more complete state of
+itself. Now whether this process is a desirable one or not
+obviously depends on the nature of the thing which is
+progressing. Take the largest and most inclusive of all
+things&mdash;the whole world. And now suppose philosophy
+to have proved that the world, the whole world, is
+advancing from a less to a more complete state of itself&mdash;which
+as a matter of fact is what the doctrine of evolution
+claims to have proved. Ought I to rejoice in this discovery?
+Will it give me satisfaction? That clearly
+depends on the nature of the world. If I am antecedently
+assured that the world is good, I shall naturally rejoice
+on hearing that it is advancing from a less to a more
+complete state of itself. But if the nature of the world is
+evil, what reason can I possibly have for rejoicing in its
+evolution? Assuming the world to be evil in its essential
+nature, I for my part, if I were consulted in the matter,
+would certainly give my vote against its being allowed
+to advance from a less to a more complete state of itself.
+The less such a world progresses the easier it will be for
+moral beings to live in it. Our interest lies in its remaining
+as undeveloped as possible.</p>
+
+<p>Obvious as this seems there are some evolutionists who<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[140]</a></span>
+take a rather different view. They seem to think that any
+sort of world, no matter what its nature might be, would
+ultimately become a good world if it were allowed to
+develop its nature far enough. It is just the fact of its
+continually becoming more of itself that makes it good.
+But this would compel us to abandon our definition that
+progress is the advance of a thing from a less to a more
+complete state of <i>itself</i>. For if itself were a bad self to
+begin with all such advance of <i>itself</i> would only make it
+worse. It is possible that an essentially bad man like
+Iago might be converted into a good one, but not by
+advancing from a less to a more complete state of <i>himself</i>
+as he originally was&mdash;unless indeed we change the hypothesis
+and suppose that he was not essentially bad to
+begin with. So with the world at large. Our nature
+being what it is, namely moral, we must first be convinced
+that the world is in principle good before we can derive
+the least satisfaction from knowing that it is advancing
+from a less to a more complete state of <i>itself</i>. The alternative
+doctrine makes a breach in the doctrine of progress
+which is inconsistent with its original form. A thing
+develops by retaining its essential nature&mdash;that is the
+original form. But a bad world which develops into
+a good one doesn't retain its essential nature. There
+comes a point somewhere when the next step of progress
+can be achieved only by the thing dropping its original
+nature&mdash;a point at which the thing is no longer becoming
+more of its former self, which was bad, but is ceasing to
+be its former self altogether and becoming something
+else, which is good.</p>
+
+<p>Let us apply this to progress in three specific directions&mdash;Science,
+the Mechanical Arts, and Government.</p>
+
+<p>We find that the progress of science has enormously
+increased man's power over the forces of nature. Is it
+a good thing that man's power over the forces of nature<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[141]</a></span>
+should be increased? That surely depends on the
+manner in which this power is used, and this depends
+again on the moral nature of man. When we observe,
+as we may truly observe, especially at the present time,
+that of all the single applications which man has made
+of science, the most extensive and perhaps the most
+efficient is that of devising implements for destroying
+his brother man, it is at least permissible to raise the
+question whether the progress of science has contributed
+on the whole to the progress of humanity. Had it not
+been for the progress of science, which has enormously
+increased the wealth of the world, it is doubtful if this
+war, which is mainly a war about wealth, would have
+taken place at all. Or if a war had broken out, it would
+not have involved the appalling destruction of human life
+and property we are now witnessing&mdash;such that, within
+a space of two years, about six million human beings have
+been killed, thirty-five millions wounded, and wealth
+destroyed to the extent of about fifteen thousand millions
+sterling&mdash;though some say it is very much more. Science
+taught us to make this wealth: science has also taught
+us how to destroy it. When one thinks of how much of
+this is attributable to the progress of science, I say it is
+<i>permissible to raise the question</i> whether man is a being
+who can safely be entrusted with that control over the
+forces of nature which science gives him. What if he uses
+this power, as he plainly can do, for his own undoing? To
+ask this, as we can hardly help asking, is to transfer the
+question of scientific progress into the sphere of morality.
+It is conceivable that the progress of science might
+involve for us no progress at all. It might be, and some
+have feared that it may become, a step towards the self-destruction
+of the human race.</p>
+
+<p>Take the mechanical arts. The chief effects of progress
+in the mechanical arts have been an enormous increase<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[142]</a></span>
+in the material wealth of mankind, and, partly consequent
+upon this, a parallel growth of population in the industrial
+countries of the world. It is by no means clear that
+either of these things constitutes a definite step in
+human progress. Consider the growth of population&mdash;the
+immense increase in the total bulk and volume of the
+human race. Whether this constitutes a clear gain to
+humanity obviously cannot be answered without reference
+to moral considerations. To increase the arithmetical
+quantity of life in the world can be counted a gain only
+if the general tendencies of life are in the right direction.
+If they are in the wrong direction, then the more lives there
+are to yield to these tendencies the less reason has the
+moralist to be satisfied with what is happening. No one,
+so far as I know, has ever seriously maintained that the
+end and aim of progress is to increase the number of
+human beings up to the limit which the planet is able
+to support; though some doctrines if pressed to their
+conclusion would lead to that, notably the doctrine that
+all morality rests ultimately on the instinct for the
+preservation and the reproduction of life. We have first
+to be convinced that the human race is not on the wrong
+road before we can look with complacency on the increase
+of its numbers. We may note in this connexion that
+mankind possesses no sort of collective control over its
+own mass or volume. The mass or total number of lives
+involved is determined by forces which are not subject
+to the unitary direction of any existing human will either
+individual or collective. This applies not only to the
+human race as a whole, but to particular communities.
+Their growth is unregulated. They just come to be what
+they are in point of size. This fact seems to me a very
+important one to bear in mind when we talk of the
+progress of science giving us control over the forces of
+nature. So far no state, no government, no community<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[143]</a></span>
+has won any effective control over that group of the
+forces of nature which determine the total size of the
+community in question. It is an aspect of human destiny
+which appears to be left to chance; and yet when we
+consider what it means, is there any aspect of human
+destiny on which such tremendous consequences depend?
+And ought we not to consider this before claiming, as we
+so often claim, that the progress of science has given us
+control of the forces of nature? It is strange that this
+point has not been more considered, especially by thinkers
+who are fond of the word 'humanity'&mdash;'the good of
+humanity'&mdash;or the 'greatest happiness of the greatest
+number'. Humanity has an arithmetical or quantitative
+side, and the good of humanity surely depends, to some
+extent, on how much humanity there is. I can imagine
+many things which might be good for a Greek city state
+of 10,000 souls which would not be good, or not good in
+the same sense, for a community of 100,000,000 souls.
+Surely it needs no reasoning to prove that our power to
+do our duty to others is affected by the number of others
+to whom duty has to be done&mdash;it makes a difference where
+there are 10,000 of men or 100,000,000. Similarly with
+the greatest happiness of the greatest number. What is
+the <i>greatest</i> number? A great deal that has been said
+about this would not have been said if we had considered
+that the <i>greatest number</i> itself is left at the disposal of
+forces outside the present scope of our own will. Even
+the proposal to sell our goods and give the proceeds to
+the poor would surely be affected, from the moral point
+of view, by the number of the poor who were to receive
+the distribution. Were this so small that the poor would
+get five pounds apiece it would be one question; were it
+so large that they would receive a halfpenny apiece it
+would be another question. Thus we may conclude that
+the progress of the mechanical arts with the consequent<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[144]</a></span>
+increase in the bulk of the human race has not solved the
+problem of moral progress, but only placed that problem
+in a new and more perplexing context. A similar conclusion
+would meet us if we were to consider the parallel
+increase of the wealth of the world. The moral question
+is not about the amount of wealth the world possesses,
+but about the way men spend it and the use they make
+of it. Industrially speaking, the human race has made
+its fortune during the last hundred years. But has it
+made up its mind what to do with the fortune? And has
+its mind been made up in the right way? To raise these
+questions is to see that progress from the economic point
+of view may be the reverse of progress from the moral.
+But I shall not further enlarge upon this&mdash;the theme
+being too familiar.</p>
+
+<p>The third question which relates itself to moral progress
+is that of Government. Now Government, I need hardly
+say, is not an end in itself. It is a device which man has
+set up to help him in attaining the true end of his life.
+To make up our minds how we ought to be governed is
+therefore impossible unless we have previously made up
+our minds how we ought to live. What might be a good
+government for a people whose end is industrial success
+might be a very bad one for a people who had some other
+end in view. Well, then, are we well governed at the
+present time? Are we better governed than we were?
+Has progress taken place in this department? Plainly
+we cannot answer these questions unless we have chosen
+our end in life and are morally satisfied with it. In the
+history of modern states we discover a tendency, more
+strongly marked in some quarters than in others, towards
+that form of democracy which is called responsible self-government.
+Government of the people, for the people,
+by the people. The people are going to govern themselves.
+But they may do so in a thousand different <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[145]</a></span>ways&mdash;each
+of which has a different moral value. A people may
+go wrong just as fatally in governing itself as in being
+governed by some external authority. I confess that
+nothing I can learn from the history of government
+entirely reassures me on this point. I see everywhere
+progress towards organization, but then one is bound to
+ask on what ulterior end is this organization directed?
+I see everywhere a growing subordination of the individual
+to the State. This may or may not be a very good thing.
+What <i>kind of State</i> is it to which the individual is becoming
+subordinated? There are great differences among them&mdash;some
+seem to me, one in particular at the present time,
+thoroughly bad, and I cannot see that the individual
+gains morally by being subordinated to such a State&mdash;at
+least if he gains in one direction he loses more in
+another.</p>
+
+<p>Even the social unity which Governments are capable
+of achieving must not be too hastily translated into moral
+progress. We are entitled to ask several questions before
+the one can be equated with the other. To begin with,
+do men know what they want to achieve by their unified
+life? And if they do know what they want, have we not
+still the right to criticize its moral value and say 'this is
+right' or this is wrong? Should the time ever come when
+the common will of mankind should get itself expressed
+by the decrees of a universal democracy, would moral
+criticism be at an end so far as the said decrees were
+concerned? For my part I cannot see that it would.
+Perhaps it were truer to say that only then would moral
+criticism effectively begin. As things now are, we are
+prevented from criticizing the common will because none
+of us knows what exactly the common will demands. But
+if it could get itself expressed and defined by the decrees
+of a perfect democracy we should know. Those decrees
+would reveal the human community to itself, and it is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[146]</a></span>
+possible that the revelation would not be altogether
+agreeable to our moral sense. We might then discover
+that the common will is capable of being grossly immoral.
+So far it has been impossible for us to make this discovery
+because no organ exists for expressing the common will
+on the human scale, and even those which express it on
+the national scale are not perfect. I am far from saying
+the discovery would be made; but I know of no line of
+argument which rules it out as impossible. Meanwhile
+we are scarcely justified in regarding the common will as
+necessarily moral until we know more than we do of what
+precisely it is that the common will aims at and intends
+to achieve. To back the common will through thick and
+thin, as some of our philosophers seem disposed to do, is
+a dangerous speculation&mdash;it might perhaps be described
+as putting your money on a dark horse.</p>
+
+<p>This leads me to say a word concerning a phrase which
+has been much in use of late&mdash;the Collective Wisdom of
+Mankind, or the Collective Wisdom of the State. Progress
+is sometimes defined as a gradual approach to a state of
+things where this collective wisdom rules the course of
+events. And collective wisdom is sometimes represented
+as vastly wiser than that possessed by any individual,
+even the wisest.</p>
+
+<p>Now if this really is so it seems pretty obvious that,
+when the collective wisdom speaks, no individual can have
+the right of appeal. What are you, what am I, that either
+of us should set up our private intelligence against the
+intelligence of forty million of our fellow citizens? That
+surely would be a preposterous claim. The collective
+wisdom must know best: at least it knows much better
+than you or I.</p>
+
+<p>But is the collective wisdom of the State so immensely
+superior to that of the individual, and of necessity so?
+Have we any means of bringing the matter to the test?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[147]</a></span>
+It is extremely difficult to do so. Not until we make the
+experiment do we find how rare are the occasions of which
+we can say that then and there the collective wisdom of
+the community fairly and fully expressed itself. Acts of
+Parliament are not good examples. They usually represent
+not the collective wisdom of the whole community,
+but the wisdom of the majority after it has been checked,
+modified, and perhaps nullified by the opposing wisdom
+of an almost equal minority. Take as an example the
+history of the Irish Question. How difficult it is to put
+one's finger on any moment in that tangled story and
+say that then and there the collective wisdom of the community
+knew what it wanted to do and did it! So with
+almost everything else.</p>
+
+<p>Now if there be such a thing as the collective wisdom
+of the State I suppose that the moment when we are most
+likely to find it in action is the moment when one State
+has dealings with another State. That surely is a fair test.
+If States possess collective wisdom they ought to show
+its existence and measure when they confront one
+another <i>as States</i>&mdash;when State calls to State across the
+great deeps of international policy. What should we say
+of any State which claimed collective wisdom only when
+dealing with its own individual members&mdash;with you and
+me&mdash;but dropped the claim when the question was one
+of reasonable intercourse with another State similarly
+endowed? This we should say is a very dubious claim.</p>
+
+<p>Well, how stands the matter when this test is applied?
+The present war provides the answer. The war arose out
+of a type of quarrel which, had it occurred between half
+a dozen individuals of average intelligence, would have
+been amicably settled, by reasonable human intercourse,
+in twenty minutes. Does not this afford a rough measure
+of the collective wisdom of such States as at present exist
+in this world? Does it not suggest that they have little<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[148]</a></span>
+faculty of reasonable intercourse with one another?
+And when you say <i>that</i> of any being, or any collection of
+beings, do you not put it pretty low down in the scale of
+intelligence? It is literally true that these States do not
+understand one another. Thus we are driven back upon
+a plain alternative; either the States do not represent
+collective wisdom, or else this collective wisdom is one
+of the lowest forms of wisdom now extant on this planet.
+In either case we must be very cautious in our use of the
+phrase. We must not infer moral progress from the reign
+of collective wisdom until we are assured that collective
+wisdom is really as wise as some of its devotees assume it
+to be.</p>
+
+<p>About the idea of moral progress, which is only another
+name for the idea of progress in its widest form, I need
+say little, the question having been adequately treated
+by other lecturers. But I will add this. Belief in moral
+progress is a belief which no man can live without, and,
+at the same time, a belief which cannot be proved by any
+appeal to human experience. We cannot live without
+it, because life is just the process of reaching forward to
+a better form of itself. Were a man to say that since
+the world began no moral progress has taken place he
+would thereby show his latent belief in moral progress.
+For no man would take the trouble to deny moral progress
+unless he believed that the world would in some
+way be made better by his denial. He would not even
+trouble to come to a private conclusion in the matter
+unless he believed that his private conclusion was something
+to the good. In that sense perhaps we may say
+that moral progress is proved, for the best proof of any
+belief is that it remains indispensable to the life we have
+to live. But the appeal to experience would not prove
+it&mdash;and for this reason. A progressive world is a world
+which not only makes gains, but <i>keeps</i> its gains when they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[149]</a></span>
+are made. If the Kingdom of Heaven were to become
+a fact to-morrow, that of itself would not prove progress,
+if you admit the possibility that the world might hereafter
+retreat from the position it had won. That possibility
+you could never rule out&mdash;except by an appeal to faith.
+A world which attained the goal and then lost it would
+be a greater failure, from the point of view of moral
+progress, than one which never attained the goal at all.
+The doctrine that the gains of morality can never be lost
+is widely held; but it does not rest on a philosophic or
+a scientific basis. As Hume taught long ago, you cannot
+infer an infinite conclusion from finite data&mdash;and in this
+case the conclusion is infinite and the data are finite.
+They are not only finite but various: some pointing one
+way, some another.</p>
+
+<p>Finally we cannot prove moral progress by appeal to
+any objective standard, such as the amount of happiness
+existing in the world at successive dates. Suppose you
+were able to show that, up to date, the amount of happiness
+in the world has shown a steady increase until it has
+reached the grand sum total now existing. Now suppose
+that you were transferred to another planet where the
+conditions were the exact opposite: where the inhabitants
+ages ago started with the happiness we now possess,
+and gradually declined until, at the present moment, they
+are no happier than the human race was at the first stage
+of its career. Now add together the totals of happiness
+for both your worlds, the ascending world which starts
+with the minimum and ends with the maximum, the
+declining world which starts with the maximum and ends
+with the minimum. The grand totals in both cases are
+exactly the same. So far as the total result is concerned,
+the declining world has just as much to show for itself
+as the ascending. Valued in terms of happiness, the one
+world would be worth as much as the other.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[150]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>And yet we know that the value of these two worlds is
+not the same. The ascending is worth a lot more than
+the descending. Why? I leave you with that conundrum.
+Answer it, and you have the key to the meaning of Moral
+Progress.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books for Reference</span></h3>
+
+<div class='indent2'>
+<p>T. H. Green, <i>Prolegomena to Ethics</i>, Book III, ch. 3.</p>
+
+<p>Lecky, <i>History of European Morals</i>, ch. 1.</p>
+
+<p>Spencer, <i>Data of Ethics</i>, ch. 13 to 14.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[151]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VII</h2>
+
+<h2>PROGRESS IN GOVERNMENT</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">A. E. Zimmern</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>When I was asked to speak to you on the subject of
+Progress in Government I gladly accepted, for it is a subject
+on which I have reflected a good deal. But when I
+came to think over what I should say, I saw that you had
+asked me for the impossible. For what is Government?
+I do not know whether there are any here for whom
+Government means no more than a policeman, or a ballot-box,
+or a list of office-holders. The days of such shallow
+views are surely over. Government is the work of ordering
+the external affairs and relationships of men. It covers
+all the activities of men as members of a community&mdash;social,
+industrial, and religious as well as political in the
+narrower sense. It is concerned, as the ancients had it,
+with 'that which is public or common', what the Greeks
+called <span class='correction' title='to koinon'>&#964;&#8056; &#954;&#959;&#953;&#957;&#8057;&#957;</span> and the Romans <i>res publica</i>. The
+Old English translation of these classical terms is 'The
+Commonwealth' or Common Weal; and I do not see
+that we can do better than adopt that word, with its
+richness of traditional meaning and its happy association
+of the two conceptions, too often separated in modern
+minds, of Wealth and Welfare.</p>
+
+<p>Our subject then is the Progress of the Commonwealth
+or, in other words, the record of the course of the common
+life of mankind in the world. It is a theme which really
+underlies all the other subjects of discussion at this week's
+meetings: for it is only the existence of the Commonwealth<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[152]</a></span>
+and its organized efforts to preserve and sustain the life
+of the individuals composing it, which have made possible
+the achievements of mankind in the various separate
+fields of effort which are claiming your attention. Lord
+Acton spent a lifetime collecting material for a History
+of Liberty. He never wrote it: but, if he had, it would
+have been a History of Mankind. A History of Government
+or of the Commonwealth would be nothing less.
+Such is the nature of the invitation so kindly given to me
+and so cheerfully accepted. If you could wait a lifetime
+for the proper treatment of the subject I would gladly give
+the time; for, in truth, it is worth it.</p>
+
+<p>What is the nature of this common life of mankind and
+with what is it concerned? The subjects of its concern
+are as wide as human nature itself. We cannot define them
+in a formula: for human nature overleaps all formulas.
+Whenever men have tried to rule regions of human activity
+and aspiration out of the common life of mankind, and to
+hedge them round as private or separate or sacred or by
+any other kind of taboo, human nature has always ended
+by breaking through the hedges and invading the retreat.
+Man is a social animal. If he retires to a monastery he
+finds he has carried problems of organization with him,
+as the promoters of this gathering would confess you have
+brought with you here. If he shuts himself up in his
+home as a castle, or in a workshop or factory as the domain
+of his own private power, social problems go with him
+thither, and the long arm of the law will follow after.
+If he crosses the seas like the Pilgrim Fathers, to worship
+God unmolested in a new country, or, like the merchant-venturers,
+to fetch home treasure from the Indies, he will
+find himself unwittingly the pioneer of civilization and
+the founder of an Empire or a Republic. In the life of
+our fellows, in the Common Weal, we live and move and
+have our being. Let us recall some wise words on this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[153]</a></span>
+subject from the Master of Balliol's book on the Middle
+Ages. 'The words "Church" and "State"', he writes,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>represent what ought to be an alliance, but is, in modern
+times, at best a dualism and often an open warfare....
+The opposition of Church and State expresses an opposition
+between two sides of human nature which we must
+not too easily label as good and evil, the heavenly and
+the earthly, the sacred and the profane. For the State,
+too, is divine as well as the Church, and may have its own
+ideals and sacramental duties and its own prophets, even
+its own martyrs. The opposition of Church and State is
+to be regarded rather as the pursuit of one great aim,
+pursued by contrasted means. The ultimate aim of all
+true human activity must be in the noble words of
+Francis Bacon 'the glory of God and the relief of man's
+estate'.<a name="FNanchor_53_53" id="FNanchor_53_53"></a><a href="#Footnote_53_53" class="fnanchor">[53]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Bacon's words form a fitting starting-point for our
+reflections: for they bring vividly before us both the
+idealism which should inspire all who labour at the task
+of government and the vastness and variety of the field
+with which they are concerned. Looked at in this broad
+light, the history of man's common life in the world
+will, I think, show two great streams of progress&mdash;the
+progress of man over Nature, or, as we say to-day, in the
+control of his environment, and the progress of man in what
+is essentially a moral task&mdash;the art of living together with
+his fellows. These two aspects of human activity and effort
+are in constant contact and interaction. Studied together,
+they reveal an advance which, in spite of man's ever-present
+moral weakness, may be described as an advance
+from Chaos to Cosmos in the organization of the world's
+common life; yet they are so distinct in method and spirit
+that they can best be described separately.</p>
+
+<p>Let us first, then, consider the history of Government,
+as a record of the progress of man's power over Nature.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[154]</a></span></p>
+<p>Human history, in this sphere, is the story of man making
+himself at home in the world. When human history
+begins we find men helpless, superstitious, ignorant, the
+plaything of blind powers in the natural and animal
+world. Superstitious because he was helpless, helpless
+because he was ignorant, he eked out a bare existence
+rather by avoiding than controlling the forces in the
+little world by which he found himself surrounded.
+Human life in its earliest stages is, as Hobbes described
+it, nasty, brutish, and short. Man was the slave of his
+environment. He has risen to become its master. The
+world, as the prophetic eye of Francis Bacon foretold,
+has become 'The Kingdom of Man'.</p>
+
+<p>How complete this conquest is, can best be realized
+perhaps by considering man's relation to the lower animals.
+When history opens, the animals are in their element;
+it is man who is the interloper. Two thousand years ago
+it was not the Society of Friends but wolves and wild
+boars who felt themselves at home on the site of Bournville
+Garden Village. To-day we are surprised when we read
+that in remote East Africa lions and giraffes venture
+occasionally to interfere in the murderous warfare between
+man and man. Man has imposed himself on the animals,
+by dint of his gradual accumulation of knowledge and his
+consequent power of organization and government. He
+has destroyed the conditions under which the animals
+prospered. He has, as we might say, destroyed their
+home life, exposing them to dangers of his own making
+against which they are now as powerless as he was once
+against them. 'It is a remarkable thing,' writes Sir E.
+Ray Lankester,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>which possibly may be less generally true than our
+present knowledge seems to suggest&mdash;that the adjustment
+of organisms to their surroundings is so severely complete
+in Nature apart from Man, that diseases are unknown as<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[155]</a></span>
+constant and normal phenomena under those conditions.
+It is no doubt difficult to investigate this matter, since
+the presence of Man as an observer itself implies human
+intervention. But it seems to be a legitimate view that
+every disease to which animals (and probably plants
+also) are liable, excepting as a transient and very exceptional
+occurrence, is due to Man's interference. The
+diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs, and horses are not known
+except in domesticated herds and those wild creatures
+to which Man's domesticated productions have communicated
+them. The trypanosome lives in the blood of wild
+game and of rats without producing mischief. The hosts
+have become tolerant of the parasite. It is only when
+man brings his unselected, humanly-nurtured races of
+cattle and horses into contact with the parasite, that it
+is found to have deadly properties. The various cattle-diseases
+which in Africa have done so much harm to
+native cattle, and have in some regions exterminated
+big game, have <i>per contra</i> been introduced by man
+through his importation of diseased animals of his own
+breeding from Europe. Most, if not all, animals in extra-human
+conditions, including the minuter things such as
+insects, shellfish, and invisible aquatic organisms, have
+been brought into a condition of 'adjustment' to their
+parasites as well as to the other conditions in which they
+live: it is this most difficult and efficient balance of
+Nature which Man everywhere upsets.<a name="FNanchor_54_54" id="FNanchor_54_54"></a><a href="#Footnote_54_54" class="fnanchor">[54]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>And Sir E. Ray Lankester goes on to point out the
+moral to be drawn from this development. He points
+out that</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>civilized man has proceeded so far in his interference
+with extra-human nature, has produced for himself and
+the living organisms associated with him such a special
+state of things by his rebellion against natural selection
+and his defiance of Nature's pre-human dispositions, that
+he must either go on and acquire firmer control of the
+conditions, or perish miserably by the vengeance certain
+to fall on the half-hearted meddler in great affairs. We
+may indeed compare civilized man to a successful rebel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[156]</a></span>
+against Nature, who, by every step forward, renders
+himself liable to greater and greater penalties, and so
+cannot afford to pause or fail in one single step. Or again
+we may think of him as the heir to a vast and magnificent
+kingdom, who has been finally educated so as to take
+possession of his property, and is at length left alone to
+do his best; he has wilfully abrogated, in many important
+respects, the laws of his mother Nature by which the
+kingdom was hitherto governed; he has gained some
+power and advantage by so doing, but is threatened on
+every hand by dangers and disasters hitherto restrained:
+no retreat is possible&mdash;his only hope is to control, as he
+knows that he can, the sources of these dangers and
+disasters.</p></div>
+
+<p>The time will come, not too long hence, as I believe,
+when men have realized, with the scientists, that the
+world is one kingdom not many, and these problems of
+man's relation to his non-human environment will be
+the first concern of statesmen and governors. In some of
+our tropical colonies they have, perforce, become so
+already. If you live on the Gold Coast, the war against
+malaria cannot help seeming more important to you than
+the war against German trade: and in parts of Central
+Africa the whole possibility of continued existence centres
+round the presence or absence of the tsetse fly which is the
+carrier of sleeping sickness. Some day, when means have
+been adopted for abating our fiercer international controversies,
+we shall discover that in these and kindred
+matters lies the real province of world-politics. When
+that day comes the chosen representatives of the human
+race will see their constituents, as only philosophers see
+them now, as the inheritors of a great tradition of service
+and achievement, and as trustees for their successors of
+the manifold sources of human happiness which the
+advance of knowledge has laid open to us.</p>
+
+<p>If the first and most important of these sources is the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[157]</a></span>
+discovery of the conditions of physical well-being, the
+second is the discovery of means of communication between
+the widely separate portions of man's kingdom. The
+record of the process of bringing the world under the
+control of the organized government of man is largely
+the record of the improvement of communications. Side
+by side with the unending struggle of human reason
+against cold and hunger and disease we can watch the
+contest against distance, against ocean and mountain and
+desert, against storms and seasons. There can be few
+subjects more fascinating for a historian to study than the
+record of the migrations of the tribes of men. He might
+begin, if he wished, with the migrations of animals and
+describe the westward progress of the many species whose
+course can be traced by experts along the natural highways
+of Western Europe. Some of them, so the books tell us,
+reached the end of their journey while Britain was still
+joined to the continent. Others arrived too late and
+were cut off by the straits of Dover. I like to form an
+imaginary picture, which the austerity of the scientific
+conscience will, I know, repudiate with horror, of the
+unhappy congregation, mournfully assembled bag and
+baggage on the edge of the straits and gazing wistfully
+across at the white cliffs of England, which they were not
+privileged to reach&mdash;<i>tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris
+amore</i>, 'stretching out their paws in longing for the
+further bank.'</p>
+
+<p>Our historian would then go on to describe the early
+'wanderings of peoples' (<i>V&ouml;lkerwanderungen</i>) how whole
+tribes would move off in the spring-time in the search for
+fresh hunting-grounds or pasture. He would trace the
+course of that westward push which, starting from
+somewhere in Asia, brought its impact to bear on the
+northern provinces of the Roman Empire and eventually
+loosened its whole fabric. He would show how Europe,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[158]</a></span>
+as we know it, was welded into unity by the attacks of
+migratory warriors on three flanks&mdash;the Huns and the
+Tartars, a host of horsemen riding light over the steppes
+of Russia and Hungary: the Arabs, bearing Islam with
+them on their camels as they moved westward along
+North Africa and then pushing across into Spain: and
+the Northmen of Scandinavia, those carvers of kingdoms
+and earliest conquerors of the open sea, who left their
+mark on England and northern France, on Sicily and
+southern Italy, on the Balkan Peninsula, on Russia,
+on Greenland, and as far as North America. Then,
+passing to Africa and Asia, he would describe the life of
+the pack-saddle and the caravan, the long and mysterious
+inland routes from the Mediterranean to Nubia and
+Nigeria, or from Damascus with the pilgrims to Medina,
+and the still longer and more mysterious passage through
+the ancient oases of Turkestan, now buried in sand, along
+which, as recent discoveries have shown us, Greece and
+China, Christianity and Buddhism, exchanged their arts
+and ideas and products. Then he would tell of the great
+age of maritime discovery, of the merchant-adventurers
+and buccaneers, of their gradual transformation into
+trading companies, in the East and in the West, from
+companies to settlements, from settlements to colonies.
+Then perhaps he would close by casting a glimpse at the
+latest human migration of all, that which takes place or
+took place up to 1914, at the rate of a million a year from
+the Old World into the United States. He would take
+the reader to Ellis Island in New York harbour, where the
+immigrants emerge from the steerage to face the ordeal of
+the Immigration Officer. He would show how the same
+causes, hunger, fear, persecution, restlessness, ambition,
+love of liberty, which set the great westward procession
+in motion in the early days of tribal migration, are still
+alive and at work to-day among the populations of<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[159]</a></span>
+Eastern Europe. He would look into their minds and read
+the story of the generations of their nameless fore-runners;
+and he would ask himself whether rulers and statesmen
+have done all that they might to make the world a home
+for all its children, for the poor as for the rich, for the Jew
+as for the Gentile, for the yellow and dark-skinned as
+for the white.</p>
+
+<p>Let us dwell for a moment more closely on one phase
+of this record of the conquest of distance. The crucial
+feature in that struggle was the conquest of the sea. The
+sea-surface of the world is far greater than its land-surface,
+and the sea, once subdued, is a far easier and more natural
+means of transport and communication. For the sea, the
+uncultivable sea, as Homer calls it, is itself a road,
+whereas on earth, whether it be mountain or desert
+or field, roads have first painfully to be made. Man's
+definitive conquest of the sea dates from the middle of
+the fifteenth century when, by improvements in the art
+of sailing and by the extended use of the mariner's
+compass, it first became possible to undertake long voyages
+with assurance. These discoveries are associated with
+the name of Prince Henry of Portugal, whose life-long
+ambition it was, to quote the words engraved on his
+monument at the southern extremity of Portugal,
+'to lay open the regions of West Africa across the sea,
+hitherto not traversed by man, that thence a passage
+might be made round Africa to the most distant parts
+of the East.'</p>
+
+<p>The opening of the high seas which resulted from
+Prince Henry's activities is one of the most momentous
+events in human history. Its effect was, sooner or later,
+to unite the scattered families of mankind, to make the
+problems of all the concern of all: to make the world one
+place. Prince Henry and his sailors were, in fact, the
+pioneers of internationalism, with all the many and varied<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[160]</a></span>
+problems that internationalism brings with it. 'In 1486,'
+says the most recent history of this development,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>Bartholomew Dias was carried by storm beyond the sight
+of land, round the southern point of Africa, and reached
+the Great Fish River, north of Algoa Bay. On his return
+journey he saw the promontory which divides the oceans,
+as the narrow waters of the Bosphorus divide the continents,
+of the East and West. As in the crowded streets
+of Constantinople, so here, if anywhere, at this awful
+and solitary headland the elements of two hemispheres
+meet and contend. As Dias saw it, so he named it, 'The
+Cape of Storms'. But his master, John II, seeing in the
+discovery a promise that India, the goal of the national
+ambition, would be reached, named it with happier
+augury 'The Cape of Good Hope'. No fitter name could
+have been given to that turning-point in the history of
+mankind. Europe, in truth, was on the brink of achievements
+destined to breach barriers, which had enclosed
+and diversified the nations since the making of the World,
+and commit them to an intercourse never to be broken
+again so long as the World endures. That good rather
+than evil may spring therefrom is the greatest of all
+human responsibilities.<a name="FNanchor_55_55" id="FNanchor_55_55"></a><a href="#Footnote_55_55" class="fnanchor">[55]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The contrast between Constantinople and the Cape,
+so finely drawn in these lines, marks the end of the age
+when land-communications and land-power were predominant
+over sea-power. The Roman Empire was, and
+could only be, a land-power. It is no accident that the
+British Commonwealth is, as the American Commonwealth
+is fast becoming, predominantly a sea-power.</p>
+
+<p>How was 'the greatest of all human responsibilities',
+arising from this new intercourse of races, met? Knowledge,
+alas, is as much the devil's heritage as the angels': it
+may be used for ill, as easily as for good. The first
+explorers, and the traders who followed them, were not
+idealists but rough adventurers. Breaking in, with the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[161]</a></span>
+full tide of western knowledge and adaptability, to the
+quiet backwaters of primitive conservatism, they brought
+with them the worse rather than the better elements
+of the civilization, the control of environment, of which
+they were pioneers. To them Africa and the East represented
+storehouses of treasure, not societies of men;
+and they treated the helpless natives accordingly.</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>England and Holland as well as the Latin monarchies
+treated the natives of Africa as chattels without rights
+and as instruments for their own ends, and revived
+slavery in a form and upon a scale more cruel than any
+practised by the ancients. The employment of slaves on
+her own soil has worked the permanent ruin of Portugal.
+The slave trade with America was an important source
+of English wealth, and the philosopher John Locke did
+not scruple to invest in it. There is no European race
+which can afford to remember its first contact with the
+subject peoples otherwise than with shame, and attempts
+to assess their relative degrees of guilt are as fruitless as
+they are invidious. The question of real importance is
+how far these various states were able to purge themselves
+of the poison, and rise to a higher realization of their duty
+towards their races whom they were called by the claims
+of their own superior civilization to protect. The fate of
+that civilization itself hung upon the issue.<a name="FNanchor_56_56" id="FNanchor_56_56"></a><a href="#Footnote_56_56" class="fnanchor">[56]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>The process by which the Western peoples have risen
+to a sense of their duty towards their weaker and more
+ignorant fellow citizens is indeed one of the chief stages
+in that progress of the common life of mankind with which
+we are concerned.</p>
+
+<p>How is that duty to be exercised? The best way in
+which the strong can help the weak is by making them
+strong enough to help themselves. The white races are not
+strong because they are white, or virtuous because they
+are strong. They are strong because they have acquired,
+through a long course of thought and work, a mastery<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[162]</a></span>
+over Nature and hence over their weaker fellow men. It
+is not virtue but knowledge to which they owe their
+strength. No doubt much virtue has gone to the making
+of that knowledge&mdash;virtues of patience, concentration,
+perseverance, unselfishness, without which the great
+body of knowledge of which we are the inheritors could
+never have been built up. But we late-born heirs of the
+ages have it in our power to take the knowledge of our
+fathers and cast away any goodness that went to its
+making. We have come into our fortune: it is ours to
+use it as we think best. We cannot pass it on wholesale,
+and at one step, to the more ignorant races, for they
+have not the institutions, the traditions, the habits of
+mind and character, to enable them to use it. Those
+too we must transmit or develop together with the treasure
+of our knowledge. For the moment we stand in the
+relation of trustees, teachers, guides, governors, but always
+in their own interest and not ours, or rather, in the
+interest of the commonwealth of which we and they,
+since the opening of the high seas, form an inseparable
+part.</p>
+
+<p>It has often been thought that the relation of the advanced
+and backward races should be one purely of
+philanthropy and missionary enterprise rather than of
+law and government. It is easy to criticize this by
+pointing to the facts of the world as we know it&mdash;to the
+existing colonial empires of the Great Powers and to
+the vast extension of the powers of civilized governments
+which they represent. But it may still be argued that
+the question is not Have the civilized powers annexed
+large empires? but Ought they to have done so? Was
+such an extension of governmental authority justifiable
+or inevitable? Englishmen in the nineteenth century,
+like Americans in the twentieth, were slow to admit
+that it was; just as the exponents of <i>laissez-faire</i> were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[163]</a></span>
+slow to admit the necessity for State interference with
+private industry at home. But in both cases they have
+been driven to accept it by the inexorable logic of facts.
+What other solution of the problem, indeed, is possible?
+'Every alternative solution', as a recent writer remarks,<a name="FNanchor_57_57" id="FNanchor_57_57"></a><a href="#Footnote_57_57" class="fnanchor">[57]</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>breaks down in practice. To stand aside and do nothing
+under the plea that every people must be left free to
+manage its own affairs, and that intervention is wicked,
+is to repeat the tragic mistake of the Manchester School
+in the economic world which protested against any
+interference by the State to protect
+workmen ... from the oppression and rapacity of employers, on
+the ground that it was an unwarranted interference
+with the liberty of the subject and the freedom of trade
+and competition. To prevent adventurers from entering
+the territory is impossible, unless there is some civilized
+authority within it to stop them through its police. To
+shut off a backward people from all contact with the
+outside world by a kind of blockade is not only unpracticable,
+but is artificially to deny them the chances of education
+and progress. The establishment of a genuine
+government by a people strong enough and liberal enough
+to ensure freedom under the law and justice for all is the
+only solution.... They must undertake this duty, not from
+any pride of dominion, or because they wish to exploit
+their resources, but in order to protect them alike from
+oppression and corruption, by strict laws and strict
+administration, which shall bind the foreigner as well as
+the native, and then they must gradually develop, by
+education and example, the capacity in the natives to
+manage their own affairs.</p></div>
+
+<p>Thus we see that the progress in knowledge and in
+the control of their environment made by the civilized
+peoples has, in fact and inevitably, led to their leadership
+in government also, and given them the predominant
+voice in laying down the lines along which the common<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[164]</a></span>
+life of mankind is to develop. If we are to look for the
+mainspring of the world's activities, for the place where
+its new ideas are thought out, its policies framed, its
+aspirations cast into practical shape, we must not seek
+it in the forests of Africa or in the interior of China,
+but in those busy regions of the earth's surface where the
+knowledge, the industries, and all the various organizations
+of government and control find their home. Because
+organization is embodied knowledge, and because knowledge
+is power, it is the Great Powers, as we truly name
+them,<a name="FNanchor_58_58" id="FNanchor_58_58"></a><a href="#Footnote_58_58" class="fnanchor">[58]</a> who are predominantly responsible for the government
+of the world and for the future of the common life
+of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>In the exercise of this control the world has already,
+in many respects, become a single organism. The conquest
+of distance in the fifteenth century was the beginning
+of a process which led, slowly but inevitably, to the
+widening of the boundaries of government. Two discoveries
+made about the same time accentuated the same
+tendency. By the invention of gunpowder the people of
+Europe were given an overwhelming military superiority
+over the dwellers in other continents. By the invention
+of printing, knowledge was internationalized for all who
+had the training to use it. Books are the tools of the brain-worker
+all the world over; but, unlike the file and the
+chisel, the needle and the hammer, books not only create,
+but suggest. A new idea is like an electric current set
+running throughout the world, and no man can say into
+what channels of activity it may not be directed.</p>
+
+<p>But neither travel nor conquest nor books and the
+spread of ideas caused so immense a transformation in the
+common life of mankind as the process beginning at the end
+of the eighteenth century which is known to historians as
+the Industrial Revolution. As we have spoken of the con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[165]</a></span>quest
+of distance perhaps a better name for the Industrial
+Revolution would be the Conquest of Organization. For it
+was not the discovery of the steam-engine or the spinning-jenny
+which constituted the revolution: it was the fact
+that men were now in a position to apply these discoveries
+to the organization of industry. The ancient Greeks played
+with the idea of the steam-engine: it was reserved for
+eighteenth-century England to produce a generation of
+pioneers endowed with the knowledge, the power, the
+foresight, and the imagination to make use of the world-transforming
+potentialities of the idea. The Industrial
+Revolution, with its railways and steamships, telegraphs
+and telephones, and now its airships and submarines
+and wireless communication, completed the conquest
+of distance. Production became increasingly organized
+on international lines. Men became familiar with the
+idea of an international market. Prices and prospects,
+booms and depressions, banking and borrowing, became
+international phenomena. The organization of production
+led to an immensely rapid increase of wealth in
+Western Europe. The application of that wealth to the
+development of the world's resources in and outside
+Europe led to a correspondingly huge advance in trade
+and intercourse. The breakfast-table in an ordinary
+English home to-day is a monument to the achievements
+of the Industrial Revolution and to the solid reality of
+the economic internationalism which resulted from it.
+There is still poverty in Western Europe, but it is
+preventable poverty. Before the Industrial Revolution,
+judged by a modern standard, there was nothing but
+poverty. The satisfying physical and economic condition
+which we describe by the name of comfort did not
+exist. The Italian historian Ferrero, in one of his essays,
+recommends those who have romantic yearnings after the
+good old times to spend one night on what our forefathers<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[166]</a></span>
+called a bed. Mr. Coulton, in his books on the Middle
+Ages, has used some very plain language on the same text.
+And Professor Smart, in his recently published posthumous
+work, pointing a gentle finger of rebuke at certain
+common Socialist fantasies, remarks:</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>There never was a golden age of equality of wealth:
+there was rather a leaden one of inequality of poverty....
+We should speak more guardedly of the riches of the
+old world. A careful examination of any old book would
+show that the most splendid processions of pomp and
+luxury in the Middle Ages were poor things compared
+to the parade of a modern circus on its opening day.<a name="FNanchor_59_59" id="FNanchor_59_59"></a><a href="#Footnote_59_59" class="fnanchor">[59]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>Such prosperity as we enjoy to-day, such a scene as
+we can observe on these smiling outskirts of Birmingham,
+is due to man's Conquest of Organization and to
+the consequent development and linking-up, by mutual
+intercourse and exchange, of the economic side of the
+world's life.</p>
+
+<p>So far we have been watching the progress of man in
+his efforts to 'make himself at home' in the world. We
+have seen him becoming more skilful and more masterful
+century by century, till in these latter days the whole
+world is, as it were, at his service. He has planted his
+flag at the two poles: he has cut a pathway for his ships
+between Asia and Africa, and between the twin continents
+of America: he has harnessed torrents and cataracts
+to his service: he has conquered the air and the depths
+of the sea: he has tamed the animals: he has rooted
+out pestilence and laid bare its hidden causes: and he is
+penetrating farther and ever farther in the discovery of
+the causes of physical and mental disease. He has set
+his foot on the neck of Nature. But the last and greatest
+conquest is yet before him. He has yet to conquer
+himself. Victorious against Nature, men are still at war,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[167]</a></span>
+nay, more than ever at war, amongst themselves. How is
+it that the last century and a half, which have witnessed
+so unparalleled an advance in the organization of the
+common life of man on the material side, should have been
+an age of wars and rumours of wars, culminating in the
+vastest and most destructive conflict that this globe of
+ours has ever witnessed? What explanation could we
+give of this to a visitor from the moon or to those creatures
+of inferior species whom, as Sir E. Ray Lankester has told
+us, it is our function, thanks to our natural superiority,
+to command and control?</p>
+
+<p>This brings us to the second great branch of our subject&mdash;the
+progress of mankind in the art of living together
+in the world.</p>
+
+<p>Government, as we have seen, covers the whole social
+life of man: for the principles that regulate human
+association are inherent in the nature of man. But in
+what follows we shall perforce confine ourselves mainly
+to the sphere of what is ordinarily called politics, that is
+to the recognized and authoritative form of human
+association called the State, as opposed to the innumerable
+subordinate or voluntary bodies and relationships, which
+pervade every department of man's common life.</p>
+
+<p>The progress of Government in this second sphere may
+be defined as the deepening and extension of man's duty
+towards his neighbour. It is to be reckoned, not in terms
+of knowledge and organization, but of character. The
+ultimate goal of human government, in the narrower
+sense, as of all social activity&mdash;let us never forget it&mdash;is
+liberty, to set free the life of the spirit. 'Liberty,' said
+Lord Acton, who could survey the ages with a wealth
+of knowledge to which no other man, perhaps, ever
+attained, 'Liberty is not a means to a higher political
+end. It is itself the highest political end. It is not for
+the sake of a good public administration that it is required<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_168" id="Page_168">[168]</a></span>
+but for security in the pursuit of the highest objects of
+civil society and of private life.'<a name="FNanchor_60_60" id="FNanchor_60_60"></a><a href="#Footnote_60_60" class="fnanchor">[60]</a> Government is needed
+in order to enable human life to become, not efficient or
+well-informed or well-ordered, but simply good; and Lord
+Acton believed, as the Greeks and generations of Englishmen
+believed before him, that it is only in the soil of
+liberty that the human spirit can grow to its full stature,
+and that a political system based upon any other principle
+than that of responsible self-government acts as a bar at
+the outset to the pursuit of what he called 'the highest
+objects of civil society or of private life'. For though
+a slave, or a man living under a servile political system,
+may develop many fine qualities of character: yet such
+virtues will, in Milton's words, be but 'fugitive and
+cloistered', 'unexercised and unbreathed'. For liberty,
+and the responsibilities that it involves, are the school
+of character and the appointed means by which men can
+best serve their neighbours. A man deprived of such
+opportunities, cut off from the quickening influence of
+responsibility, has, as Homer said long ago 'lost half
+his manhood'. He may be a loyal subject, a brave
+soldier, a diligent and obedient workman: but he will
+not be a full-grown man. Government will have starved
+and stunted him in that which it is the supreme object
+of government to develop and set free.</p>
+
+<p>It is idle, then, to talk in general terms about the extension
+of government as a good thing, whether in relation
+to the individual citizen or to the organization of the
+world into an international State. We have always first
+to ask: What kind of Government? On what principles
+will it be based? What ideal will it set forth? What
+kind of common life will it provide or allow to its citizens?
+If the whole world were organized into one single State,
+and that State, supreme in its control over Nature, were<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_169" id="Page_169">[169]</a></span>
+armed with all the knowledge and organization that the
+ablest and most farseeing brains in the world could
+supply, yet mankind might be worse off under its sway,
+in the real essentials of human life, than if they were
+painted savages. 'Though I have the gift of prophecy
+and understand all mysteries and all knowledge: and
+though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains,
+and have not charity, I am nothing.' Government may
+be the organization of goodness, or the organization of
+evil. It may provide the conditions by which the common
+life of society can develop along the lines of man's spiritual
+nature: or it may take away the very possibility of such
+a development. Till we know what a Government stands
+for, do not let us judge it by its imposing externals of
+organization. The Persian Empire was more imposing
+than the Republics of Greece: Assyria and Babylon than
+the little tribal divisions of Palestine: the Spanish Empire
+than the cities of the Netherlands. There is some danger
+that, in our new-found sense of the value of knowledge in
+promoting happiness, we should forget what a tyrant
+knowledge, like wealth, can become. No doubt, just as
+we saw that moral qualities, patience and the like, are
+needed for the advancement of knowledge, so knowledge
+is needed, and greatly needed, in the task of extending
+and deepening the moral and spiritual life of mankind.
+But we cannot measure that progress in terms of knowledge
+or organization or efficiency or culture. We need
+some other standard by which to judge between Greece
+and Persia, between Israel and Babylon, between Spain
+and the Netherlands, between Napoleon and his adversaries,
+and between contending powers in the modern
+world. What shall that standard be?</p>
+
+<p>It must be a similar standard&mdash;let us boldly say it&mdash;to
+that by which we judge between individuals. It must be
+a standard based on our sense of right and wrong. But<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_170" id="Page_170">[170]</a></span>
+right and wrong in themselves will not carry us very far,
+any more than they will carry the magistrate on the
+bench or the merchant in his counting-house. Politics,
+like business, is not the whole of life&mdash;though some
+party politicians and some business men think otherwise&mdash;but
+a department of life: both are means, not ends;
+and as such they have developed special rules and codes
+of their own, based on experience in their own special
+department. In so far as they are framed in accordance
+with man's spiritual nature and ideals these rules may be
+considered to hold good and to mark the stage of progress
+at which Politics and Business have respectively arrived
+in promoting the common weal in their own special
+sphere. With the rules of business, or what is called
+Political Economy, we have at the moment no concern.
+It is the rules of politics, or the working experience
+of rulers, crystallized in what is called Political Science
+or Political Philosophy, to which we must devote a few
+moments' attention.</p>
+
+<p>We are all of us, of course, political philosophers.
+Whether we have votes or not, whether we are aware of
+it or not, we all have views on political philosophy and
+we are all constantly making free use of its own peculiar
+principles and conceptions. Law, the State, Liberty,
+Justice, Democracy are words that are constantly on
+our lips. Let us try to form a clear idea of the place
+which these great historic ideals occupy in the progress
+of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>The great political thinkers of the world have always
+been clear in their own minds as to the ultimate goal of
+their own particular study. Political thought may be
+said to have originated with the Jewish prophets, who were
+the first to rebuke kings to their faces and to set forth
+the spiritual aims of politics&mdash;to preach Righteousness
+and Mercy as against Power and Ambition and Self-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_171" id="Page_171">[171]</a></span>interest.
+Their soaring imagination, less systematic than
+the Greek intellect, was wider in its sweep and more farseeing
+in its predictions. 'As the earth bringeth forth
+her bud and as the garden causeth the things sown in it
+to spring forth', says Isaiah, in magnificent anticipation
+of the doctrine of Natural Law, 'so the Lord God will
+cause righteousness and praise to spring forth before all
+the nations.' 'Peace, peace, to him that is far off, and to
+him that is near, saith the Lord, and I will heal him: but
+the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest,
+whose waters cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace,
+saith my God, for the wicked.' 'Out of Zion shall go
+forth the Law and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
+And he shall judge between the nations and shall reprove
+many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into
+plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation
+shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they
+learn war any more.'<a name="FNanchor_61_61" id="FNanchor_61_61"></a><a href="#Footnote_61_61" class="fnanchor">[61]</a></p>
+
+<p>It was, however, Plato and Aristotle who first made
+politics a branch of separate study: and, unlike many of
+their modern successors, they pursued it throughout in
+close connexion with the kindred studies of ethics and
+psychology. Their scope was, of course, confined to the
+field of their own experience, the small self-contained
+City-States of Greece, and it did not fall within their
+province to foreshadow, like the Jewish Prophets, the end
+of warfare, or to speculate on the ultimate unity of
+mankind. Their task was to interpret the work of their
+own fellow-countrymen on the narrow stage of Greek life.
+Their lasting achievement is to have laid down for mankind
+what a State is, as compared with other forms of
+human association, and to have proclaimed, once and for
+all, in set terms, that its object is to promote the 'good
+life' of its members. 'Every State', says Aristotle in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_172" id="Page_172">[172]</a></span>
+the opening words of his <i>Politics</i>, 'is a community of
+some kind.' That is to say, States belong to the same
+<i>genus</i>, as it were, as political parties, trade unions, cricket
+clubs, business houses, or such gatherings as ours. What,
+then, is the difference between a State and a political
+party? 'If all communities', he goes on, 'aim at some
+good, the State or political community, which is the highest
+of all and which embraces all the rest, aims, and in a
+greater degree than any other, at the highest good.'</p>
+
+<p>Why is the State the highest of all forms of association?
+Why should our citizenship, for instance, take precedence
+of our trade unionism or our business obligations?
+Aristotle replies, and in spite of recent critics I think the
+reply still holds good: because, but for the existence of
+the State and the reign of law maintained by it, none
+of these associations could have been formed or be
+maintained. 'He who first founded the State was the
+greatest of benefactors. For man, when protected, is
+the best of animals, but when separated from law and
+righteousness, he is the worst of all.' Or, to put it in the
+resounding Elizabethan English of Hooker: 'The public
+power of all societies is above every soul contained in
+the same societies. And the principal use of that power
+is to give laws to all that are under it; which laws, in
+such case, we must obey, unless there be reason showed
+which may necessarily enforce that the law of Reason or
+of God doth enjoin the contrary. Because except our
+own private and probable resolutions be by the law of
+public determinations overruled, we take away all
+possibility of social life in the world.'<a name="FNanchor_62_62" id="FNanchor_62_62"></a><a href="#Footnote_62_62" class="fnanchor">[62]</a> The Greeks did
+not deny, as the example of Socrates shows, the right of
+private judgement on the question of obedience to law,
+or the duty of respect for what Hooker calls the Law of
+Reason or of God. Against the authentic voice of con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_173" id="Page_173">[173]</a></span>science
+no human authority can or should prevail. But
+Aristotle held, with Hooker, that obedience to law and
+faithful citizenship are themselves matters normally
+ordained by the law of Reason or of God and that, as
+against those of any other association (<span class='correction' title='koinônia'>&#954;&#959;&#953;&#957;&#969;&#957;&#8055;&#945;</span>), the claims
+of the State are paramount. In other words, he would
+deny what is sometimes loosely called the <i>right</i> of rebellion,
+whilst not closing the door to that <i>duty</i> of rebellion which
+has so often advanced the cause of liberty. When Aristotle
+speaks of the State, moreover, he does not mean a sovereign
+authority exercising arbitrary power, as in Persia or
+Babylon: he means an authority administering Law and
+Justice according to recognized standards: and he is
+thinking of Law and Justice, not simply as part of the
+apparatus of government but as based upon moral
+principles. 'Righteousness', he says, 'is the bond of
+men in States and the administration of Justice, which
+is the determination of what is righteous, is the principle
+of order in political society.' 'Of Law', says Hooker,<a name="FNanchor_63_63" id="FNanchor_63_63"></a><a href="#Footnote_63_63" class="fnanchor">[63]</a>
+here as elsewhere echoing the ancients, 'there can be no
+less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God,
+her voice the harmony of the world.' The State takes
+precedence of the party or the trade union because,
+however idealistic in their policy these latter may be, the
+State covers all, not merely a section of the community,
+and is able not merely to proclaim but to enforce the rule
+of law and justice. Put in modern language, one might
+define the Greek idea of the State as the Organization of
+Mutual Aid.</p>
+
+<p>The Greek States did not remain true to this high ideal.
+Faced with the temptations of power they descended
+almost to the level of the oriental monarchies with which
+they were contrasted. But even had they remained
+faithful to their philosophers' ideal of public service they<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_174" id="Page_174">[174]</a></span>
+would not have survived. Unable to transcend the limits
+of their own narrow State-boundaries and to merge their
+ideals with those of their neighbours, they were helpless
+in the face of the invader. First Macedonia and then
+Rome swept over them, and political idealism slumbered
+for many centuries. Rome gave the world, what it
+greatly needed, centuries of peace and order and material
+prosperity: it built up an enduring fabric of law on
+principles of Reason and Humanity: it did much to give
+men, what is next to the political sense, the social sense.
+It made men members of one another from Scotland to
+Syria and from Portugal to Baghdad. But it did not give
+them 'the good life' in its fullness: for it did not, perhaps
+it could not, give them liberty. Faced with the choice
+between efficiency and the diffusion of responsibility, the
+rulers of the Roman Empire unhesitatingly chose efficiency.
+But the atrophy of responsibility proved the canker at
+the heart of the Empire. Deprived of the stimulus that
+freedom and the habit of responsibility alone can give,
+the Roman world sank gradually into the morass of
+Routine. Life lost its savour and grew stale, flat and
+unprofitable, as in an old-style Government office. 'The
+intolerable sadness inseparable from such a life', says
+Renan, 'seemed worse than death.' And when the
+barbarians came and overturned the whole fabric of
+bureaucracy, though it seemed to educated men at the
+time the end of civilization, it was in reality the beginning
+of a new life.</p>
+
+<p>Amid the wreckage of the Roman Empire, one governing
+institution alone remained upright&mdash;the Christian Church
+with its organization for ministering to the spiritual
+needs of its members. With the conversion of the barbarians
+to Christianity the governing functions and influence
+of the Church became more and more important;
+and it was upon the basis of Church government that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_175" id="Page_175">[175]</a></span>
+political idealism, so long in abeyance, was reawakened.
+The thinkers who took up the work of Plato and Aristotle
+on the larger stage of the Holy Roman Empire boldly
+looked forward to the time when mankind should be
+united under one government and that government
+should embody the highest ideals of mankind. Such an
+ideal seemed indeed to many one of the legacies of the
+Founder of Christianity. The familiar petition in the
+Lord's Prayer: <i>thy kingdom come, thy will be done on
+earth as it is in heaven</i> sounded, in the ears of Dante
+and Thomas Aquinas and innumerable theologians and
+canonists, as a prayer and a pledge for the ultimate
+political unity of mankind on the basis of Christian Law.
+Such a belief was indeed the bedrock of mediaeval
+political thought. To devout Christians, brought up in
+the oecumenical traditions of the Roman Empire,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'every ordering of a human community must appear as
+a component part of that ordering of the world which
+exists because God exists, and every earthly group must
+appear as an organic member of that <i>Civitas Dei</i>, that
+God-State, which comprehends the heavens and the
+earth.[1] ... Thus the Theory of Human Society must
+accept the divinely created organization of the Universe
+as a prototype of the first principles which govern the
+construction of human communities.... Therefore, in
+all centuries of the Middle Age, Christendom, which in
+destiny is identical with Mankind, is set before us as
+a single, universal Community, founded and governed
+by God Himself. Mankind is one "mystical body"; it
+is one single and internally connected "people" or "folk";
+it is an all-embracing corporation, which constitutes that
+Universal Realm, spiritual and temporal, which may be
+called the Universal Church, or, with equal propriety,
+the Commonwealth of the Human Race. Therefore, that
+it may attain its one purpose, it needs One Law and One
+Government.'<a name="FNanchor_64_64" id="FNanchor_64_64"></a><a href="#Footnote_64_64" class="fnanchor">[64]</a></p></div>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_176" id="Page_176">[176]</a></span></p>
+<p>But the mediaeval ideal, like the Greek, broke down
+in practice. 'Where the Middle Ages failed', says the
+Master of Balliol, continuing a passage already quoted,
+'was in attempting ... to make politics the handmaid
+of religion, to give the Church the organization and form
+of a political State, that is, to turn religion from an indwelling
+spirit into an ecclesiastical machinery.' In other
+words, the mediaeval attempt broke down through
+neglecting the special conditions and problems of the
+political department of life, through declining, as it were,
+to specialize. While men were discussing the Theory of
+the Two Swords, whether the Emperor derived his power
+directly from God or indirectly through the Pope, or
+whether the sword should be used at all, the actual
+work of government in laying the foundations of the good
+life was neglected. Not only Liberty but Justice and
+Order were largely in abeyance and the range of State
+action which we to-day describe as 'social legislation'
+was not even dreamed of. Absorbed in theory or wrapped
+in ignorance, men forget the practical meaning of Statehood
+and its responsibilities. Central Europe languished
+for centuries, under a sham Empire, in the unprogressive
+anarchy of feudalism. 'The feudal system', it has been
+said,<a name="FNanchor_65_65" id="FNanchor_65_65"></a><a href="#Footnote_65_65" class="fnanchor">[65]</a> 'was nothing more nor less than the attempt of
+a society which had failed to organize itself as a State,
+to make contract do the work of patriotism.' It is the
+bitter experience which Germany went through under the
+anarchy of feudalism and petty governments, lasting to well
+within living memory, which by a natural reaction has led
+the German people, under Prussian tutelage, to cling to
+the conception of the State as Power and nothing more.</p>
+
+<p>The study of politics had to become secular before it
+could once more become practical, and, by being practical,
+ministering to practical ideals and enlisting practical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_177" id="Page_177">[177]</a></span>
+devotion, become, as it were, sacred once more. Where
+the well-being of our fellow men is concerned it is not
+enough to be well-meaning. Government is an art, not
+an aspiration: and those who are concerned with it,
+whether as rulers or voters, should have studied its
+problems, reflected on its possibilities and limitations,
+and fitted themselves to profit by its accumulated
+experience.</p>
+
+<p>Since the close of the Middle Ages, when politics became
+secular, the art of government has advanced by giant
+strides. Invention has followed invention, and experiment
+experiment, till to-day skilled specialists in the Old
+World and the New are at hand to watch and to record
+the latest devices for dealing with a hundred difficult
+special problems&mdash;whether it be the administration of
+justice or patronage, the organization of political parties,
+the fixing of Cabinet responsibility, the possibilities and
+limits of federalism, the prevention of war. There has,
+indeed, been as great an advance in the political art in
+the last four centuries and particularly in the last century,
+as in the very kindred art of medicine. The wonderful
+concentration of energy which the various belligerent
+powers have been able to throw into the present war is
+at once the best and the most tragic illustration of this
+truth. Man's common life in the State is more real, more
+charged with meaning and responsibility, more potent
+for good or for ill than it has ever been before&mdash;than
+our predecessors even in the time of Napoleon could have
+dreamed of.</p>
+
+<p>The greatest inventors and most skilful practitioners
+of the political art in the modern world have been the
+English, for it is the English who, of all nations, have held
+closest to the ideal of freedom in its many and various
+manifestations. Superficially regarded, the English are
+a stupid people, and so their continental neighbours<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_178" id="Page_178">[178]</a></span>
+have often regarded them. But their racial heritage and
+their island situation seem to have given them just that
+combination of experience and natural endowment
+necessary to success in the task of government. Taken
+as a whole, the English are not brilliant, but they are
+clear-headed: they are not far-sighted, but they can see
+the fact before their eyes: they are ill equipped with
+theoretical knowledge, but they understand the working
+of institutions and have a good eye for judging character:
+they have little constructive imagination of the more
+grandiose sort, but they have an instinct for the 'next
+step' which has often set them on paths which have led
+them far further than they dreamed; above all, they have
+a relatively high standard of individual character and
+public duty, without which no organization involving the
+free co-operation of man and man can hope to be effective.
+It is this unique endowment of moral qualities and practical
+gifts, coupled with unrivalled opportunities, which has
+made the English the pioneers in modern times in the art
+of human association. Englishmen, accustomed to what
+eighteenth-century writers used to call 'the peculiar
+felicity of British freedom', do not always remember how
+far their own experience has carried them on the road
+of political progress. They do not realize how many
+problems they have solved and abolished, as the art of
+medicine has abolished diseases. When they hear speak
+of the eternal conflict between Nationality and Nationality,
+they often forget that a war between England and Scotland
+has long since become unthinkable and that the platitudes
+of St. Andrew's Day are still paradoxes in Central and
+Eastern Europe. When they are told of States where the
+spontaneous manifestations of group-life, non-conforming
+sects, workmen's associations, and ordinary social clubs,
+are driven underground and classed as dangerous secret
+societies, they should realize how precious a thing is that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_179" id="Page_179">[179]</a></span>
+freedom of association which is one of the dearest attributes
+of English liberty. So too when they read of
+monarchical and military supremacy in a country like
+Germany, which is still politically speaking in the stage
+of England under the Tudors, or of Russian autocracy, or
+of the struggle over the King's prerogative which has been
+taking place in Greece. If we believe, as we must, in the
+cause of liberty, let us not be too modest to say that
+nations which have not yet achieved responsible self-government,
+whether within or without the British
+Commonwealth, are politically backward, and let us recall
+the long stages of political invention by which our own
+self-government has been achieved. Representation,
+trial by jury, an independent judiciary, equality before
+the law, habeas corpus, a limited monarchy, the practice
+of ministerial responsibility, religious toleration, the
+freedom of printing and association, colonial autonomy&mdash;all
+these are distinctly English inventions, but time has
+shown that most of them are definite additions to the universal
+art of government. We can survey the Balkans, for
+instance, and say with confidence that one thing, amongst
+others, that those nations are in need of is toleration, both
+in the sphere of nationality and of religion: or declare
+of the United States that their industrial future will be
+menaced till they have freed Trade Unionism from the
+threat of the so-called law of Conspiracy: or ask of our
+own so-called self-governing Dominions whether they are
+content with a system that concedes them no responsible
+control over the issues of peace and war. This is not to
+say that our own governmental machinery is perfect.
+Far from it. It was never in greater need of overhauling.
+It is only to reaffirm the belief, which no temporary
+disillusionment can shake, that it is founded on enduring
+principles which are not political but moral. To compare
+a system which aims at freedom and seeks to attain<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_180" id="Page_180">[180]</a></span>
+that aim through the working of responsible self-government
+with systems, however logically perfect or temporarily
+effective, which set no value on either, is, as it were,
+to compare black with white. It is to go back on the
+lessons of centuries of experience and to deny the cause,
+not of liberty alone, but of that progress of the spirit of
+man which it is the highest object of liberty to promote.</p>
+
+<p>We have no time here to discuss in detail the various
+English inventions in the art of politics, but we must
+pause to consider two of the most important, because
+they are typical of British methods. The first is the
+invention called the Principle of Representation. Representation
+is a device by which, and by which alone, the
+area of effective government can be extended without the
+sacrifice of liberty. It is a device by which the scattered
+many can make their will prevail over the few at the centre.
+Under any non-representative system, whether in a State
+or a Church or a Trade Union or any other association,
+men always find themselves set before the inexorable
+dilemma between freedom and weakness on the one hand
+and strength and tyranny on the other. Either the State
+or the association has to be kept small, so that the members
+themselves can meet and keep in touch with all that
+goes on. Or it is allowed to expand and grow strong, in
+which case power becomes concentrated at the centre
+and the great body of members loses all effective control.
+The ancient world saw no way out of this dilemma. The
+great Oriental monarchies never contemplated even the
+pretence of popular control. The city-states of Greece,
+where democracy originated, set such store in consequence
+by the personal liberty of the individual citizen, that
+they preferred to remain small, and suffered the inevitable
+penalty of their weakness. Rome, growing till she overshadowed
+the world, sacrificed liberty in the process.
+Nor was the Christian Church, when it became a large-scale<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_181" id="Page_181">[181]</a></span>
+organization, able to overcome the dilemma. It was not
+till thirteenth-century England that a way out was
+found. Edward I in summoning two burgesses from each
+borough and two knights from each shire to his model
+Parliament in 1295, hit on a method of doing business
+which was destined to revolutionize the art of government.
+He stipulated that the men chosen by their fellows to
+confer with him must come, to quote the exact words
+of the summons, armed with 'full and sufficient power
+for themselves and for the community of the aforesaid
+county, and the said citizens and burgesses for themselves
+and the communities of the aforesaid cities and boroughs
+separately, there and then, for doing what shall then be
+ordained according to the Common Council in the premises,
+so that the aforesaid business shall not remain unfinished
+in any way for defect of this power'. In other words,
+the members were to come to confer with the king not as
+individuals speaking for themselves alone, but as representatives.
+Their words and acts were to bind those on
+whose behalf they came, and those who chose them were
+to do so in the full knowledge that they would be so
+bound. In choosing them the electors deliberately
+surrendered their own share of initiative and sovereignty
+and combined to bestow it on a fellow citizen whom they
+trusted. In this way, and in this way alone, the people
+of Cornwall and of Northumberland could bring their
+wishes to bear and play their part, together with the people
+at the centre, in the government of a country many
+times the size of a city-state of ancient Greece. There had
+been assemblies before in all ages of history: but this was
+something different. It was a Parliament.</p>
+
+<p>Representation seems to us such an obvious device that
+we often forget how comparatively modern it is and what
+a degree of responsibility and self-control it demands
+both in the representative and in those whom he represents.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_182" id="Page_182">[182]</a></span>
+It is very unpleasant to hear of things done or acquiesced
+in by our representatives of which we disapprove, and to
+have to remember that it is our own fault for not sending
+a wiser or braver man to Westminster in his place. It is
+still more unpleasant for a representative to feel, as he
+often must, that his own honest opinion and conscience
+draw him one way on a matter of business and the opinions
+of most of his constituents another. But these are difficulties
+inherent in the system, and for which there is no
+remedy but sincerity and patience. It is part of the
+bargain that a constituency should not be able to disavow
+a representative: and that a representative should feel
+bound to use his own best judgement on the issues put
+before him. To turn the representative, as there is
+a tendency to do in some quarters, into a mere mouthpiece
+with a mandate, is to ignore the very problem which made
+representation necessary, and to presume that a local
+mass-meeting can be as well informed or take as wide
+a view as those who have all the facts before them at the
+centre. The ancient Greeks, who had a strong sense of
+individuality, were loth to believe that any one human
+being could make a decision on behalf of another. In
+the deepest sense of course they were right. But government,
+as has been said, is at best a rough business.
+Representation is no more than a practical compromise:
+but it is a compromise which has been found to work. It
+has made possible the extension of free government to
+areas undreamed of. It has enabled the general sense of
+the inhabitants of the United States, an area nearly as
+large as Europe, to be concentrated at Washington, and
+it may yet make it possible to collect the sense of self-governing
+Dominions in four continents in a Parliament
+at London. All this lay implicit in the practical instructions
+sent by the English king to his sheriffs; but its
+development would only have been possible in a community<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_183" id="Page_183">[183]</a></span>
+where the general level of character was a high one and
+where men were, therefore, in the habit of placing implicit
+trust in one another. The relationship of confidence
+between a member of Parliament and his constituents,
+or a Trade Union leader and his rank and file, is a thing
+of which public men are rightly proud: for it reflects
+honour on both parties and testifies to an underlying
+community of purpose which no passing disagreement on
+details can break down.</p>
+
+<p>Representation paved the way for the modern development
+of responsible self-government. But it is important
+to recognize that the two are not the same thing. Responsible
+self-government, in its modern form, is a separate
+and more complex English invention in the art of government.
+A community may be decked out with a complete
+apparatus of representative institutions and yet remain
+little better than an autocracy. Modern Germany is a
+case in point. The parliamentary suffrage for the
+German Reichstag is more representative than that for
+the British House of Commons. The German workman
+is better represented in his Parliament than the British
+workman is in ours. But the German workman has far
+less power to make his will effective in matters of policy
+than the British, because the German constitution does
+not embody the principle of responsible self-government.
+Sovereignty still rests with the Kaiser as it rested in the
+thirteenth century with Edward I. The Imperial Chancellor
+is not responsible to the Reichstag but to the Kaiser,
+by whom he is appointed and whose personal servant he
+remains. The Reichstag can discuss the actions of the
+Chancellor: it can advise him, or protest to him, or even
+pass votes of censure against him; but it cannot make its
+will effective. We can observe the working of similar
+representative institutions in different parts of the British
+Commonwealth. The provinces of India and many British<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_184" id="Page_184">[184]</a></span>
+Colonies have variously composed representative assemblies,
+but in all cases without the power to control their
+executives. The self-governing Dominions, on the other
+hand, do enjoy responsible self-government, but in an
+incomplete form, because the most vital of all issues of
+policy are outside their control. On questions of foreign
+policy, and the issues of war and peace, the Parliaments
+of the Dominions, and the citizens they represent,
+are, constitutionally speaking, as helpless as the
+most ignorant native in the humblest dependency. Representative
+institutions in themselves thus no more
+ensure real self-government than the setting up of a
+works committee of employees in a factory would
+ensure that the workmen ran the factory. The distinction
+between representation and effective responsibility is so
+simple that it seems a platitude to mention it. Yet it
+is constantly ignored, both in this country by those
+who speak of Colonial self-government as though the
+Dominions really enjoyed the same self-government
+as the people of these islands, and by the parties in
+Germany whose programme it is, not to make Germany
+a truly constitutional country, but to assimilate the retrograde
+Prussian franchise to the broader representation of
+the Reichstag.</p>
+
+<p>Wherein does the transition from representation to
+full responsibility consist? It came about in England
+when Parliament, instead of merely being consulted by
+the sovereign, felt itself strong enough to give orders to
+the sovereign. The sovereign naturally resisted, as the
+Kaiser and the Tsar will resist in their turn; but in this
+country the battle was fought and won in the seventeenth
+century. Since that time, with a few vacillations, Parliament
+has been the sovereign power. But once this transfer
+of sovereignty has taken place, a new problem arises.
+A Parliament of several hundred members, even though<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_185" id="Page_185">[185]</a></span>
+it meets regularly, is not competent to transact the
+multitudinous and complex and highly specialized
+business of a modern State. The original function of
+Parliament was to advise, to discuss, and to criticize. It
+is not an instrument fit for the work of execution and
+administration. Having become sovereign, its first business
+must be to create out of its own members an instrument
+which should carry out its own policy and be responsible
+to itself for its actions. Hence arose the Cabinet. The
+Cabinet is, as it were, a distillation of Parliament, just
+as Parliament itself is a distillation of the country. It
+consists of members of Parliament and it is in constant
+touch with Parliament; but its methods are not the
+methods of Parliament but of the older, more direct,
+organs of government which Parliament superseded. It
+meets in secret: it holds all the strings of policy: it has
+almost complete control of political and legislative
+initiative: it decides what is to be done and when and
+how: it has its own staff of agents and confidential
+advisers in the Departments and elsewhere whose acts
+are largely withdrawn from the knowledge and criticism
+of Parliament. A modern Cabinet in fact is open to the
+charge of being autocracy in a new guise. Such a charge
+would, of course, be a gross overstatement. But there is
+no doubt that the increasing complexity in the tasks of
+government has led to a corresponding growth of power
+and organization at the centre which has strengthened
+the Cabinet immeasurably of recent years at the expense
+of the direct representatives of the people. There are, however,
+powerful influences at work in the opposite direction,
+towards decentralization and new forms of representation,
+which there is no space to touch on here. Suffice it to say
+that here, as elsewhere, the price of liberty is eternal
+vigilance.</p>
+
+<p>England, then, and all who enjoy the full privileges<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_186" id="Page_186">[186]</a></span>
+of British citizenship have been placed by the progress
+of events in a position of peculiar responsibility. The
+twentieth century finds us the centre of the widest
+experiment of self-government which the world has ever
+seen; for the principles of liberty, first tested in this
+island, have approved themselves on the soil of North
+America, Australasia, and South Africa. It finds us also
+responsible for the government and for the training in
+responsibility of some 350,000,000 members of the more
+politically inexperienced and backward races of mankind,
+or about one-fifth of the human race. The growth
+of the British Commonwealth, about which so astonishingly
+little is known either by ourselves or by other
+peoples, is not a mere happy or unhappy accident. It
+is one of the inevitable and decisive developments in
+the history of mankind. It is the direct result of that
+widening of intercourse, that internationalizing of the
+world, to which reference has already been made. It represents
+the control of law and organized government over the
+blind and selfish forces of exploitation. In the exercise of
+this control we have often ourselves been blind and sometimes
+selfish. But 'the situation of man', as Burke
+finely said of our Indian Empire, 'is the preceptor of his
+duty'. The perseverance of the British character, its habit
+of concentration on the work that lies to hand, and the
+influence of our traditional social and political ideals, have
+slowly brought us to a deeper insight, till to-day the Commonwealth
+is becoming alive to the real nature of its task&mdash;the
+extension and consolidation of liberty. If it has thus
+taken up, in part, the work of the mediaeval Empire and
+has had a measure of success where the other failed, it is
+because of the character of its individual citizens, because
+despite constant and heart-breaking failures in knowledge
+and imagination, we are a people who, in the words of a
+stern, if friendly, critic, 'with great self-assertion and a bull-<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_187" id="Page_187">[187]</a></span>dog
+kind of courage, have yet a singular amount of gentleness
+and tenderness'.<a name="FNanchor_66_66" id="FNanchor_66_66"></a><a href="#Footnote_66_66" class="fnanchor">[66]</a></p>
+
+<hr style='width: 45%;' />
+
+<p>We have come to the end of our long survey. Some of
+you may feel that I have fetched too wide a compass
+and given too wide an extension to the meaning of
+government. But if I have sinned I have sinned of set
+purpose. I refuse to confine government within the limits
+of what is ordinarily called politics, or to discuss the
+association called the State in isolation from other sides
+of man's community life. To do so, I feel, is to lay oneself
+open to one of two opposite errors: the error of those
+for whom the State is the Almighty, and who invest
+it with a superhuman morality and authority of its own;
+and the error of those who draw in their skirts in horror
+from the touch of what Nietzsche called this 'cold monster'
+and take refuge in monastic detachment from the political
+responsibilities of their time. We must be able to see
+politics as a part of life before we can see it steadily and
+see it whole. We must be able to see it in relation to the
+general ordering of the world and to connect it once more,
+as in the Middle Ages, with religion and morality. No
+thinking man can live through such a time as this and
+preserve his faith unless he is sustained by the belief
+that the clash of States which is darkening our generation
+is not a mere blind collision of forces, but has spiritual
+bearings which affect each individual living soul born or
+to be born in the world. It is not for us to anticipate
+the verdict of history. But what we can do is to bear
+ourselves worthily, in thought and speech, like our
+soldiers in action, of the times in which we live&mdash;to
+testify, as it were, in our own lives, to that for which
+so many of our friends have laid down theirs. We
+are met at a culminating moment of human <span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_188" id="Page_188">[188]</a></span>fate&mdash;when,
+so far as human judgement can discern, the
+political destinies of this planet are being settled for
+many generations to come&mdash;perhaps for good. If the
+task of leadership in the arts of government remains with
+us, let us face the responsibility conscious of the vast
+spiritual issues which it involves, and let us so plan and
+act that history, looking back on these years of blood,
+may date from them a new birth of freedom and progress,
+not for ourselves in this country alone but throughout
+that kingdom of Man which must one day, as we believe,
+become in very truth the kingdom of God.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books for Reference</span></h3>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Books2">
+<tr><td align='left'>1.</td><td align='left'><i>Man's Control over Nature</i>:</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'>Ray Lankester, <i>The Kingdom of Man</i>, and other essays. 1912.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'>Demolins, <i>Comment la route cr&eacute;e le type social</i>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'>Curtis (ed. by), <i>The Commonwealth of Nations</i>. Vol. i, 1916.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'>Murphy, <i>The Basis of Ascendancy</i>. 1909.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'><i>Introduction to the Study of International Relations</i> (Greenwood and others). 1916.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>2.</td><td align='left'><i>Political Ideals</i>:</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'><i>The Jews</i>: Todd, <i>Politics and Religion in Ancient Israel</i>. 1904.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'><i>Greece</i>: <i>Aristotle's Politics</i>, translated by B. Jowett. 1908.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'>Dickinson, <i>The Greek View of Life</i>. 1909.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'>Barker, <i>The Political thought of Plato and Aristotle</i>. 1908.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'><i>Rome</i>: H. Stuart Jones, <i>The Roman Empire</i>. (Story of the Nations.) 1908. Warde Fowler, <i>Rome</i> (Home University Series).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'><i>The Middle Ages</i>: A. L. Smith, <i>Church and State in the Middle Ages</i>. 1911.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'>Gierke, <i>Political Theories of the Middle Ages</i> (introduction by Maitland). 1900.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'><i>Miscellaneous</i>: Wallas, <i>Human Nature in Politics</i>. 1908.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'>Acton, <i>The History of Freedom</i>, and other essays. 1909.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'>Lowell, <i>The Government of England</i>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td class='inset'>B&uuml;low, <i>Imperial Germany</i>. 1916.</td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_53_53" id="Footnote_53_53"></a><a href="#FNanchor_53_53"><span class="label">[53]</span></a> A. L. Smith, <i>Church and State in the Middle Ages</i>, pp. 207-8.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_54_54" id="Footnote_54_54"></a><a href="#FNanchor_54_54"><span class="label">[54]</span></a> Lankester, <i>Nature and Man</i>, Romanes Lecture, 1905, pp. 27-9.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_55_55" id="Footnote_55_55"></a><a href="#FNanchor_55_55"><span class="label">[55]</span></a> <i>The Commonwealth of Nations</i>, edited by L. Curtis, Part I,
+p. 130.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_56_56" id="Footnote_56_56"></a><a href="#FNanchor_56_56"><span class="label">[56]</span></a> Ibid., p. 166.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_57_57" id="Footnote_57_57"></a><a href="#FNanchor_57_57"><span class="label">[57]</span></a> P. H. Kerr in <i>An Introduction to the Study of International
+Relations</i>, 1915, p. 149.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_58_58" id="Footnote_58_58"></a><a href="#FNanchor_58_58"><span class="label">[58]</span></a> A still better name would be the Great Responsibilities.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_59_59" id="Footnote_59_59"></a><a href="#FNanchor_59_59"><span class="label">[59]</span></a> <i>Second Thoughts of an Economist</i>, 1916, pp. 17-18, 22.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_60_60" id="Footnote_60_60"></a><a href="#FNanchor_60_60"><span class="label">[60]</span></a> <i>Freedom and other Essays</i>, p. 22.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_61_61" id="Footnote_61_61"></a><a href="#FNanchor_61_61"><span class="label">[61]</span></a> Isaiah lxvi. 2; lvii. 19, 21; ii. 3, 4.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_62_62" id="Footnote_62_62"></a><a href="#FNanchor_62_62"><span class="label">[62]</span></a> <i>Ecclesiastical Polity</i>, Book I, ch. xvi. 5.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_63_63" id="Footnote_63_63"></a><a href="#FNanchor_63_63"><span class="label">[63]</span></a> End of Book I of the <i>Ecclesiastical Polity</i>.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_64_64" id="Footnote_64_64"></a><a href="#FNanchor_64_64"><span class="label">[64]</span></a> Gierke, <i>Political Theories of the Middle Age</i>, pp. 8 and 10.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_65_65" id="Footnote_65_65"></a><a href="#FNanchor_65_65"><span class="label">[65]</span></a> <i>The Commonwealth of Nations</i>, Part I, p. 73.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_66_66" id="Footnote_66_66"></a><a href="#FNanchor_66_66"><span class="label">[66]</span></a> <i>Memoirs and letters of Sir Robert Morier</i>, ii. 276.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_189" id="Page_189">[189]</a></span></p>
+<h2>VIII</h2>
+
+<h2>PROGRESS IN INDUSTRY</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">A. E. Zimmern</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>In our study of Government we traced the upward
+course of the common life of mankind in the world. We
+saw it in the increasing control of Man over his physical
+environment, and we saw it also in his clearer realization
+of the ultimate ideal of government&mdash;the ordering of the
+world's affairs on the basis of liberty. We have now to
+turn aside from this main stream of social development
+to watch one particular branch of it&mdash;to survey man's
+record in the special department of economics. We shall
+no longer be studying human history, or the history of
+human society, as a whole, but what is known as economic
+or industrial history.</p>
+
+<p>It is important to be clear at the outset that economic
+or industrial history <i>is</i> a tributary stream and not the
+main stream: for there are a number of people who are
+of the contrary opinion. There has been an increasing
+tendency of recent years to write human history in terms
+of economic or industrial progress. 'Tell me what men
+ate or wore or manufactured,' say historians of this
+school, 'and we will tell you what stage of civilization
+he had reached. We will place him in his proper pigeonhole
+in our arrangement of the record of human progress.'
+Did he use flint implements or fight with nothing but
+a bow and arrow? Did he use a canoe with a primitive
+pole which he had not even the sense to flatten so as to
+make it into a serviceable paddle? Then our sociologist<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_190" id="Page_190">[190]</a></span>
+will put him very low down on his list of the stages of
+human progress. For the modern sociologist is a confirmed
+plutocrat. He measures the character of men and races
+by their wealth. Just as old-fashioned people still think
+of the society of our own country as a hierarchy, in which
+the various classes are graded according to their social
+prestige and the extent of their possessions: so students
+of primitive civilization classify races according to their
+material equipment, and can hardly help yielding to the
+temptation of reckoning their stage of progress as a whole
+by the only available test. Thus it is common, especially
+in Germany and the United States, to find histories of
+what purports to be the progress of mankind which show
+man first as a hunter and a fisherman, then as a shepherd,
+then as a tiller of the soil, and then work upwards to the
+complicated industrial system of to-day. We are asked
+to accept the life of Abraham or David among the sheepfolds
+as the bottom of the ladder, and the life of a modern
+wage-earner under the smoky sky of a manufacturing
+area as the top; and when we complain and say, as men
+like William Morris and Stephen Graham are always
+saying, that we would far prefer to live in David's world,
+in spite of all its discomforts, we are told that we have
+no right to quarrel with the sacred principle of Evolution.</p>
+
+<p>To interpret human history in this way is, of course, to
+deny its spiritual meaning, to deny that it is a record of
+the progress of the human <i>spirit</i> at all. It is to read it
+as a tale of the improvement, or rather the increasing
+complication, of <i>things</i>, rather than of the advance of
+man. It is to view the world as a Domain of Matter, not
+as the Kingdom of Man&mdash;still less, as the Kingdom of
+God. It is to tie us helplessly to the chariot wheels of an
+industrial Juggernaut which knows nothing of moral
+values. Let the progress of industry make life noisy and
+ugly and anxious and unhappy: let it engross the great<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_191" id="Page_191">[191]</a></span>
+mass of mankind in tedious and uncongenial tasks and
+the remainder in the foolish and unsatisfying activities
+of luxurious living; let it defile the green earth with pits
+and factories and slag-heaps and the mean streets of those
+who toil at them, and dim the daylight with exhalations
+of monstrous vapour. It is not for us to complain or to
+resist: for we are in the grip of a Power which is greater
+than ourselves, a Power to which mankind in all five
+continents has learnt to yield&mdash;that Economic Process
+which is, in truth, the God, or the Devil, of the modern
+world.</p>
+
+<p>No thinking man dare acquiesce in such a conclusion
+or consent to bow the head before such fancied necessities.
+The function of industry, he will reply, is to serve human
+life not to master it: to beautify human life not to
+degrade it: to set life free not to enslave it. Economics
+is not the whole of life: and when it transgresses its
+bounds and exceeds its functions it must be controlled
+and thrust back into its place by the combined activities
+of men. The soul is higher than the body, and life is
+more than housekeeping. Liberty is higher than Riches,
+and the welfare of the community more important than
+its economic and material progress. These great processes,
+which the increase of man's knowledge has set
+in motion, are not impersonal inhuman forces: Men
+originated them: men administer them: and men must
+control them. Against economic necessity let us set
+political necessity: and let the watchword of that
+political necessity, here as always, be the freedom and
+the well-being of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>With this caution in mind, then, let us approach our
+subject.</p>
+
+<p>What is Economics? Economics is simply the Greek
+for 'house-keeping'. If writers and thinkers on the
+subject had only kept this simple fact in mind, or used<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_192" id="Page_192">[192]</a></span>
+the English word instead of the Greek, the world would
+have been saved much misery and confusion. Political
+economy is not, what Mill and other writers define it to
+be, 'the Science of Wealth'. It is the art of community-housekeeping,
+and community-housekeeping, as every
+woman knows, is a very important if subsidiary branch
+of the art of community-management or government.</p>
+
+<p>Housekeeping, of course, is not a selfish but a social
+function. Housewives do not lay in bread and cheese
+simply to gratify their own desire to be possessors of
+a large store, but for the sake of their household. The
+true housekeeper or economic man is the man who is
+consciously ministering to the real needs of the community.
+Like the ruler or minister in the political sphere, he is
+a man who is performing a public service.</p>
+
+<p>This is equally true whether the housekeeper has
+a monopoly of the purchase of bread and cheese for the
+household, or whether he or she has to compete with
+others as to which is to be allowed to serve the public
+in that particular transaction. Just as, under the party
+system, which seems to be inseparable from the working
+of democratic institutions, men stand for Parliament and
+compete for the honour of representing their neighbours,
+so in most systems of industry men compete for the
+honour of supplying the public. Competition in industry
+is practically as old as industry. In the earliest picture
+that has come down to us of Greek village life we read
+of the competition between potter and potter and between
+minstrel and minstrel&mdash;a competition as keen and as fierce,
+we may be sure, as that between rival shopkeepers to-day.
+For the opposite of competition, as has been truly said,
+is not co-operation but monopoly or bureaucracy: and
+there is no short and easy means of deciding between the
+rival systems. Sometimes the community is better
+served by entrusting one department wholly to one<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_193" id="Page_193">[193]</a></span>
+purveyor or one system of management&mdash;as in the Postal
+Service, or the Army and Navy. Sometimes it is clearly
+better to leave the matter open to competition. Nobody,
+for instance, would propose to do with only one minstrel,
+and seal the lips of all poets but the Poet Laureate.
+Sometimes, as in the case of the organized professions
+and the liquor trade, a strictly regulated system of
+competition has been considered best. No doubt the
+tendency at the present time is setting strongly against
+competition and towards more unified and more closely
+organized systems of doing business. But it is important
+to make quite clear that there is nothing immoral or
+anti-social about the fact of competition itself, and
+nothing inconsistent with the idea of service and co-operation
+which should underlie all social and economic
+activity. It is not competition itself, as people often
+wrongly think, which is the evil, but the shallow and
+selfish motives and the ruthless trampling down of the
+weak that are too often associated with it. When we
+condemn the maxim 'the Devil take the hindmost', it
+is not because we think we ought to treat the hindmost
+as though he were the foremost&mdash;to buy cracked jars
+or patronize incapable minstrels. It is because we feel
+that there is a wrong standard of reward among those
+who have pushed to the front, and that the community
+as a whole cannot ignore its responsibility towards its
+less fortunate and capable members.</p>
+
+<p>It is, indeed, quite impossible to abolish competition
+for the patronage of the household without subjecting
+its members to tyranny or tying them down to an intolerable
+uniformity&mdash;forcing them to suppress their own
+temporary likes or dislikes and to go on taking in the
+same stuff in the same quantities world without end.
+For the most serious and permanent competition is not
+that between rival purveyors of the same goods, between<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_194" id="Page_194">[194]</a></span>
+potter and potter and minstrel and minstrel, but between
+one set of goods and another: between the potter and
+the blacksmith, the minstrel and the painter. If we
+abolished competition permanently between the British
+railways we could not make sure that the public would
+always use them as it does now. People would still be at
+liberty to walk or to drive or to bicycle or to fly, or, at
+the very worst, to stay at home. Competition, as every
+business man knows, sometimes arises from the most
+unexpected quarters. The picture-house and the bicycle
+have damaged the brewer and the publican. Similarly the
+motor-car and the golf links have spoilt the trade in the
+fine china ornaments such as used to be common in
+expensively furnished drawing-rooms. People sit less in
+their rooms, so spend less on decorating them. The
+members of the household always retain ultimate control
+over their economic life, if they care to exercise it. 'Whoso
+has sixpence,' as Carlyle said, 'is sovereign (to the length
+of sixpence), over all men; commands Cooks to feed
+him, Philosophers to teach him, Kings to mount guard
+over him,'&mdash;to the length of sixpence. Passive resistance
+and the boycott are always open to the public in the last
+resort against any of their servants who has abused the
+powers of his position. A good instance of this occurred
+in the events which led to the so-called Tobacco riots in
+Milan in 1848. The Austrians thought they could force
+the Italians in their Lombard provinces to pay for
+a government they hated by putting a heavy tax on
+tobacco. But the Italians, with more self-control than
+we have shown in the present war, with one accord gave
+up smoking. Here was a plain competition between
+a monopoly and the consumer, between tobacco and
+patriotism: between a united household and an unpopular
+servant: and the household won, as it always can unless
+its members are incapable of combined action or have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_195" id="Page_195">[195]</a></span>
+been deprived by governmental tyranny of all power to
+associate and to organize.</p>
+
+<p>We are faced then with a community or household
+which has certain wants that need to be supplied. The
+individual members of the community are justified,
+within the limits of general well-being,<a name="FNanchor_67_67" id="FNanchor_67_67"></a><a href="#Footnote_67_67" class="fnanchor">[67]</a> in deciding what
+are their own wants and how to satisfy them. They
+claim the right to <i>demand</i>, as the economists put it, the
+goods and services they require, bread and cheese, poetry,
+tobacco, motor-bicycles, china ornaments. In order to
+meet those demands, which are stable in essentials but
+subject to constant modification in detail, there is ceaseless
+activity, rivalry, competition, on the part of the
+purveyors&mdash;on the side of what economists call <i>supply</i>.
+The business of housekeeping, or what is called the economic
+process, is that of bringing this demand and this
+supply into relation with one another. If the members of
+the household said they wanted to eat the moon instead of
+sugar, their demand would not be an economic demand:
+for no housekeeper could satisfy it. Similarly on the
+supply side: if the baker insisted on bringing round bad
+epics instead of bread and the grocer bad sonatas instead
+of sugar, the supply, however good it might seem to the
+baker and the grocer, and however much satisfaction
+they might personally have derived from their work,
+would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper,
+acting on behalf of the household, would not take it in.
+But if the demand was for something not yet available,
+but less impossibly remote than the moon, the housekeeper
+might persuade the purveyors to cudgel their
+brains till they had met the need. For, as we know,
+Necessity, which is another word for Demand, is the
+mother of invention. Similarly, if a purveyor supplied<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_196" id="Page_196">[196]</a></span>
+something undreamed of by the household, but otherwise
+good of its kind, he might succeed in persuading the
+household to like it&mdash;in other words, in creating a demand.
+The late Sir Alfred Jones, by putting bananas cheap on
+the market, persuaded us that we liked them. Similarly
+Mr. Marvin, who deals in something better than bananas,
+has persuaded us all to come here, though most of us
+would never have thought of it unless he had created the
+demand in us.</p>
+
+<p>Economic Progress, then, is progress both on the side
+of demand and on the side of supply. It is a progress in
+wants as well as in their means of satisfaction: a progress
+in the aspirations of the household as well as in the
+contrivances of its purveyors: a progress in the sense
+of what life might be, as well as in the skill and genius and
+organizing powers of those to whom the community
+looks for help in the realization of its hopes. It is important
+that this double aspect of our subject should be
+realized, for in what follows we shall have no opportunity
+to dwell further upon it. Space compels us to leave the
+household and its wants and aspirations out of account
+and to direct our attention solely to the side of supply;
+although it must always be remembered that no real and
+permanent progress in the organization of production is
+possible without improvements in the quality and reduction
+in the number of the requirements of what is called
+civilization.<a name="FNanchor_68_68" id="FNanchor_68_68"></a><a href="#Footnote_68_68" class="fnanchor">[68]</a> What we have to watch, in our study of
+progress in industry, is the history of man as a purveyor
+of the household: in other words, as a producer of goods
+and services: from the days of the primitive savage with
+his bark canoe to the gigantic industrial enterprises of
+our own time.</p>
+
+<p>We can best do so by dividing our subject into two on<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_197" id="Page_197">[197]</a></span>
+somewhat similar lines to the division in our study of
+government. Let us consider industry, first as an activity
+involving a relationship between man and Nature;
+secondly, as involving what may be called a problem of
+industrial government, a problem arising out of the
+co-operation between man and man in industrial work.
+In the first of these aspects we shall see man as a maker,
+an inventor, an artist; in the second as a subject
+or a citizen, a slave or a free man, in the Industrial
+Commonwealth.</p>
+
+<p>Man as a maker or producer carries us back to the dawn
+of history. Man is a tool-using animal and the early stages
+of human history are a record of the elaboration of tools.
+The flint axes in our museums are the earliest monuments
+of the activity of the human spirit. We do not know
+what the cave men of the Old Stone Age said or thought,
+or indeed whether they did anything that we should call
+speaking or thinking at all; but we know what they
+made. Centuries and millenniums elapsed between them
+and the first peoples of whom we have any more intimate
+record&mdash;centuries during which the foundations of our
+existing industrial knowledge and practice were being
+steadily laid. 'One may say in general,' says Mr. Marvin,<a name="FNanchor_69_69" id="FNanchor_69_69"></a><a href="#Footnote_69_69" class="fnanchor">[69]</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>that most of the fruitful practical devices of mankind had
+their origin in prehistoric times, many of them existing
+then with little essential difference. Any one of them
+affords a lesson in the gradual elaboration of the simple.
+A step minute in itself leads on and on, and so all the
+practical arts are built up, a readier and more observant
+mind imitating and adapting the work of predecessors,
+as we imagined the first man making his first flint axe.
+The history of the plough goes back to the elongation of
+a bent stick. The wheel would arise from cutting out
+the middle of a trunk used as a roller. House architecture
+is the imitation with logs and mud of the natural shelters<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_198" id="Page_198">[198]</a></span>
+of the rocks, and begins its great development when men
+have learnt to make square corners instead of a rough
+circle. And so on with all the arts of life or pleasure,
+including clothing, cooking, tilling, sailing, and fighting.</p></div>
+
+<p>How did this gradual progress come about? Mr. Marvin
+himself supplies the answer. Through the action of the
+'readier and more observant minds'&mdash;in other words,
+through specialization and the division of labour. As far
+back as we can go in history we find a recognition that
+men are not all alike, that some have one gift and some
+another, and that it is to the advantage of society to let
+each use his own gift in the public service. Among
+primitive peoples there has indeed often been a belief
+that men are compensated for physical weakness and disability
+by peculiar excellence in some sphere of their
+own. Hephaestos among the Greek gods was lame: so he
+becomes a blacksmith and uses his arms. Homer is blind:
+so instead of fighting he sings of war. They would not
+go so far as to maintain that all lame men must be good
+blacksmiths or all blind men good poets: but at least
+they recognized that there was room in the community
+for special types and that the blacksmith and the poet
+were as useful as the ordinary run of cultivators and
+fighting men. The Greek word for craftsman&mdash;<span class='correction' title='dêmiourgos'>&#948;&#951;&#956;&#953;&#959;&#965;&#961;&#947;&#8057;&#962;</span>&mdash;'worker
+for the people,' shows how the Greeks felt on
+this point. To them poetry and craftsmanship were as
+much honourable occupations or, as we should say,
+professional activities as fighting and tilling. Whether
+Homer took to poetry because he could not fight or
+because he had an overwhelming poetic gift, he had
+justified his place in the community.</p>
+
+<p>Specialization is the foundation of all craftsmanship
+and therefore the source of all industrial progress. We
+recognize this, of course, in common speech. 'Practice
+makes perfect,' 'Genius is an infinite capacity for<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_199" id="Page_199">[199]</a></span>
+taking pains,' are only different ways of saying that it is
+not enough to be 'ready' and 'observant', but that
+continued activity and concentration are necessary.
+A perfect industrial community would not be a community
+where everybody was doing the same thing: nor would
+it be a community where every one was doing just what
+he liked at the moment: it would be a community where
+every one was putting all his strength into the work
+which he was by nature best qualified to do&mdash;where, in
+the words of Kipling:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">No one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of Things as They Are.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Progress in industry, then, on this side, consists in increasing
+specialization and in the perfection of the relationship
+between the workman and his work. Man in this
+world is destined to labour, and labour is often described
+as the curse of Adam. But in reality, as every one knows
+who has tried it, or observed the habits of those who
+have, idleness is far more of a curse than labour. Few
+men&mdash;at any rate in the temperate zone&mdash;can be consistently
+idle and remain happy. The born idler is almost
+as rare as the born poet. Most men, and, it must be added,
+most women, are happier working. If holidays were the
+rule and work the exception the world would be a much
+less cheerful place than it is even to-day. Purposeful
+activity is as natural to man as playing is to a kitten.
+From a purely natural point of view, no one has ever
+given a better definition of happiness than Aristotle when
+he defined it as <i>an activity of the soul in the direction of
+excellence in an unhampered life</i>. By excellence, of course,
+in this famous definition, Aristotle does not mean simply<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_200" id="Page_200">[200]</a></span>
+virtue: he means excellence in work. It is impossible,
+as we all know, to be good in the abstract. We must be
+good in some particular directions, <i>at</i> some particular
+thing. And the particular thing that we are good at is <i>our</i>
+work, our craft, our art&mdash;or, to use our less aesthetic
+English word, for which there is no equivalent in Greek,
+our duty. If happiness is to be found in doing one's duty,
+it does not result from doing that duty badly, but from
+doing it well&mdash;turning out, as we say, a thoroughly good
+piece of work, whether a day's work or a life work. There
+is a lingering idea, still held in some quarters, that the
+more unpleasant an activity is the more virtuous it is.
+This is a mere barbarous survival from the days of what
+Nietzsche called slave-morality. We are each of us born
+with special individual gifts and capacities. There is, if
+we only knew it, some particular kind or piece of work
+which we are pre-eminently fitted to do&mdash;some particular
+activity or profession, be it held in high or in low repute
+in the world of to-day, in which we can win the steady
+happiness of purposeful labour. Shall we then say that
+it ministers to human progress and to the glory of God
+deliberately to bury our talent out of sight and to seek
+rather work which, because it is irksome and unpleasant
+to us, we can never succeed in doing either easily or
+really well? No one who knows anything of education
+or of the training of the young, no one, indeed, who has
+any love for children, would dare to say that we should.
+Our State educational system, miserably defective though
+it is in this regard, is based upon the idea of ministering
+to the special gifts of its pupils&mdash;of trying by scholarships,
+by Care Committees, by the institution of schools with
+a special 'bias', to meet the needs of different kinds of
+young people and to set them in the path on which they
+are best fitted to travel.</p>
+
+<p>In doing this the modern State is only trying to carry<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_201" id="Page_201">[201]</a></span>
+out the principle laid down in the greatest book ever
+written on education&mdash;Plato's <i>Republic</i>. Plato's object
+was to train every citizen to fill the one position where he
+could lead the best life for the good of the State. His aim
+was not to make his citizens happy but to promote
+goodness; but he had enough faith in human nature&mdash;and
+who can be an educational thinker without having
+faith in human nature?&mdash;to be convinced that to enable
+men to 'do their bit', as we say to-day, was to assure
+them of the truest happiness. We of this generation
+know how abundantly that faith has been confirmed. And
+indeed we can appeal in this matter not only to the
+common sense of Education Authorities or to the philosophy
+of the ancients, but to the principles of the Christian
+religion. The late Professor Smart, who was not only
+a good economist but a good man; has some very pertinent
+words on this subject. 'If for some reason that we know
+not of,' he remarks,<a name="FNanchor_70_70" id="FNanchor_70_70"></a><a href="#Footnote_70_70" class="fnanchor">[70]</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>this present is merely the first stage in being; if we
+are all at school, and not merely pitched into the world
+by chance to pick up our living as best we can ... it
+seems to me that we have reason enough to complain
+of the existing economic system.... I imagine that
+many of our churchgoing people, if they ever get to
+the heaven they sing about, will find themselves most
+uncomfortable, if it be a place for which they have made
+no preparation but in the 'business' in which they have
+earned their living.... A man's daily work is a far greater
+thing towards the development of the God that is in him
+than his wealth. And, however revolutionary the idea is,
+I must say that all our accumulations of wealth are little
+to the purpose of life if they do not tend towards the
+giving to all men the opportunity of such work as will
+have its reward <i>in the doing</i>.</p></div>
+
+<p>And of his own particular life-work, teaching, he
+remarks, in words that testify to his own inner peace<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_202" id="Page_202">[202]</a></span>
+and happiness, that 'some of us have got into occupations
+which almost seem to guarantee immortality'.</p>
+
+<p>Let us, then, boldly lay it down that the best test of
+progress in industry and the best measure of success in
+any industrial system is the degree to which it enables
+men to 'do their bit' and so to find happiness in their
+daily work, or if you prefer more distinctively religious
+language, the degree to which it enables men to develop the
+God that is in them. Let us have the courage to say that
+in the great battle which Ruskin and William Morris
+fought almost single-handed against all the Philistines of
+the nineteenth century, Ruskin and Morris, however
+wrong they may have been on points of practical detail,
+were right in principle. Let us make up our minds that
+a world in which men have surrendered the best hours
+of the day to unsatisfying drudgery, and banished happiness
+to their brief periods of tired leisure, is so far from
+civilized that it has not even made clear to itself wherein
+civilization consists. And when we read such a passage
+as the following from a leading modern economist, let us
+not yield to the promptings of our lower nature and
+acquiesce in its apparent common sense, but remember
+that economists, like all workmen, are bounded by the
+limits of their own particular craft or study. 'The
+greater part of the world's work,' says Professor Taussig,<a name="FNanchor_71_71" id="FNanchor_71_71"></a><a href="#Footnote_71_71" class="fnanchor">[71]</a>
+the leading exponent of Economics at Harvard,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>is not in itself felt to be pleasurable. Some reformers have
+hoped to reach a social system under which all work would
+be in itself a source of satisfaction. It is probable that such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_203" id="Page_203">[203]</a></span>
+persons are made optimistic by the nature of their own
+doings. They are writers, schemers, reformers; they are
+usually of strongly altruistic character, and the performance
+of any duty or set task brings to them the approval
+of an exacting conscience; and they believe that all mankind
+can be brought to labour in their own spirit. The
+world would be a much happier place if their state of
+mind could be made universal. But the great mass of
+men are of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked
+bent or any loftiness of character. Moreover, most of
+the world's work for the satisfaction of our primary
+wants must be of a humdrum sort, and often of a rough
+and coarse sort. There must be ditching and delving,
+sowing and reaping, hammering and sawing, and all the
+severe physical exertion which, however lightened by
+tools and machinery, yet can never be other than labour
+in the ordinary sense of the word.</p></div>
+
+<p>When Professor Taussig assures us that 'the great
+mass of men are of a humdrum sort, not born with any
+marked bent or loftiness of character' he is simply denying
+the Christian religion. To argue the point with him
+would carry us too far. We will do no more here than
+remind him that the people to whom the Founder of
+Christianity preached, and even those who were chosen
+to be its first disciples, were, like this audience, distinctly
+humdrum, and that assuredly the American Professor
+would not have discerned in them promising material
+for a world-transforming religious movement. What
+people see in others is often a mirror of themselves.
+Perhaps Professor Taussig, in spite of his excellent book,
+is rather a humdrum person himself.</p>
+
+<p>When, however, Professor Taussig declares that 'the
+greater part of the world's work is not in itself felt to be
+pleasurable' he is saying what, under existing conditions,
+we must all recognize to be true. A year or two ago
+Mr. Graham Wallas made an investigation into this very
+question, the results of which confirmed the general<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_204" id="Page_204">[204]</a></span>
+impression that modern workmen find little happiness
+in their work.<a name="FNanchor_72_72" id="FNanchor_72_72"></a><a href="#Footnote_72_72" class="fnanchor">[72]</a> But two of the conclusions which he
+reached conflict in a rather curious way with the statement
+of Professor Taussig. Mr. Wallas's evidence, which was
+largely drawn from students of Ruskin College, led him
+to the conclusion 'that there is less pleasantness or happiness
+in work the nearer it approaches the fully organized
+Great Industry'. The only workman who spoke enthusiastically
+of his work was an agricultural labourer who
+'was very emphatic with regard to the pleasure to be
+obtained from agricultural work'. Professor Taussig,
+on the other hand, selects four agricultural occupations,
+ditching, delving, sowing, and reaping, as characteristically
+unpleasant and looks to machinery and the apparatus
+of the Industrial Revolution to counteract this unpleasantness.
+But the most interesting evidence gathered by
+Mr. Wallas was that relating to women workers. He had
+an opportunity of collecting the views of girls employed
+in the laundries and poorer kind of factories in Boston.
+'The answers', he says,<a name="FNanchor_73_73" id="FNanchor_73_73"></a><a href="#Footnote_73_73" class="fnanchor">[73]</a> 'surprised me greatly. I expected
+to hear those complaints about bad wages, hard
+conditions and arbitrary discipline which a body of men
+working at the same grade of labour would certainly have
+put forward. But it was obvious that the question
+"Are you happy?" meant to the girls "Are you happier
+than you would have been if you had stayed at home
+instead of going to work?" And almost every one of
+them answered "Yes".' Why were they unhappy at
+home? Let Professor Taussig reflect on the answer. Not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_205" id="Page_205">[205]</a></span>
+because they had 'rough' or 'coarse' or 'humdrum'
+work to do, as in a factory or laundry, but because they had
+nothing to do, and they had found idleness unbearable.
+'One said that work "took up her mind", she had been
+awfully discontented'. Another that 'you were of some
+use'. Another thought 'it was because the hours went so
+much faster. At home one could read, but only for
+a short time, there was the awful lonesome afternoon
+ahead of you.' 'Asked a little girl with dyed hair but
+a good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It made her
+feel she was worth something.' And Mr. Wallas concludes
+that it is just because 'everything that is interesting,
+even though it is laborious, in the women's arts of the
+old village is gone': because 'clothes are bought ready-made,
+food is bought either ready-cooked, like bread
+and jam and fish, or only requiring the simplest kind of
+cooking': in fact just because physical exertion has been
+lightened by books and machinery, that 'there results
+a mass of inarticulate unhappiness whose existence has
+hardly been indicated by our present method of sociological
+enquiry'.</p>
+
+<p>It would seem then that the task of associating modern
+industrial work with happiness is not impossible, if we
+would only set ourselves to the task. And the task is
+a two-fold one. It is, first, to make it possible for people
+to follow the employment for which they are by nature
+best fitted; and secondly, to study much more closely
+than heretofore, from the point of view of happiness,
+the conditions under which work is done. The first task
+involves a very considerable reversal of current educational
+and social values. It does not simply mean paving the
+way for the son of an engine-driver to become a doctor
+or a lawyer or a cavalryman. It means paving the way
+for the son of a duke to become, without any sense of
+social failure, an engine-driver or a merchant seaman or<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_206" id="Page_206">[206]</a></span>
+a worker on the land&mdash;and to do so not, as to-day, in
+the decent seclusion of British Columbia or Australia,
+but in our own country and without losing touch, if he
+desires it, with his own natural circle of friends. The
+ladder is an old and outworn metaphor in this connexion.
+Yet it is still worth remembering that the Angels whom
+Jacob observed upon it were both ascending and descending.
+It is one of the fallacies of our social system
+to believe that a ladder should only be used in one direction&mdash;and
+that the direction which tends to remove men
+from contact and sympathy with their fellows. But in
+truth we need to discard the metaphor of the ladder
+altogether, with its implied suggestion that some tasks
+of community-service are more honourable and involve
+more of what the world calls 'success' than others. We
+do not desire a system of education which picks out for
+promotion minds gifted with certain kinds of capacity
+and stimulates them with the offer of material rewards,
+while the so-called humdrum remainder are left, with
+their latent talents undiscovered and undeveloped.</p>
+
+<p>Recent educational experiments,<a name="FNanchor_74_74" id="FNanchor_74_74"></a><a href="#Footnote_74_74" class="fnanchor">[74]</a> and not least that
+most testing of all school examinations, the war, have
+shown us that we must revise all our old notions as to
+cleverness and stupidity. We know now that, short of
+real mental deficiency, there is or ought to be no such
+personage as the dunce. Just as the criminal is generally
+a man of unusual energy and mental power directed into
+wrong channels, so the dunce is a pupil whose special
+powers and aptitudes have not revealed themselves in the
+routine of school life. And just as the criminal points
+to serious defects in our social system, so the dunce points
+to serious defects in our educational system. The striking
+record of our industrial schools and reformatories in the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_207" id="Page_207">[207]</a></span>
+war shows what young criminals and dunces can do when
+they are given a fair field for their special gifts. One of
+the chief lessons to be drawn from the war is the need for
+a new spirit and outlook in our national education from
+the elementary school to the University. We need a
+system which treats every child, rich or poor, as a living
+and developing personality, which enables every English
+boy and girl to stay at school at least up to the time when
+his or her natural bent begins to disclose itself, which
+provides for all classes of the community skilled guidance
+in the choice of employment based upon psychological
+study of individual gifts and aptitude,<a name="FNanchor_75_75" id="FNanchor_75_75"></a><a href="#Footnote_75_75" class="fnanchor">[75]</a> which sets up
+methods of training and apprenticeship in the different
+trades&mdash;or, as I would prefer to call them the different
+professions&mdash;such as to counteract the deadening influence
+of premature specialization, and which ensures good
+conditions and a sense of self-respect and community-service
+to all in their self-chosen line of life, whether their
+bent be manual or mechanical or commercial or administrative,
+or for working on the land or for going to sea, or
+towards the more special vocations of teaching or scholarship
+or the law or medicine or the cure of souls. No one
+can estimate how large a share of the unhappiness
+associated with our existing social system is due to the
+fact that, owing to defects in our education and our
+arrangements for the choice of employment, there are
+myriads of square pegs in round holes. This applies with
+especial force to women, to whom many of the square
+holes are still inaccessible, not simply owing to the lack
+of opportunities for individuals, but owing to the inhibitions
+of custom and, in some cases, to narrow and retrograde
+professional enactments. The war has brought
+women their chance, not only in the office and the work<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_208" id="Page_208">[208]</a></span>shop,
+but in higher administrative and organizing
+positions, and not the least of its results is the revelation
+of undreamt-of capacities in these directions.</p>
+
+<p>In the second task, that of perfecting the adaptation
+between men and their tools, we have much to learn from
+the industrial history of the past. It is natural for men
+to enjoy 'talking shop', and this esoteric bond of union
+has existed between workmen in all ages. We may be
+sure that there were discussions amongst connoisseurs
+in the Stone Age as to the respective merits of their
+flint axes, just as there are to-day between golfers about
+niblicks and putters, and between surgeons as to the
+technique of the extraction of an appendix. A good workman
+loves his tools. He is indeed inseparable from them,
+as our law acknowledges by forbidding a bankrupt's
+tools to be sold up. Give a good workman, in town or
+country, a sympathetic listener and he is only too ready
+to expatiate on his daily work. This sense of kinship
+between men and their tools and material is so little
+understood by some of our modern expert organizers of industry
+that it is worth while illustrating it at some length.
+I make no apology, therefore, for quoting a striking
+passage from an essay by Mr. George Bourne, who is
+not a trade unionist or a student of Labour politics but
+an observer of English village life, who has taken the
+trouble to penetrate the mind of what is commonly
+regarded as the stupidest and most backward&mdash;as it is
+certainly the least articulate&mdash;class of workmen in this
+country, the agricultural labourer in the southern counties.
+'The men', he writes,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>are commonly too modest about their work, and too
+unconscious that it can interest an outsider, to dream of
+discussing it. What they have to say would not therefore
+by itself go far in demonstration of their acquirements
+in technique. Fortunately, for proof of that we are not<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_209" id="Page_209">[209]</a></span>
+dependent on talk. Besides talk there exists another
+kind of evidence open to every one's examination, and
+the technical skill exercised in country labours may be
+purely deduced from the aptness and singular beauty
+of sundry country tools.</p>
+
+<p>The beauty of tools is not accidental, but inherent and
+essential. The contours of a ship's sail bellying in the
+wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the
+curves of an adze-head or of a plough-share. Cast in
+iron or steel, the gracefulness of a plough-share is more
+indestructible than the metal, yet pliant (in the limits
+of its type) as a line of English blank verse. It changes
+for different soils: it is widened out or narrowed; it
+is deep-grooved or shallow; not because of caprice at the
+foundry or to satisfy an artistic fad, but to meet the
+technical demands of the expert ploughman. The most
+familiar example of beauty indicating subtle technique
+is supplied by the admired shape of boats, which, however,
+is so variable (the statement is made on the authority
+of an old coast-guardsman) that the boat best adapted
+for one stretch of shore may be dangerous, if not entirely
+useless, at another stretch ten miles away. And as technique
+determines the design of a boat, or of a waggon,
+or of a plough-share, so it controls absolutely the fashioning
+of tools, and is responsible for any beauty of form they
+may possess. Of all tools none, of course, is more exquisite
+than a fiddle-bow. But the fiddle-bow never could have
+been perfected, because there would have been no call
+for its tapering delicacy, its calculated balance of lightness
+and strength, had not the violinist's technique reached
+such marvellous fineness of power. For it is the accomplished
+artist who is fastidious as to his tools; the bungling
+beginner can bungle with anything. The fiddle-bow,
+however, affords only one example of a rule which is
+equally well exemplified by many humbler tools. Quarryman's
+peck, coachman's whip, cricket-bat, fishing-rod,
+trowel, all have their intimate relation to the skill of those
+who use them; and like animals and plants, adapting
+themselves each to its own place in the universal order,
+they attain to beauty by force of being fit. That law of
+adaptation which shapes the wings of a swallow and
+prescribes the poise and elegance of the branches of trees<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_210" id="Page_210">[210]</a></span>
+is the same that demands symmetry in the corn-rick and
+convexity in the beer-barrel; the same that, exerting
+itself with matchless precision through the trained senses
+of haymakers and woodmen, gives the final curve to the
+handles of their scythes and the shafts of their axes.
+Hence the beauty of a tool is an unfailing sign that in
+the proper handling of it technique is present ...</p></div>
+
+<p>'It is not the well-informed and those eager to teach',
+he says in another passage,</p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>who know the primitive necessary lore of civilization;
+it is the illiterate. In California, Louis Stevenson found
+men studying the quality of vines grown on different
+pockets of earth, just as the peasants of Burgundy and
+the Rhine have done for ages. And even so the English
+generations have watched the produce of their varying
+soils. When or how was it learnt&mdash;was it at Oxford or
+at Cambridge?&mdash;that the apples of Devonshire are so
+specially fit for cider? Or how is it that hops are growing&mdash;some
+of them planted before living memory&mdash;all along
+the strip of green sand which encircles the Weald&mdash;that
+curious strip to which text-books at last point
+triumphantly as being singularly adapted for hops?
+Until it got into the books, this piece of knowledge was
+not thought of as learning; it had merely been acted
+upon during some centuries. But such knowledge exists,
+boundless, in whatever direction one follows it: the
+knowledge of fitting means to ends: excellent rule-of-thumb
+knowledge, as good as the chemist uses for analyzing
+water. When the peculiar values of a plot of land have
+been established&mdash;as, for instance, that it is a clay 'too
+strong' for bricks&mdash;then further forms of localized knowledge
+are brought to supplement this, until at last the
+bricks are made. Next, they must be removed from the
+field; and immediately new problems arise. The old
+farm-cart, designed for roots or manure, has not the most
+suitable shape for brick-carting. Probably, too, its wide
+wheels, which were intended for the softness of ploughed
+land, are needlessly clumsy for the hard road. Soon,
+therefore, the local wheelwright begins to lighten his
+spokes and felloes, and to make the wheels a trifle less<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_211" id="Page_211">[211]</a></span>
+'dished'; while his blacksmith binds them in a narrower
+but thicker tyre, to which he gives a shade more tightness.
+For the wheelwright learns from the carter&mdash;that ignorant
+fellow&mdash;the answer to the new problems set by a load of
+bricks. A good carter, for his part, is able to adjust
+his labour to his locality. A part of his duty consists in
+knowing what constitutes a fair load for his horse in the
+district where he is working. So many hundred stock
+bricks, so many more fewer of the red or wire-cut, such
+and such a quantity of sand, or timber, or straw, or coal,
+or drain-pipes, or slates, according to their kinds and
+sizes, will make as much as an average horse can draw in
+this neighbourhood; but in London the loads are bigger
+and the vehicles heavier; while in more hilly parts (as
+you may see any day in the West Country) two horses
+are put before a cart and load which the London carter
+would deem hardly too much for a costermonger's
+donkey.</p>
+
+<p>So it goes throughout civilization: there is not an
+industry but produces its own special knowledge relating
+to unclassified details of adjustment.<a name="FNanchor_76_76" id="FNanchor_76_76"></a><a href="#Footnote_76_76" class="fnanchor">[76]</a></p></div>
+
+<p>It is this craft-knowledge and common professional
+feeling which is at the basis of all associations of workpeople,
+from the semi-religious societies of ancient times,
+which met in secret to worship their patron-god&mdash;Hephaestos,
+the god of the metal-workers, or Asclepios, the
+god of the doctors&mdash;through the great guilds of the Middle
+Ages to the trade unions and professional organizations
+of to-day. Trade unions do not exist simply to raise
+wages or to fight the capitalist, any more than the British
+Medical Association exists simply to raise fees and to
+bargain with the Government. They exist to serve
+a professional need: to unite men who are doing the same
+work and to promote the welfare and dignity of that
+work. It is this which renders so difficult the problems
+of adjustment which arise owing to the introduction of
+new and unfamiliar processes. Professional associations<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_212" id="Page_212">[212]</a></span>
+are, and are bound to be, conservative: their conservatism
+is honourable and to their credit: for they are the
+transmitters of a great tradition. The problem in every
+case is to ensure the progress necessary to the community
+without injury to that sense of 'fellowship in the mystery'
+on which the social spirit of the particular class of workmen
+depends. It is from this point of view that recent
+American proposals in the direction of 'scientific management'
+are most open to criticism: for they involve the
+break-up of the craft-spirit without setting anything
+comparable in its place. In fact, Mr. F. W. Taylor,
+one of the inventors of what is called the 'system' of
+scientific management, frankly ignores or despises the
+craft-spirit and proposes to treat the workman as a being
+incapable of understanding the principles underlying the
+practice of his art. He goes so far as to lay it down as
+a general principle that 'in almost all the mechanic arts
+the science which underlies each act of each workman is
+so great and amounts to so much that the workman who
+is best suited to actually doing the work is incapable of
+fully understanding this science, without the guidance
+and help of those who are working with him or over him,
+either through lack of education or through insufficient
+mental capacity'.<a name="FNanchor_77_77" id="FNanchor_77_77"></a><a href="#Footnote_77_77" class="fnanchor">[77]</a> Along the lines of this philosophy
+no permanent industrial advance is possible. It may
+improve the product for a time, but only at the cost of
+degrading the producer. If we are to make happiness
+our test, and to stand by our definition of happiness
+as involving free activity, such a system, destructive as it
+is of any real or intense relationship between the workman
+and his work, stands self-condemned. If we are looking
+for <i>real</i> industrial progress it is elsewhere that we must
+turn.</p>
+<p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_213" id="Page_213">[213]</a></span></p>
+<p>This leads us naturally on to the second great division
+of our subject: progress in the methods of co-operation
+between man and man in doing industrial work. For if
+man is a social animal his power to do his bit and his
+consequent happiness must be derived, in part at least,
+from his social environment. The lonely craftsman
+perfecting his art in the solitude of a one-man workshop
+does not correspond with our industrial ideal any more
+than the hermit or the monk corresponds with our general
+religious ideal. It was the great apostle of craftsmanship,
+William Morris, who best set forth the social ideal of
+industry in his immortal sentence: 'Fellowship is Life and
+lack of Fellowship is Death.' Our study of the workman,
+then, is not complete when we have seen him with his tools:
+we must see him also among his workmates. We must see
+industry not simply as a process of production but as
+a form of association; and we must realize that the
+association of human beings for the purpose of industrial
+work involves what is just as much a problem of government
+as their association in the great political community
+which we call the State.</p>
+
+<p>It is difficult to see the record of the progress of industrial
+government in clear perspective for the simple reason
+that the world is still so backward as regards the organization
+of this side of its common life. The theory and practice
+of industrial government is generations, even centuries,
+behind the theory and practice of politics. We are still
+accustomed in industry to attitudes of mind and methods
+of management which the political thought of the Western
+World has long since discarded as incompatible with its
+ideals. Two instances must suffice to illustrate this.
+It is constantly being said, both by employers and by
+politicians, and even by writers in sympathy with working-class
+aspirations, that all that the workman needs in his
+life is security. Give him work under decent conditions,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_214" id="Page_214">[214]</a></span>
+runs the argument, with reasonable security of tenure
+and adequate guarantees against sickness, disablement
+and unemployment, and all will be well. This theory
+of what constitutes industrial welfare is, of course, when
+one thinks it out, some six centuries out of date. It
+embodies the ideal of the old feudal system, but without
+the personal tie between master and man which humanized
+the feudal relationship. Feudalism, as we saw in our
+study of political government, was a system of contract
+between the lord and the labourer by which the lord and
+master ran the risks, set on foot the enterprises (chiefly
+military), and enjoyed the spoils, incidental to mediaeval
+life, while the labourer stuck to his work and received
+security and protection in exchange. Feudalism broke
+down because it involved too irksome a dependence,
+because it was found to be incompatible with the personal
+independence which is the birthright of a modern man.
+So it is idle to expect that the ideal of security will
+carry us very far by itself towards the perfect industrial
+commonwealth.</p>
+
+<p>Take a second example of the wide gulf that still
+subsists between men's ideas of politics and men's ideas of
+industry. It is quite common, even in these latter days,
+and among those who have freely sacrificed their nearest
+and dearest to the claims of the State, to hear manufacturers
+and merchants say that they have a 'right to
+a good profit'. The President of the Board of Trade
+remarked openly in the House of Commons after many
+months of war that it was more than one could expect
+of human nature for coal-owners not to get the highest
+price they could. Such a standpoint is not merely
+indecent: it is hopelessly out-of-date. Looked at from
+the political point of view it is a pure anachronism.
+There used to be times when men made large fortunes
+out of the service of government, as men still make them<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_215" id="Page_215">[215]</a></span>
+out of the service of the community in trade and industry
+to-day. In the days of St. Matthew, when tax-gathering
+was let out by contract, the apostle's partners would
+probably have declared, as Mr. Runciman does to-day,
+that it was more than one could expect of human nature
+that a publican who had a government contract for the
+collection of the taxes should not get all he could out of
+the tax-payer. It is, indeed, little more than a century
+ago since it was a matter of course in this country to
+look upon oversea colonies merely as plantations&mdash;that
+is, as business investments rather than as communities
+of human beings. The existence of Chartered Company
+government marks a survival of this habit of mind.
+The old colonial system, which embodied this point of
+view, proved demoralizing not only to the home government
+but to the colonists, as a similar view is to the working
+class, and it led to the loss of the American colonies
+as surely as a similar attitude on the part of employers
+leads to unrest and rebellion among workpeople to-day.</p>
+
+<p>We have thus a long way to travel before the ideals
+of politics have been assimilated into the industrial life
+of the community and have found fitting embodiment
+in its kindred and more complex problems. But at
+least we have reached a point where we can see what the
+problem of industrial government is. We can say with
+assurance that a system which treats human beings
+purely as instruments or as passive servants, and atrophies
+their self-determination and their sense of individual and
+corporate responsibility, is as far from perfection in
+industry as the Roman Empire was in politics. Renan's
+words about 'the intolerable sadness' incidental to such
+a method of organization apply with redoubled force
+to occupations which take up the best part of the day
+of the mass of the working population. The bleak and
+loveless buildings, with their belching chimneys, which<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_216" id="Page_216">[216]</a></span>
+arrest the eye of the thoughtful traveller in the industrial
+districts of England are not prisons or workhouses. But
+they often look as if they were, and they resemble them in
+this&mdash;that they too often stand for similarly authoritarian
+ideas of government and direction. Industry is still an
+autocracy, as politics was in the days before the supremacy
+of Parliament. Power still descends from above instead
+of springing from below. It is a power limited no doubt
+by trade union action and parliamentary and administrative
+control: but it is in essence as autocratic as the
+government of England used to be before the transference
+of sovereignty from the monarch to the representatives
+of his subjects. It was recently announced in the press
+that Lord Rhondda had bought a group of Welsh collieries
+for 2 millions, and that as a result 'Lord Rhondda now
+controls over 3-1/2 millions of capital, pays 2-1/2 millions in wages
+every year, and is virtually the dictator of the economic
+destiny of a quarter of a million miners. Rumours are
+also current', the extract continues, 'that Lord Rhondda
+is extending his control over the press of Wales'.<a name="FNanchor_78_78" id="FNanchor_78_78"></a><a href="#Footnote_78_78" class="fnanchor">[78]</a> The
+existence of such power in this twentieth century in the
+hands of single individuals, not selected from the mass
+for their special wisdom or humanity, is a stupendous
+fact which must give pause to any one who is inclined to
+feel complacent about modern industrial progress. In
+days gone by political power was as irresponsible as the
+economic power wielded to-day by Lord Rhondda; and
+it descended from father to son by hereditary right in
+the same way as the control over the lives of countless
+American workers descends to-day as a matter of course
+from John D. Rockefeller senior to John D. Rockefeller
+junior. If there is any reality at all in our political
+faith we must believe that a similar development towards
+self-government can and must take place in industry.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_217" id="Page_217">[217]</a></span>
+It may be that generations will elapse before the problems
+of industrial government find a final and satisfactory
+constitutional solution. But at least we can say that
+there is only one basis for that solution which is compatible
+with a sound ideal of government, or indeed with any
+reasoned view of morality or religion&mdash;the basis of individual
+and corporate freedom with its corresponding
+obligations of responsibility and self-respect. No nation,
+as Abraham Lincoln said, can remain half-slave and
+half-free: and it was a greater than Lincoln who warned
+us that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. It is
+this underlying conflict of ideals in the organization of
+our existing economic system which is the real cause of
+the 'Labour unrest' of which we have heard so much
+in recent years.</p>
+
+<p>With this warning in our minds as to the imperfections
+of our modern industrial organization, let us briefly
+survey the record of the forms of economic association
+which preceded it.</p>
+
+<p>The earliest form of industrial grouping is, of course,
+the family; and the family, as we all know, still retains
+its primitive character in some occupations as a convenient
+form of productive association. This is particularly the
+case in agriculture in communities where peasant holdings
+prevail. But the family is so much more than an industrial
+group that it hardly falls to us to consider it further here.</p>
+
+<p>Outside the family proper, industrial work among
+primitive peoples is often carried on by slaves. It was
+a step forward in human progress when primitive man
+found that it was more advantageous to capture his
+enemies than to kill or eat them; and it was a still greater
+step forward when he found that there was more to be
+got out of slaves by kind treatment than by compulsion.
+This is not the place in which to go into the vexed questions
+connected with various forms of slavery. Suffice<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_218" id="Page_218">[218]</a></span>
+it to say that it is a profound mistake to dismiss the whole
+system in one undiscriminating condemnation. Slavery
+involves the denial of freedom, and as such it can never
+be good. But other systems besides slavery implicitly
+involve the denial of freedom. Some of the finest artistic
+work in the world has been done by slaves&mdash;and by
+slaves not working under compulsion but in the company
+of free men and on terms of industrial equality with them.
+This should serve to remind us that, in judging of systems
+of industry, we must look behind the letter of the law to
+the spirit of the times and of social institutions. Slavery
+at its best merges insensibly into wage-labour at its
+lower end. Many of the skilled slaves of ancient Greece
+and Rome are hardly distinguishable in status from a
+modern workman bound by an unusually long and strict
+indenture and paid for his work not only in money but
+partly in truck. In order to stimulate their productive
+capacity it was found necessary in Greece and Rome to
+allow skilled slaves to earn and retain money&mdash;although
+in the eye of the law they were not entitled to do so; and
+they were thus frequently in a position to purchase their
+own freedom and become independent craftsmen. Slavery
+in the household and in small workshops is open to many
+and serious dangers, which need not be particularized here;
+but the worst abuses of slavery have always taken place
+where slaves have been easily recruited, as in the early
+days of European contact with Africa, and when there
+were large openings for their employment in gangs on
+work of a rough and unskilled character. The problem
+of slavery in its worse forms is thus at bottom a cheap-labour
+problem analogous to that which confronts North
+America and South Africa to-day; and there is an
+essential difference which is often ignored between the
+educated slave in a Roman Government office who did
+the work of a First Division Civil Servant for his imperial<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_219" id="Page_219">[219]</a></span>
+master and his compeer working in the fields of South
+Italy: and between the household servants of a Virginian
+family and the plantation-slaves of the farther South. Let
+us remember, in passing judgement on what is admittedly
+an indefensible system, that during the war which
+resulted in the freeing of the American slaves the slaveholders
+of the South trusted their household slaves to
+protect the women and children during their absence from
+home and that that trust was nowhere betrayed. There
+is another side to <i>Uncle Tom's Cabin</i> as surely as there is
+another side to Mr. Carnegie's paean of modern industrialism
+in his <i>Triumphant Democracy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Systems of serfdom or caste which bind the workman
+to his work without permitting him to be sold like a slave
+may be regarded as one step higher than slavery proper.
+Such systems are common in stable and custom-bound
+countries, and persisted throughout the European Middle
+Ages. We need not describe how the rising tide of change
+gradually broke up the system in this country and left the
+old-time villein a free but often a landless and property less
+man. The transition from serfdom to the system of
+wage-labour which succeeded it was a transition from
+legal dependence to legal freedom, and as such it marked
+an advance. But it was also a transition from a fixed
+and, as it were, a professional position of service to the
+community to a blind and precarious individualism. It
+was a transition, as Sir Henry Maine put it, from status to
+contract. This famous nineteenth-century aphorism is
+eloquent of the limitations of that too purely commercial
+age. Every thinking man would admit to-day that
+status at its best is a better thing than contract at its
+best&mdash;that the soldier is a nobler figure than the army
+contractor, and that corporate feeling and professional
+honour are a better stimulus to right action than business
+competition and a laudable keenness to give satisfaction<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_220" id="Page_220">[220]</a></span>
+to a valuable customer. We have always suffered from
+the temptation in this country of adapting business
+methods and ideals to politics rather than political
+ideals and methods to business. Our eighteenth-century
+thinkers explained citizenship itself, not as a duty to our
+neighbours but as the fulfilment of an unwritten contract.
+Our nineteenth-century legal writers elevated the idea
+of free contract almost to an industrial ideal; while, in
+somewhat the same spirit, the gutter journalists of to-day,
+when they are at a loss for a popular watchword, call for
+a business government. Such theories and battle-cries
+may serve for a 'nation of shopkeepers'; but that
+opprobrious phrase has never been true of the great
+mass of the English people, and it was never less true
+than to-day.</p>
+
+<p>The idea of industrial work as the fulfilment of a contract,
+whether freely or forcibly made, is thus essentially
+at variance with the ideal of community service. It is
+difficult for a man who makes his livelihood by hiring
+himself out as an individual for what he can get out of
+one piece of work after another to feel the same sense
+of community service or professional pride as the man
+who is serving a vocation and has dedicated his talents
+to some continuous and recognized form of work. It
+is this which makes the system of wage-labour so unsatisfactory
+in principle compared with the guilds of the
+town workmen in the Middle Ages and with the organized
+professions of to-day; and it is this which explains why
+trade unions of recent years have come to concern
+themselves more and more with questions of status rather
+than of wages and to regard the occupation which they
+represent more and more as a profession rather than a
+trade. No one has laid bare the deficiencies of the wage-system
+more clearly than Adam Smith in the famous
+chapter in which he foreshadows the principle of collective<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_221" id="Page_221">[221]</a></span>
+bargaining. 'What are the common wages of labour',
+he there remarks,<a name="FNanchor_79_79" id="FNanchor_79_79"></a><a href="#Footnote_79_79" class="fnanchor">[79]</a></p>
+
+<div class="blockquot"><p>'depends everywhere upon the contract usually made
+between those two parties, whose interests are by no
+means the same. The workmen desire to get as much,
+the masters to give as little, as possible. The former
+are disposed to combine in order to raise, the latter
+in order to lower, the wages of labour.... We rarely
+hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters,
+though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever
+imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine
+is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are
+always and everywhere in a sort of tacit but constant and
+uniform combination not to raise the wages of labour
+above their actual rate. To violate this combination is
+everywhere a most unpopular action and a sort of reproach
+to a master among his neighbours and equals. We seldom,
+indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the usual,
+and one may say, the natural state of things which
+nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into
+particular combinations to sink the wages of labour
+even below this rate. These are always conducted with
+the utmost secrecy till the moment of execution; and,
+when the workmen yield, as they sometimes do without
+resistance, though severely felt by them, they are never
+heard of by other people. Such combinations, however,
+are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination
+of the workmen, who sometimes, too, without any
+provocation of this kind, combine of their own accord to
+raise the price of labour. Their usual pretences are,
+sometimes the high price of provisions, sometimes the
+great profit which their masters make by their work.'</p></div>
+
+<p>These words were written 140 years ago, but, as we all
+know, they are still true of the working of the system
+to-day. Indeed the war has served to emphasize their
+truth by showing us how deeply entrenched are the habits
+of bargaining and of latent antagonism which the working<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_222" id="Page_222">[222]</a></span>
+of the wage-system has engendered. It is the defect of
+the wage-system, as Adam Smith makes clear to us, that
+it lays stress on just those points in the industrial process
+where the interests of employers and workpeople
+run contrary to one another, whilst obscuring those far
+more important aspects in which they are partners and
+fellow-workers in the service of the community. This
+defect cannot be overcome by strengthening one party
+to the contract at the expense of the other, by crushing
+trade unions or dissolving employers' combinations, or
+even by establishing the principle of collective bargaining.
+It can only be overcome by the recognition on both sides
+that industry is in essence not a matter of contract and
+bargaining at all, but of mutual interdependence and
+community service: and by the growth of a new ideal
+of status, a new sense of professional pride and corporate
+duty and self-respect among all who are engaged in the
+same function. No one can say how long it may take
+to bring about such a fundamental change of attitude,
+especially among those who have most to lose, in the
+material sense, by an alteration in the existing distribution
+of economic power. But the war has cleared away so
+much of prejudice and set so much of our life in a new
+light that the dim ideals of to-day may well be the
+realities of to-morrow. This at least we can say: that no
+country in the world is in a better position than we are
+to redeem modern industry from the reproach of materialism
+and to set it firmly upon a spiritual basis, and that
+the country which shall first have had the wisdom and
+the courage to do so will be the pioneer in a vast extension
+of human liberty and happiness and will have shown
+that along this road and no other lies the industrial
+progress of mankind.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books for Reference</span></h3><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_223" id="Page_223">[223]</a></span></p>
+
+<div class='center'>
+<table border="0" cellpadding="4" cellspacing="0" summary="Books3">
+<tr><td align='left'>1.</td><td align='left'><i>Economics</i>:</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>H. Clay, <i>Economics for the General Reader</i>. 1916.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Ruskin, <i>Unto this last</i>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Smart, <i>Second Thoughts of an Economist</i>. 1916.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>2.</td><td align='left'><i>Man and his Tools</i>:</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Marvin, <i>The Living Past</i>. 1913.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>F. W. Taylor, <i>The Principles of Scientific Management</i>. 1911.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Hoxie, <i>Scientific Management and Labour</i>. 1916.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'>3.</td><td align='left'><i>Industrial Government</i>:</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Aristotle, <i>Politics</i> (Book I, chapters on Slavery).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Zimmern, <i>The Greek Commonwealth</i> (chapters on Slavery). 1911.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Ashley, <i>The Economic Organization of England</i>. 1914.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Unwin, <i>Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries</i>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>S. and B. Webb, <i>The History of Trade Unionism</i>.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Macgregor, <i>The Evolution of Industry</i> (Home University Library).</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>Wallas, <i>The Great Society</i>. 1914.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'>G. D. H. Cole, <i>The World of Labour</i>. 1915.</td></tr>
+<tr><td align='left'></td><td align='left'><i>Round Table, June 1916 (Article on the Labour Movement and the Future of British Industry).</i></td></tr>
+</table></div>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_67_67" id="Footnote_67_67"></a><a href="#FNanchor_67_67"><span class="label">[67]</span></a> Including the well-being of the producers&mdash;a point which is
+too often overlooked.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_68_68" id="Footnote_68_68"></a><a href="#FNanchor_68_68"><span class="label">[68]</span></a> On this point see <i>Poverty and Waste</i>, by Hartley Withers, 1914,
+written before the war, which has driven its lessons home.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_69_69" id="Footnote_69_69"></a><a href="#FNanchor_69_69"><span class="label">[69]</span></a> <i>The Living Past</i>, pp. 20, 21.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_70_70" id="Footnote_70_70"></a><a href="#FNanchor_70_70"><span class="label">[70]</span></a> <i>Second Thoughts of an Economist</i>, p. 89.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_71_71" id="Footnote_71_71"></a><a href="#FNanchor_71_71"><span class="label">[71]</span></a> <i>Principles of Economics</i>, vol. i, p. 11. It is interesting to note
+that in his latest book, <i>Inventors and Money-making, lectures on
+some relations between Economics and Psychology</i> (1915), Professor
+Taussig to some extent goes back upon the point of view of the
+extract given above.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_72_72" id="Footnote_72_72"></a><a href="#FNanchor_72_72"><span class="label">[72]</span></a> A similar inquiry on a much larger scale was made by Adolf
+Levinstein in his book <i>Die Arbeiterfrage</i> (Munich, 1910). He
+examined 4,000 workpeople, consisting of coalminers, cotton
+operatives, and engineers. With the exception of a few turners
+and fitters almost all replied that they found little or no pleasure
+in their work.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_73_73" id="Footnote_73_73"></a><a href="#FNanchor_73_73"><span class="label">[73]</span></a> <i>The Great Society</i>, p. 363.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_74_74" id="Footnote_74_74"></a><a href="#FNanchor_74_74"><span class="label">[74]</span></a> Especially the wonderful results obtained from the young
+criminals at the Little Commonwealth in Dorsetshire.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_75_75" id="Footnote_75_75"></a><a href="#FNanchor_75_75"><span class="label">[75]</span></a> See <i>Readings in Vocational Guidance</i> by Meyer Bloomfield
+(Boston, 1915).</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_76_76" id="Footnote_76_76"></a><a href="#FNanchor_76_76"><span class="label">[76]</span></a> <i>Lucy Bettesworth</i>, pp. 178-80, and 214-16.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_77_77" id="Footnote_77_77"></a><a href="#FNanchor_77_77"><span class="label">[77]</span></a> This sentence is practically an unconscious paraphrase of
+a passage from Aristotle's defence of slavery.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_78_78" id="Footnote_78_78"></a><a href="#FNanchor_78_78"><span class="label">[78]</span></a> <i>The Welsh Outlook</i>, August 1916, p. 272.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_79_79" id="Footnote_79_79"></a><a href="#FNanchor_79_79"><span class="label">[79]</span></a> <i>Wealth of Nations</i>, Book I, ch. viii.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_224" id="Page_224">[224]</a></span></p>
+<h2>IX</h2>
+
+<h2>PROGRESS IN ART</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">A. Clutton Brock</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>It is often said that there can be no such thing as
+progress in art. At one time the arts flourish, at another
+they decay: but, as Whistler put it, art happens as
+men of genius happen; and men cannot make it happen.
+They cannot discover what circumstances favour art,
+and therefore they cannot attempt to produce those
+circumstances. There are periods of course in which the
+arts, or some one particular art, progress. One generation
+may excel the last; through several generations an art
+may seem to be rushing to its consummation. This
+happened with Greek sculpture and the Greek drama
+in the sixth and fifth centuries; with architecture and
+all kindred arts in western Europe in the twelfth and
+thirteenth centuries, and at the same time with many arts
+in China. It happened with painting and sculpture in
+Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with
+literature in England in the sixteenth century, with
+music in Germany in the eighteenth century and the
+beginning of the nineteenth. But in all these cases there
+followed a decline, often quite unconscious at the time
+and one of which we cannot discover the causes. Attempts
+are made by historians of the arts to state the causes;
+but they satisfy only those who make them, for they are,
+in fact, only statements of the symptoms of decline.
+They tell us what happened, not why it happened. And
+they all seem to point to two conclusions about the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_225" id="Page_225">[225]</a></span>
+course of the arts, both of which would make us despair
+of any settled progress in them. The first is that the
+practice of any art by any particular people always
+follows a certain natural course of growth, culmination,
+and decay. At least it always follows this course where
+an art is practised naturally and therefore with success.
+Art in fact, in its actual manifestations, is like the life
+of an individual human being and subject to inexorable
+natural laws. It is born, as men are born, without the
+exercise of will; and in the same way it passes through
+youth, maturity, and old age. The second conclusion
+follows from this, and it is that one nation or age cannot
+take up an art where another has left it. That is where
+art seems to differ from science. The mass of knowledge
+acquired in one country can, if that country loses energy
+to apply or increase it, be utilized by another. But we
+cannot so make use of the art of the Greeks or of the
+Italian Renaissance or of our own Middle Ages. In the
+Gothic revival we tried to make use of the art of the
+Middle Ages and we failed disastrously. We imitated
+without understanding, and we could not understand
+because we were not ourselves living in the Middle Ages.
+Art, in fact, is always a growth of its own time which
+cannot be transplanted, and no one can tell why it
+grows in one time and among one people and not in
+another.</p>
+
+<p>That is what we are always told, and yet we never
+quite believe all of it. For, as art is a product of the human
+mind, it must also be a product of the human will, unless
+it is altogether unconscious like a dream. But that it is
+not; for men produce it in their waking hours and with
+the conscious exercise of their faculties. If a man paints
+a picture he does so because he wants to paint one. He
+exercises will and choice in all his actions, and the man
+who buys a picture does the same. We talk of inspiration<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_226" id="Page_226">[226]</a></span>
+in the arts as something that cannot be commanded, but
+there is also inspiration in the sciences. No man can
+make a scientific discovery by the pure exercise of his will.
+It jumps into one mind and not into another just like an
+artistic inspiration. And further we are taught and trained
+in the arts as in the sciences; and success in both depends
+a great deal upon the nature of the training. In both
+good training will not give genius or inspiration to those
+who are without it; but it will enable those who possess
+it to make the most of it; and, what is more, it will
+enable even the mediocre to produce work of some value.
+What strikes us most about the Florentine school of
+painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the
+fact that its second-rate painters are so good, that
+we can enjoy their works even when they are merely
+imitative. But the Florentine school excelled all others
+of the time in its teaching; most painters of other
+schools in Italy learnt from Florence; and the inspiration
+came to them from Florence, they were quickened from
+Florence, however much their art kept its own natural
+character. But this school which had the best teaching
+also produced the most painters of genius. Its level was
+higher and its heights were higher; and for this reason,
+that the whole Florentine intellect went both into the
+teaching and into the practice of painting and sculpture.
+The Florentine was able to put all his mind, the scientific
+faculties as well as the aesthetic, into his art. He never
+relied merely on his temperament or his mood. He was
+eager for knowledge. It was not enough for him to paint
+things as he saw them; he tried to discover how they
+were made, what were the laws of their growth and
+construction; and his knowledge of these things changed
+the character of his vision, made him see the human body,
+for instance, as no mediaeval artist had ever seen it;
+made him see it as an engineer sees a machine. Just<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_227" id="Page_227">[227]</a></span>
+as an engineer sees more in a machine than a man who
+does not understand its working, so the Florentine saw
+more in the human body than a mediaeval artist. He saw
+it with a scientific as well as an aesthetic passion, and all
+this science of his enriched his art so that there has never
+since been drawing like the Florentine, drawing at once
+so logical and so expressive.</p>
+
+<p>The Florentines in fact did exercise their will upon their
+art more than any other modern artists, more, perhaps,
+than any other artists known to us, and their painting
+and sculpture were the greatest of the modern world.
+Yet the fact remains that Florentine art declined suddenly
+and irresistibly, and that all the Florentine intellect, which
+still remained remarkable and produced men of science
+like Galileo, could not arrest that decline. Indeed the
+Florentines themselves seem not to have been conscious
+of it. They thought that the dull imitators of Michelangelo
+were greater than his great predecessors. As we
+say, their taste became bad, their values were perverted;
+and with that perversion all their natural genius for the
+arts was wasted. To this day Carlo Dolci is the favourite
+painter of the ordinary Florentine. He was a man of
+some ability, and he painted pictures at once feeble and
+revolting because he himself and his public liked such
+pictures.</p>
+
+<p>There is no accounting for tastes, we say, and in saying
+that we despair of progress in the arts. For it is ultimately
+this unaccountable thing called taste, and not the absence
+or presence of genius, which determines whether the arts
+shall thrive or decay in any particular age or country.
+People often say that they know nothing about art, but
+that they do know what they like; and what they imply
+is that there is nothing to be known about art except
+your own likes and dislikes, and further that no man can
+control those. The Florentines of the seventeenth century<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_228" id="Page_228">[228]</a></span>
+happened to like Carlo Dolci, where the Florentines of the
+fifteenth had liked Botticelli. That is the only explanation
+we can give of the decline of Florentine painting.</p>
+
+<p>It is of course no explanation; and because no explanation
+beyond it has been given, we are told that there can
+be no such thing as progress in the arts. That is the
+lesson of history. We are far beyond the Egyptians in
+science, but certainly not beyond them in art. Indeed
+one might say that there has been a continual slow
+decline in all the arts of Europe, except music, since the
+year 1500, and that music itself has been slowly declining
+since the death of Beethoven. But with this slow inexorable
+decline of the arts there has been a great advance
+in nearly everything else, in knowledge, in power, even
+in morality. Upon everything man has been able to
+exercise his will except upon the arts. Where he has
+really wished for progress there he has got it, except in
+this one case. Therefore it seems that upon the arts he
+cannot exercise his will, and that they alone of all his
+activities are not capable of progress. What do we mean
+by progress except the successful exercise of the human will
+in a right direction? That is what distinguishes progress
+from natural growth; that alone can preserve it from
+natural processes of decay. There are people who say
+that it does not exist, that everything which happens
+to man is a natural process of growth or decay. Whether
+that is so or not, we do mean by progress something
+different from these natural processes. When we speak
+of it we do imply the exercise of the human will, man's
+command over circumstances; and those who deny
+progress altogether deny that man has any will or any
+command over circumstances. For them things happen
+to man and that is all, it is not man's will that makes
+things happen. But if we use the word progress at all,
+we imply that it is man's will that makes things happen.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_229" id="Page_229">[229]</a></span>
+And since man is evidently liable to decline as well as
+progress, it follows that if we believe man to be capable
+of exercising his will in a right direction we must also
+believe that he can and does exercise it in a wrong direction.
+I assume that man has this power both for good and for
+evil. If I did not, I should not be addressing you upon the
+question whether man is capable of progress in the arts,
+but upon the question whether he is capable of progress
+at all. And I should be trying to prove that he is not.</p>
+
+<p>As it is, the question I have to discuss is whether he
+has the power of exercising for good or evil his will upon
+the arts as upon other things; and hitherto I have been
+giving you certain facts in the history of the arts which
+seem to prove that he is not. They all amount to
+this&mdash;that man has not hitherto succeeded in exercising
+his will upon the arts; that he has not produced
+good art because he wished to produce it. We, for
+instance, wish to excel in the arts; we have far more
+power than the ancient Greeks or Egyptians; but we
+have not been able to apply that power to the
+arts. In them we are conscious of a strange impotence.
+We cannot build like our forefathers of the
+Middle Ages, we cannot make furniture like our great-grandfathers
+of the eighteenth century. Go into an old
+churchyard and look at the tombstones of the past and
+present. You will see that the lettering is always fine
+up to the first generation of the nineteenth century.
+In that generation there is a rapid decline; and since
+about 1830 there has been no decent lettering upon
+tombstones except what has been produced in the last
+ten years or so by the conscious effort of a few individual
+artists of great natural talent and high training. If I want
+good lettering on a tombstone I have to employ one of
+these artists and to pay him a high price for his talent
+and his training. But that is only one example of a<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_230" id="Page_230">[230]</a></span>
+universal decline in all the arts of use, a decline which
+happened roughly between the years 1800 and 1830.
+And the significant fact about it is that when it happened
+no one was aware of it. So far as I know, this artistic
+catastrophe, far the swiftest and most universal known
+to us in the whole course of history, was never even
+mentioned in contemporary literature. The poets, the
+lovers of beauty, did not speak of it. They talked
+about nature, not about art. There is not a hint of it in
+the letters of Shelley or Keats. There is just a hint of
+it in some sayings of Blake; but that is all. One would
+suppose that such a catastrophe would have filled the
+minds of all men who were not entirely occupied with
+the struggle for life, that all would have seen that a glory
+was passing away from the earth, and would have made
+some desperate struggle to preserve it. But, as I say,
+they saw nothing of it. They were not aware that a universal
+ugliness was taking the place of beauty in all things
+made by man; and therefore the new ugliness must
+have pleased them as much as the old beauty. So it
+appears once again that there is no accounting for tastes,
+and no test that we can apply to them. When science
+declines, men at least know that they have less power.
+They are more subject to pestilence when they forget
+medicine and sanitation; their machines become useless
+to them when they no longer know how to work them;
+there is anarchy when they lose their political goodwill.
+But when their taste decays they do not know that it
+has decayed. And with it decays their artistic capacity, so
+that, quite complacently, they lose the power of doing
+decently a thousand things that their fathers did excellently.</p>
+
+<p>But here suddenly I am brought to a stop by a new
+fact in human history. The arts have declined, but our
+complacency over their decline has ceased. The first<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_231" id="Page_231">[231]</a></span>
+man who disturbed it was Ruskin. It was he who saw
+the catastrophe that had happened. Suddenly he was
+aware of it; suddenly he escaped from the universal
+tyranny of the bad taste of his time. He was the first
+to deny that there was no accounting for tastes; the first
+to deny, indeed, that the ordinary man did know what he
+liked. And he was followed with more knowledge and
+practical power, in fact with more science, by William
+Morris. What both of these great men really said was
+that taste is not unaccountable; that the mass of men
+do not know what they like, that they do not apply
+their intellect and will to what they suppose to be
+their likes and dislikes, and that they could apply their
+intellect and will to these things if they chose.</p>
+
+<p>When we say that there is no accounting for tastes
+we imply that tastes are always real, that, whether good
+or bad, they happen to men without any exercise of their
+will. But Ruskin and Morris implied that we must
+exercise our will and our intelligence to discover what our
+tastes really are; that this discovery is not at all easy,
+but that, if we do not make it, we are at the mercy, not
+of our own real tastes, but of an unreal thing which is
+called the public taste, or of equally unreal reactions
+against it. We think that we like what we suppose other
+people to like, and these other people too think that they
+like what no one really likes. Or in mere blind reaction
+we think that we dislike what the mob likes. But in
+either case our likes and dislikes are not ours at all and,
+what is more, they are no one's. Taste in fact is bad
+because it is not any one's taste, because no one's will
+is exercised in it or upon it. When it is good, it is always
+real taste, that is to say some real person's taste. In
+the work of art the artist does what he really likes to do
+and expresses some real passion of his own, not some
+passion which he believes that he, as an artist, ought to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_232" id="Page_232">[232]</a></span>
+express. Art, said Morris, is the expression of the workman's
+pleasure in his work. It cannot be real art unless
+it is a real pleasure. And so the public will not demand real
+art unless they too take a real pleasure in it. If they do
+not know what they really like, they will not demand
+of the artist what they really like or what he really
+likes. They will demand something tiresome and insincere,
+and by the tyranny of their demand will set him to
+produce it.</p>
+
+<p>That was what happened at the beginning of the nineteenth
+century in nearly all the arts and especially in
+the arts of use. It had happened before in different ages
+and countries, especially in painting, sculpture, architecture,
+and the arts of use as they were patronized by the
+vulgar rich, such as the court of Louis XV. But now it
+happened suddenly and universally to all arts. There
+were no longer vulgar rich only but also vulgar poor and
+vulgar middle-classes. Everywhere there spread a kind
+of aesthetic snobbery which obscured real tastes. Of
+this I will give one simple and homely example. The
+beautiful flowers of the cottage garden were no longer
+grown in the gardens of the well-to-do, because they were
+the flowers of the poor. Instead were grown lobelias,
+geraniums, and calceolarias, combined in a hideous
+mixture, not because any one thought them more beautiful,
+but because, since they were grown in green-houses,
+they implied the possession of green-houses and so of
+wealth. They did not, of course, even do that, since they
+could be bought very cheaply from nurserymen. They
+implied only the bad taste of snobbery which is the absence
+of all real taste. For it is physically impossible for any
+one to like such a combination of plants better than
+larkspurs and lilies and roses. What they did enjoy
+was not the flowers themselves but their association with
+gentility. But so strong was the contagion of this associa<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_233" id="Page_233">[233]</a></span>tion
+that cottagers themselves began to throw away
+their beautiful cottage-garden flowers and to grow these
+plants, so detestable in combination. And to this day
+one can see often in cottage gardens pathetic imitations
+of a taste that never was real and which now is discredited
+among the rich, so that a border of lobelias, calceolarias,
+and geraniums has become a mark of social inferiority as
+it was once one of social superiority. But what it never
+was and never could be was an expression of a genuine
+liking.</p>
+
+<p>Now I owe the very fact that I am able to give this
+account of a simple perversion of taste to Ruskin and
+Morris. It was they who first made the world aware
+that its taste was perverted and that most of its art was
+therefore bad. It was they who filled us with the conviction
+of artistic sin, and who also in a manner entirely
+scientific tried to discover what was the nature of this
+sin and how it had come about. First Ruskin tentatively,
+and afterwards Morris systematically and out of his own
+vast artistic experience, connected this decay of the arts
+with certain social conditions. It was not merely that
+taste had decayed or that the arts had developed to
+a point beyond which there was nothing for them but
+decline. Morris insisted that there were causes for the
+decay of taste and the decline of the arts, causes as much
+subject to the will of man as the causes of any kind of
+social decay or iniquity. He insisted that a work of art
+is not an irrational mystery, not something that happens
+and may happen well or ill; but that all art is intimately
+connected with the whole of our social well-being. It is
+in fact an expression of what we value, and if we value
+noble things it will be noble, if we pretend to value base
+things it will be base.</p>
+
+<p>Whistler said that this was not so. He insisted that
+genius is born, not made, and that some peoples have<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_234" id="Page_234">[234]</a></span>
+artistic capacity, some have not. Now it is true that
+nations vary very much in their artistic capacity and in
+the strength of their desire to produce art. But even the
+nations which have little artistic capacity and little desire
+to produce art have in their more primitive state produced
+charming works of real art. Whistler gave the case of
+the Swiss as an excellent people with little capacity for
+art. But the old Swiss chalets are full of character and
+beauty, and there are churches in Switzerland which have
+all the beauty of the Middle Ages. The cuckoo clocks
+and other Swiss articles of commerce which Whistler
+despised are contemptible, not because they are Swiss,
+but because they are tourist trash produced by workmen
+who express no pleasure of their own in them for visitors
+who buy them only because they think they are characteristic
+of Switzerland. They are, in fact, not the expression
+of any genuine taste or liking whatever, like the tourist
+trash that is sold in the Rue de Rivoli. Probably the
+Swiss would never be capable of producing works of art like
+Chartres Cathedral or Don Giovanni, but they have in the
+past possessed a genuine and delightful art of their own
+like nearly every European nation in the Middle Ages.</p>
+
+<p>So, though genius is born, it is also made, and though
+nations differ in artistic capacity, they all have some
+artistic capacity so long as they know what they like and
+express only their own liking in their art, so long as they
+are not infected with artistic snobbism or commercialism.
+This we know now, and we have developed a new and
+remarkable power of seeing and enjoying all the genuine
+art of the past. This power is part of the historical sense
+which is itself modern. In the past, until the nineteenth
+century, very few people could see any beauty or meaning
+in any art of the past that did not resemble the art of
+their own time and country. The whole art of the
+Middle Ages, for instance, was thought to be merely<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_235" id="Page_235">[235]</a></span>
+barbarous until the Gothic revival, and so was the art of
+all the past so far as it was known, except the later art
+of Greece and Rome. For our ancestors' taste did indeed
+happen as art happened, and they could not escape
+from the taste which circumstances imposed on them; any
+art that was not according to that taste was for them as
+it were in an unknown tongue. But we have made this
+great progress in taste, at least, if not in the production
+of art, that we can understand nearly all artistic languages,
+and that what used to be called classical art has lost its
+old superstitious prestige for us. Not only can we enjoy
+the art of our own Middle Ages; but many of us can enjoy
+and understand just as well the great art of Egypt and
+China, and can see as clearly when that art is good or
+bad as if it were of our own time. We have, in fact,
+in the matter of artistic appreciation gained the freedom
+of all the ages, and this is a thing that has never, so far
+as we know, happened before in the history of the human
+mind.</p>
+
+<p>But still this freedom of all the ages has not enabled
+us to produce a great art of our own. There are some,
+indeed, who think that it has hindered us from doing so,
+that we are becoming merely universal connoisseurs
+who can criticize anything and produce nothing. We
+have the most wonderful museums that ever were, and
+the most wonderful power of enjoying all that is in them,
+but, with all our riches from the past, our present is barren;
+and it is barren because our rich men would rather pay
+great prices for past treasures than encourage artists
+to produce masterpieces now. If that is so, if that is all
+that is coming to us from our freedom of all the ages,
+there is certainly not progress in it. Better that we should
+produce and enjoy the humblest genuine art of our own
+than that we should continue in this learned impotence.</p>
+
+<p>But this power of enjoying the art of all ages, though it<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_236" id="Page_236">[236]</a></span>
+certainly has had some unfortunate results, must be good
+in itself. It is sympathy, and that is always better than
+indifference or antipathy. It is knowledge, and that is
+always better than ignorance. And we have to remember
+that it has existed only for a short time and is, therefore,
+not yet to be judged by its fruits. We are still gasping
+at all the artistic treasures of the past that have been
+revealed to us like a new world; and still they are being
+revealed to our new perceptions. Only in the last ten
+years, for instance, have we discovered that Chinese
+painting is the rival of Italian, or that the golden age of
+Chinese pottery was centuries before the time of that
+Chinese porcelain which we have hitherto admired so
+much. The knowledge, the delight, is still being gathered
+in with both hands. It is too soon to look for its effects
+upon the mind of Europe.</p>
+
+<p>But it is not the result of mere barren connoisseurship
+or scholasticism. Rather it is a new renaissance, a new
+effort of the human spirit, and an effort after what? An
+effort to exert the human will in the matter of art far more
+consciously than it has exerted ever before. It is to
+be noted that Morris himself, the man who first told us
+that we must exert our wills in art, was also himself
+eager in the discovery and enjoyment of all kinds of art
+in the past. He had his prejudices, the prejudices of
+a very wilful man and a working artist. 'What can I
+see in Rome,' he said, 'that I cannot see in Whitechapel?'
+But he enjoyed the art of most ages and countries more
+than he enjoyed his prejudices. He had the historical
+sense in art to a very high degree. He knew what the artist
+long dead meant by his work as if it were a poem in his
+own language, and from the art of the past which he loved
+he saw what was wrong with the art of our time. So did
+Ruskin and so do many now. Further we are not in the
+least content to admire the art of the past without<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_237" id="Page_237">[237]</a></span>
+producing any of our own. There is incessant restless
+experiment, incessant speculation about aesthetics, incessant
+effort to apply them to the actual production of
+art, in fact to exert the conscious human will upon art
+as it has never been exerted before.</p>
+
+<p>So, if one wished in a sentence to state the peculiarity
+of the last century in the history of art, one would say
+that it is the first age in which men have rebelled against
+the process of decadence in art, in which they have been
+completely conscious of that process and have tried to
+arrest it by a common effort of will. We cannot yet say
+that that effort has succeeded, but we cannot say either
+that it has failed. We may be discontented with the art
+of our own time, but at least we must allow that it is, with
+all its faults, extravagances, morbidities and blind experiments,
+utterly unlike the art of any former age of decadence
+known to us. There may be confusion and anarchy,
+but there is not mere pedantry and stagnation. Artists
+perhaps are over-conscious, always following some new
+prophet, but at least there is the conviction of sin in them,
+which is exactly what all the decadent artists of the past
+have lacked.</p>
+
+<p>The artistic decadence of the past which is most
+familiar to us is that of the later Graeco-Roman art.
+It was a long process which began at least as early as the
+age of Alexander and continued until the fall of the
+Western Roman Empire and afterwards, until, indeed,
+the decadent classical art was utterly supplanted by the
+art which we call Romanesque and Byzantine, and which
+seems to us now at its best to be as great as any art that
+has ever been.</p>
+
+<p>But a hundred years ago this Romanesque and Byzantine
+art was thought to be only a barbarous corruption
+of the classical art. For then the classical art even in
+its last feebleness still kept its immense and unique<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_238" id="Page_238">[238]</a></span>
+prestige. Shelley said that the effect of Christianity
+seemed to have been to destroy the last remains of pure
+taste, and he said this when he had been looking at the
+great masterpieces of Byzantine mosaic at Ravenna.
+Now we know with an utter certainty that he was wrong.
+He was himself a great artist, but to him there was only
+one rational and beautiful and civilized art, and that was
+the decadent Graeco-Roman art. To him works like the
+Apollo Belvedere were the masterpieces of the world, and
+all other art was good as it resembled them. He and in
+fact most people of his time were still overawed by the
+immense complacency of that art. They had not the
+historical sense at all. They had no notion of certain
+psychological facts about art which are now familiar to
+every educated man. They did not know that art cannot
+be good unless it expresses the character of the people
+who produce it; that characterless art, however accomplished,
+is uninteresting; that there may be more life and
+so more beauty in the idol of an African savage than in
+the Laocoon.</p>
+
+<p>This later Greek and Graeco-Roman art was doomed
+to inevitable decay because of its immense complacency.
+The artists had discovered, as they thought, the right
+way to produce works of art, and they went on producing
+them in that way without asking themselves whether
+they meant anything by them or whether they enjoyed
+them. They knew, in fact, what was the proper thing
+to do just as conventional people now know what is the
+proper thing to talk about at a tea party; and their art
+was as uninteresting as the conversation of such people.
+In both the talk and the art there is no expression of real
+values and so no expression of real will. The past lies
+heavy upon both. So people have talked, so artists have
+worked, and so evidently people must talk and artists
+must work for evermore.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_239" id="Page_239">[239]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Now we have been threatened with just the same kind
+of artistic decadence, and we are still threatened with it;
+so that it would be very easy to argue that, when men
+reach a certain stage in that organization of their lives
+which we call civilization, they must inevitably fall into
+artistic decadence. The Roman Empire did attain to
+a high stage of such organization, and all the life went
+out of its art. We have reached perhaps a still higher or
+at least more elaborate stage of it, and the life has gone
+or is going out of our art. It has become even more
+mechanical than the Graeco-Roman. We, too, have lost
+the power of expressing ourselves, our real values, our
+real will, in it; and we had better submit to that impotence
+and not make a fuss about it. Indeed art really is
+an activity proper to a more childish stage of the human
+mind, and we shall do well not to waste our time and
+energy upon it. That is the only way in which we can be
+superior to the Graeco-Roman world in the matter of art.
+We can give it up altogether or rather put it all into
+museums as a curiosity of the past to be studied for
+historical and scientific purposes.</p>
+
+<p>But I have only to say that to prove that we will not
+be contented with such a counsel of despair. The Romans
+went on producing art, even if it was bad art, and we
+shall certainly go on producing art whether it is good or
+bad. We have produced an immense mass of bad art,
+worse perhaps than any that the Roman world produced.
+But there is this difference between us and the Romans,
+that we are not content with it. We have the conviction
+of artistic sin and they had not. Therefore we do not
+think that their example need make us despair. They
+were not exercising their will on their art. It was to
+them what a purely conventional morality is to a morally
+decadent people. It went from bad to worse, just as
+conventional morals do, when no man arises and says:<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_240" id="Page_240">[240]</a></span>
+'This is wrong, although you think it right. I know what
+is right from my own sense of values, and I will do it in
+spite of you.' So far as we know, there were no rebels
+of that kind in the art of the Graeco-Roman world. But
+our world of art is full of such rebels and has been ever
+since the artistic debacle at the beginning of the nineteenth
+century. In fact the chief and the unique characteristic
+of the art of the last hundred years has been the
+constant succession of artistic rebels. All our greatest
+artists have been men who were determined to exercise
+their own wills in their art, whatever the mass of men
+might think of it. And what has always happened is that
+they have been first bitterly abused and then passionately
+praised. This, so far as I know, has never happened
+before. There have been rebel artists like Rembrandt,
+but only a few of them. Most great artists before the
+nineteenth century have been admired in their own time.
+But in the nineteenth century, and more and more
+towards the end of it, the great artists have had to
+conquer the world with their rebellion, they have had to
+exercise their own individual wills against the common
+convention. And it seems to us now the mark of the
+great artist so to exercise his individual will, so to rebel
+and conquer the world with his rebellion, even if he kills
+himself in the process. Think of Constable and even
+Turner, of our pre-Raphaelites, and above all of nearly
+all the great French artists, of Millet, of Manet, of
+Cezanne, Gauguin, of Rodin himself, who has conquered
+the world now, but only in his old age. Think of Beethoven,
+of Schubert, of Wagner, and of all the rebel
+musicians of to-day. But in the past the great artists,
+Michelangelo, Titian, even the great innovator Giorgione;
+Mozart, Bach, Handel; none of these were thought of as
+rebels. They had not to conquer the world against its
+will. They came into the world, and the world knew<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_241" id="Page_241">[241]</a></span>
+them. So, we may be sure, the decadent artists of the
+Graeco-Roman world were not rebels. There they were
+like Michelangelo and Raphael, if they were like them in
+nothing else. If they had been rebels we might not yawn
+at their works now.</p>
+
+<p>Now, clearly, this rebellion is not so good a thing as the
+harmony between the artist and his public which has
+prevailed in all great ages of art. But it is better than
+the harmony of dull and complacent convention which
+prevailed in the Graeco-Roman decadence. For it means
+that our artists are not content with such complacence,
+that they will not accept decadence as an inevitable
+process. And the fact that we do passionately admire
+them for their rebellion as soon as we understand what
+it means, that this rebellion seems to us a glorious and
+heroic thing, is a proof that we, the public, also are not
+content to sink into the Graeco-Roman complacency.
+We may stone our prophets at first, but like the Hebrews,
+we produce prophets as well as priests, that is to say
+academicians. And we treasure their works as the
+Hebrews treasured the books of the prophets.</p>
+
+<p>Art, in fact, is a human activity in which we try to
+exercise our wills. We are aware that it is threatened
+with decadence by the mere process of our civilization,
+that it is much more difficult for us to produce living art
+than it was for our forefathers of the Middle Ages. But
+still we are not content to produce dead art. Half
+unconsciously we are making the effort to exercise our
+wills upon our art, as upon our science, our morals, our
+politics, to avoid decadence in art as we try to avoid it
+in other human activities; and this effort is the great
+experiment, the peculiar feature, of the art of the last
+century.</p>
+
+<p>It is an effort not merely aesthetic but also intellectual.
+There is a great interest in aesthetics and a constant and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_242" id="Page_242">[242]</a></span>
+growing effort to charge them with actual experience
+and to put them to some practical end. In the past they
+have been the most backward, the most futile and barren,
+kind of philosophy because men wrote about them who
+had never really experienced works of art and who saw
+no connexion between their philosophy and the production
+of works of art. They talked about the nature of the
+beautiful, as schoolmen talked about the nature of God.
+And they knew no more about the nature of the beautiful
+from their own experience of it than schoolmen knew
+about the nature of God. But now men are interested
+in the beautiful because they miss it so much in the
+present works of men and because they so passionately
+desire it; and their speculation has the aim of recovering
+it. So aesthetics, whatever some artists in their peculiar
+and pontifical narrowness may say, is of great importance
+now; they are part of the effort which the modern
+world is making to exercise its will in the production of
+works of art, and they are bound, if that effort is
+successful, to have more and more effect upon that
+production.</p>
+
+<p>But is that effort going to be successful? That is
+a question which no one can answer yet. But my object
+is to insist that in our age, because of its effort, an effort
+which has never been made so consciously and resolutely
+before, there is a possibility of a progress in art of the
+same nature as progress in other human activities. If
+we can escape from what has seemed to some men this
+inexorable process of decadence in art, we shall have
+accomplished one of the greatest achievements of the
+human will. We shall have redeemed art from the
+tyranny of mere fate.</p>
+
+<p>What we have to do now is to understand what it is that
+causes decadence in art, we have to apply a conscious
+science to the production of it. We have to see what are<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_243" id="Page_243">[243]</a></span>
+the social causes that produce excellence and decay in it.
+And we have made a great beginning in this. For we are
+all aware that art is not an isolated thing, that it does not
+merely happen, as Whistler said. We know that it is
+a symptom of something right or wrong with the whole
+mind of man and with the circumstances that affect that
+mind. We know at last that there is a connexion between
+the art of man and his intellect and his conscience. It
+was because William Morris saw that connexion that he,
+from being a pure artist, became a socialist and spoke
+at street corners. Such a change, such a waste and
+perversion as it seemed to many, would have been
+impossible in any former age. It was possible and inevitable,
+it was a natural process for Morris in the nineteenth
+century, because he was determined to exercise his will
+upon art, just as men in the past had exercised their will
+upon religion or politics; because he no longer believed
+that art happened as the weather happens and that the
+artist is a charming but irresponsible child swayed
+merely by the caprices of his own private subconsciousness.
+Was he right or wrong? I myself firmly believe
+that he was right. That if man has a will at all, if he is
+not a mere piece of matter moulded by circumstances,
+he has a will in art as in all other things. And, further,
+if he has a common will which can express itself in his
+other activities, in religion or politics, that common will
+must also be able to express itself in art. It has not
+hitherto done so consciously, because man in all periods
+of artistic success has been content to succeed without
+asking why he succeeded, and in all periods of artistic
+failure he has been content to fail without asking why
+he has failed. We have been for long living in a period
+of artistic failure, but we have asked, we are asking
+always more insistently, why we fail. And that is where
+our time differs from any former period of artistic deca<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_244" id="Page_244">[244]</a></span>dence,
+why, I believe, it is not a period of decadence but
+one of experiment, and of experiment which will not be
+wasted, however much it may seem at the moment to
+fail. But if out of all this conscious effort and experiment
+we do arrest the process of decadence, if we do pass from
+failure to success, then we shall have accomplished a progress
+in art such as has never been accomplished before
+even in the greatest ages. For whereas men have never
+been able to learn from the experience of those ages,
+whereas the Greeks and the men of the thirteenth century
+have not taught men how to avoid decadence in art, we
+and our children will teach them how to avoid it. We
+shall then have given a security to art such as it has
+never enjoyed before; and we shall do that by applying
+science to it, by using the conscious intelligence
+upon it.</p>
+
+<p>We may fail, of course, but even so our effort will not
+have been in vain. And some future age in happier
+circumstances may profit by it, and achieve that progress,
+that application of science to art, which we are now
+attempting.</p>
+
+<p>Many people, especially artists, tell us that the attempt
+is a mere absurdity. But ignorance even about art need
+not be eternal. Ignorance is eternal only when it is
+despairing or contented. Twenty years ago many people
+said that men never would be able to fly, yet they are
+flying now because they were resolved to fly. So we are
+more and more resolved to have great art. Every year
+we feel the lack of it more and more. Every year more
+people exercise their wills more and more consciously in
+the effort to achieve it. This, I repeat, has never happened
+before in the history of the world. And the consequence
+is that our art, what real art we have, is unlike any that
+there has been in the world before. It is so strange and
+so rebellious that we ourselves are shocked and amazed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_245" id="Page_245">[245]</a></span>
+by it. Much of it, no doubt, is merely strange and
+rebellious, as much of early Christianity was merely
+strange and rebellious and so provoked the resentment
+and persecution of self-respecting pagans. Every great
+effort of the human mind attracts those who merely
+desire their own salvation, and so it is with the artistic
+effort now. There are cubists and futurists and post-impressionists
+who are as silly as human beings can be,
+because they hope to attain to artistic salvation by
+rushing to extremes. They are religious egotists, in fact,
+and nothing can be more disagreeable than a religious
+egotist. But there were no doubt many of them among
+the early Christians. Yet Christianity was a great creative
+religious effort which came because life and truth had
+died out of the religions of the past, and men could not
+endure to live without life and truth in their religion.
+So now they cannot endure to live without life and truth
+in their art. They are determined to have an art which
+shall express all that they have themselves experienced
+of the beauty of the universe, which shall not merely
+utter platitudes of the past about that beauty.</p>
+
+<p>So far perhaps there is little but the effort at expression,
+an effort strange, contorted, self-conscious. You can
+say your worst about it and laugh at all its failures. Yet
+they are failures different in kind from the artistic failures
+of the past, for they are failures of the conscious will, not
+of mere complacency. And it is such failures in all human
+activities that prepare the way for successes.</p>
+
+<p>Let us remember then, always, that art is a human
+activity, not a fairy chance that happens to the mind of
+man now and again. And let us remember, too, that it
+does not consist merely of pictures or statues or of music
+performed in concert-rooms. It is, indeed, rather a quality
+of all things made by man, a quality that may be good
+or bad but which is always in them. That is one of the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_246" id="Page_246">[246]</a></span>
+facts about art that was discovered in the nineteenth
+century, when men began to miss the excellence of art in
+all their works and to wish passionately that its excellence
+might return to them. And this discovery which was
+then made about art was of the greatest practical importance.
+For then men became aware that they could not
+have good pictures or architecture or sculpture unless
+the quality of art became good again in all their works.
+So much they learnt about the science of art. They
+began, or some of them did, to think about their furniture
+and cottages and pots and pans and spoons and forks,
+and even about their tombstones, as well as about what
+had been called their works of art. And in all these
+humbler things an advance, a conscious resolute wilful
+advance, has been made. We begin to see when and also
+why spoons and forks and pots and pans are good or bad.
+We are less at the mercy of chance or blind fashion in
+such things than our fathers were. We know our vulgarity
+and the naughtiness of our own hearts. The advance,
+the self-knowledge, is not general yet, but it grows more
+general every year and the conviction of sin spreads.
+No doubt, like all conviction of sin, it often produces
+unpleasant results. The consciously artistic person often
+has a more irritating house than his innocently philistine
+grandfather had. So, no doubt, many simple pagan
+people were much nicer than those early Christians who
+were out for their own salvation. But there was progress
+in Christianity and there was none in paganism.</p>
+
+<p>The title of this book is <i>Progress and History</i>, and it
+may justly be complained that the progress of which
+I have been talking is not historic, but a progress that
+has not yet happened and may never happen at all. But
+that I think is a defect of my particular branch of the
+subject. Progress in art, if progress is anything more
+than a natural process of growth to be followed inevitably<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_247" id="Page_247">[247]</a></span>
+by a natural process of decay, has never yet happened in
+art; but there is now an effort to make it happen, an
+effort to exercise the human will in art more completely
+and consciously than it has ever been exercised before.
+Therefore I could do nothing but attempt to describe
+that effort and to speculate upon its success.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_248" id="Page_248">[248]</a></span></p>
+<h2>X</h2>
+
+<h2>PROGRESS IN SCIENCE</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">F.S. Marvin</span></h3>
+
+<p class='center'>'L'Esprit travaillant sur les donn&eacute;es de l'exp&eacute;rience.'</p>
+
+
+<p>The French phrase, neater as usual than our own, may
+be taken as the starting-point in our discussion. We shall
+put aside such questions as what an experience is, or how
+much the mind itself supplies in each experience, or what,
+if anything, is the not-mind upon which the mind works.
+We must leave something for the chapter on philosophy;
+and the present chapter is primarily historical. Having
+defined what we mean by science, we are to consider
+at what stage in history the working of the mind on
+experience can be called scientific, in what great strides
+science has leapt forward since its definite formation, and
+in what ways this growth of science has affected general
+progress, both by its action on the individual and on the
+welfare and unity of mankind.</p>
+
+<p>Our French motto must be qualified in order to give
+us precision in our definition and a starting-point in
+history for science in the strict sense. In a general sense
+the action of the mind upon the given in experience has
+been going on from the beginning of animal life. But
+science, strictly so-called, does not appear till men have
+been civilized and settled in large communities for
+a considerable time. We cannot ascribe 'science' to the
+isolated savage gnawing bones in his cave, though the
+germs are there, in every observation that he makes of
+the world around him and every word that he utters to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_249" id="Page_249">[249]</a></span>
+his mates. But we may begin to speak of science when we
+reach those large and ordered societies which are found
+in the great river-basins and sedentary civilizations of
+East and West, especially in Egypt and Chaldea.</p>
+
+<p>When we turn to the quality of the thing itself, we note
+in the first place that while science may be said to begin
+with mere description, it implies from the first a certain
+degree of order and accuracy, and this order and accuracy
+increase steadily as science advances. It is thus a type of
+progress, for it is a constant growth in the fullness, accuracy
+and simplification of our experience. From the dawn
+of science, therefore, man must have acquired standards
+and instruments of measurement and means of handing
+on his observations to others. Thus writing must have
+been invented. But in the second place, there is always
+involved in this orderly description, so far as it is scientific,
+the element of prediction. The particular description is
+not scientific. 'I saw a bird fly' is not a scientific description,
+however accurate; but 'The bird flies by stretching
+out its wings' is. It contains that causal connexion or
+element of generality which enables us to predict.</p>
+
+<p>Before entering on a historical sketch of the most perfect
+example of human progress, it is of the first importance
+to realize its social foundation. This is the key-note, and
+it connects science throughout with the other aspects
+of our subject. Knowledge depends upon the free intercourse
+of mind with mind, and man advances with the
+increase and better direction of his knowledge. But when
+we consider the implications of any generalization which we
+can call 'a law of nature' the social co-operation involved
+becomes still more apparent. Geometry and astronomy&mdash;the
+measurement of the earth and the measurement of
+the heavens&mdash;dispute the honour of the first place in the
+historical order. Both, of course, involved the still more
+fundamental conception of number and the acceptance<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_250" id="Page_250">[250]</a></span>
+of some unit for measurement. Now in each case and
+at every step a long previous elaboration is implied of
+intellectual conventions and agreements&mdash;conscious and
+unconscious&mdash;between many minds stretching back to
+the beginnings of conscious life: the simplest element of
+thought involves the co-operation of individual minds
+in a common product. Language is such a common
+product of social life and it prepares the ground for
+science. But science, as the exact formulation of
+general truths, attains a higher degree of social value,
+because it rises above the idioms of person or race
+and is universally acceptable in form and essence.
+Such is the intrinsic nature of the process, and the
+historical circumstances of its beginnings make it clear.
+It was the quick mind of the Greek which acted as the
+spark to fire the trains of thought and observation which
+had been accumulating for ages through the agency of
+the priests in Egypt and Babylonia. The Greeks lived
+and travelled between the two centres, and their earliest
+sages and philosophers were men of the most varied intercourse
+and occupation. Their genius was fed by a wide
+sympathy and an all-embracing curiosity. No other
+people could have demonstrated so well the social nature
+of science from its inception, and they were planting in
+a soil well prepared. In Egypt conspicuously and in
+Chaldea also to a less extent there had been a social order
+which before the convulsions of the last millennium <span class="smcap">b.c.</span>
+had lasted substantially unchanged for scores of centuries.
+This order was based upon a religious discipline which
+connected the sovereigns on earth with the divine power
+ruling men from the sky. Hence the supreme importance
+of the priesthood and their study of the movements of
+the heavenly bodies. The calendar, which they were the
+first to frame, was thus not only or even primarily a work
+of practical utility but of religious meaning and obligation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_251" id="Page_251">[251]</a></span>
+The priests had to fix in advance the feast days of gods and
+kings by astronomical prediction. Their standards and
+their means of measurement were rough approximations.
+Thus the 360 degrees into which the Babylonians taught
+us to divide the circle are thought to have been the nearest
+round number to the days of the year. The same men
+were also capable of the more accurate discovery that
+the side of a hexagon inscribed in a circle was equal
+to the radius and gave us our division of sixty minutes
+and sixty seconds with all its advantages for calculation.
+In Egypt, if the surveyors were unaware of the
+true relation between a triangle and the rectangle on
+the same base, they had yet established the carpenter's
+rule of 3, 4 and 5 for the sides of a right-angled
+triangle.</p>
+
+<p>How much the Greeks drew from the ancient priesthoods
+we shall never know, nor how far the priests had
+advanced in those theories of general relations which we
+call scientific. But one or two general conclusions as
+to this initial stage of scientific preparation may well be
+drawn.</p>
+
+<p>One is that a certain degree of settlement and civilization
+was necessary for the birth of science. This we find
+in these great theocracies, where sufficient wealth enabled
+a class of leisured and honoured men to devote themselves
+to joint labour in observing nature and recording their
+observations. Another point is clear, namely, that the
+results of these early observations, crude as they were,
+contributed powerfully to give stability to the societies
+in which they arose. The younger Pliny points out later
+the calming effect of Greek astronomy on the minds of
+the Eastern peoples, and we are bound to carry back the
+same idea into the ancient settled communities where
+astronomy began and where so remarkable an order
+prevailed for so long during its preparation.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_252" id="Page_252">[252]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>But however great the value we allow to the observations
+of the priests, it is to the Ionian Greeks that we
+owe the definite foundation of science in the proper sense;
+it was they who gave the raw material the needed accuracy
+and generality of application, A comparison of the
+societies in the nearer East to which we have referred, with
+the history of China affords the strongest presumption of
+this. In the later millenniums <span class="smcap">b.c.</span> the Chinese were in
+many points ahead of the Babylonians and Egyptians.
+They had made earlier predictions of eclipses and more
+accurate observations of the distance of the sun from the
+zenith at various places. They had, too, seen the advantages
+of a decimal system both in weights and measures
+and in the calculations of time. But no Greek genius came
+to build the house with the bricks that they had fashioned,
+and in spite of the achievements of the Chinese they remained
+until our own day the type in the world of a settled
+and contented, although unprogressive, conservatism.</p>
+
+<p>Science then among its other qualities contains a force
+of social movement, and our age of rapid transformation
+has begun to do fuller justice to the work of the Greeks,
+the greatest source of intellectual life and change in the
+world. We are now fully conscious of the defects in their
+methods, the guesses which pass for observations, the
+metaphysical notions which often take the place of
+experimental results.<a name="FNanchor_80_80" id="FNanchor_80_80"></a><a href="#Footnote_80_80" class="fnanchor">[80]</a> But having witnessed the latest
+strides in the unification of science on mathematical
+lines, we are more and more inclined to prize the geometry
+and astronomy of the Greeks, who gave us the first
+constructions on which the modern mechanical theories
+of the universe are based. We shall quote from them
+here only sufficient illustrations to explain and justify
+this statement.</p>
+
+<p>The first shall be what is called Euclidean geometry, but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_253" id="Page_253">[253]</a></span>
+which is in the main the work of the Pythagorean school
+of thinkers and social reformers who flourished from the
+seventh to the fifth centuries <span class="smcap">b.c.</span> This formed the greater
+part of the geometrical truth known to mankind until
+Descartes and the mathematicians recommenced the work
+in the seventeenth century. The second greatest contribution
+of the Greeks was the statics and the conics of which
+Archimedes was the chief creator in the third century
+<span class="smcap">b.c.</span> In his work he gave the first sketch of an infinitesimal
+calculus and in his own way performed an integration.
+The third invaluable construction was the trigonometry
+by which Hipparchus for the first time made a scientific
+astronomy possible. The fourth, the optics of Ptolemy
+based on much true observation and containing an
+approximation to the general law.</p>
+
+<p>These are a few outstanding landmarks, peaks in the
+highlands of Greek science, and nothing has been said
+of their zoology or medicine. In all these cases it will
+be seen that the advance consisted in bringing varying
+instances under the same rule, in seeing unity in difference,
+in discovering the true link which held together the various
+elements in the complex of phenomena. That the Greek
+mind was apt in doing this is cognate to their idealizing
+turn in art. In their statues they show us the universal
+elements in human beauty; in their science, the
+true relations that are common to all triangles and all
+cones.</p>
+
+<p>Ptolemy's work in optics is a good example of the
+scientific mind at work.<a name="FNanchor_81_81" id="FNanchor_81_81"></a><a href="#Footnote_81_81" class="fnanchor">[81]</a> The problem is the general
+relation which holds between the angles of incidence and
+of refraction when a ray passes from air into water or
+from air into glass. He groups a series of the angles with
+a close approximation to the truth, but just misses the
+perception which would have turned his excellent raw<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_254" id="Page_254">[254]</a></span>
+material into the finished product of science. His brick
+does not quite fit its place in the building. His formula
+<i>i</i> (the angle of incidence) = <i>nr</i> (the angle of refraction) only
+fits the case of very small angles for which the sine is
+negligible, though it had the deceptive advantage of
+including reflexion as one case of refraction. He did not
+pursue the argument and make his form completely
+general. Sin <i>i</i> = <i>n</i> sin <i>r</i> escaped him, though he had
+all the trigonometry of Hipparchus behind him, and it
+was left for Snell and Descartes to take the simple
+but crucial step at the beginning of the seventeenth
+century.</p>
+
+<p>The case is interesting for more than one reason. It
+shows us what is a general form, or law of nature in
+mathematical shape, and it also illustrates the progress of
+science as it advances from the most abstract conceptions
+of number and geometry, to more concrete phenomena
+such as physics. The formula for refraction which
+Ptolemy helped to shape, is geometrical in form. With
+him, as with the discoverer of the right angle in a semicircle,
+the mind was working to find a general ideal
+statement under which all similar occurrences might be
+grouped. Observation, the collection of similar instances,
+measurement, are all involved, and the general statement,
+law or form, when arrived at, is found to link up
+other general truths and is then used as a starting-point
+in dealing with similar cases in future. Progress in
+science consists in extending this mental process to an
+ever-increasing area of human experience. We shall see,
+as we go on, how in the concrete sciences the growing
+complexity and change of detail make such generalizations
+more and more difficult. The laws of pure geometry
+seem to have more inherent necessity and the
+observations on which they were originally founded have
+passed into the very texture of our minds. But the work<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_255" id="Page_255">[255]</a></span>
+of building up, or, perhaps better, of organizing our
+experience remains fundamentally the same. Man is
+throughout both perceiving and making that structure of
+truth which is the framework of progress.</p>
+
+<p>Ptolemy's work brings us to the edge of the great
+break which occurred in the growth of science between
+the Greek and the modern world. In the interval, the
+period known as the Middle Ages, the leading minds in
+the leading section of the human race were engaged in
+another part of the great task of human improvement.
+For them the most incumbent task was that of developing
+the spiritual consciousness of men for which the Catholic
+Church provided an incomparable organization. But the
+interval was not entirely blank on the scientific side.
+Our system of arithmetical notation, including that
+invaluable item the cipher, took shape during the Middle
+Ages at the hands of the Arabs, who appear to have derived
+it in the main from India. Its value to science is an
+excellent object-lesson on the importance of the details of
+form. Had the Greeks possessed it, who can say how
+far they might have gone in their applications of
+mathematics?</p>
+
+<p>Yet in spite of this drawback the most permanent contribution
+of the Greeks to science was in the very sphere
+of exact measurement where they would have received the
+most assistance from a better system of calculation had
+they possessed it. They founded and largely constructed
+both plane and spherical geometry on the lines which best
+suit our practical intelligence. They gave mankind the
+framework of astronomy by determining the relative
+positions of the heavenly bodies, and they perceived and
+correctly stated the elementary principles of equilibrium.
+At all these points the immortal group of men who
+adopted the Copernican theory at the Renascence, began
+again where the Greeks had left off. But modern science<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_256" id="Page_256">[256]</a></span>
+starts with two capital improvements on the work of
+the Greeks. Measurement there had been from the first,
+and the effort to find the constant thing in the variable
+flux; and from the earliest days of the Ionian sages
+the scientific mind had been endeavouring to frame the
+simplest general hypothesis or form which would contain
+all the facts. But the moderns advanced decisively, in
+method, by experimenting and verifying their hypotheses,
+and in subject-matter, by applying their method to phenomena
+of movement, which may theoretically include all
+facts biological as well as physical. Galileo, the greatest
+founder of modern science, perfectly exemplifies both
+these new departures.</p>
+
+<p>It is, perhaps, the most instructive and encouraging
+thing in the whole annals of progress to note how the men
+of the Renascence were able to pick up the threads of
+the Greeks and continue their work. The texture held
+good. Leonardo da Vinci, whose birth coincides with
+the invention of the printing-press, is the most perfect
+reproduction in modern times of the early Greek sophos,
+the man of universal interests and capacity. He gave
+careful and admiring study to Archimedes, the greatest
+pure man of science among the Greeks, the one man
+among them whose works, including even his letters,
+have come down to us practically complete. A little later,
+at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Copernicus
+gained from the Pythagoreans the crude notion of the
+earth's movement round a great central fire, and from
+it he elaborated the theory which was to revolutionize
+thought. Another half-century later the works of
+Archimedes were translated into Latin and for the first
+time printed. They thus became well known before the
+time of Galileo, who also carefully studied them. At the
+beginning of the seventeenth century Galileo made the
+capital discoveries which established both the Copernican<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_257" id="Page_257">[257]</a></span>
+theory and the science of dynamics. Galileo's death in
+1642 coincides with the birth of Sir Isaac Newton.</p>
+
+<p>Such is the sequence of the most influential names at
+the turning-point of modern thought.</p>
+
+<p>Galileo's work, his experiments with falling bodies and
+the revelations of his telescope, carried the strategic
+lines of Greek science across the frontiers of a New World,
+and Newton laid down the lines of permanent occupation
+and organized the conquest. Organization, the formation
+of a network of lines connected as a whole, and giving
+access to different parts of the world of experience, is
+perhaps the best image of the growth of science in the
+mind of mankind. It will be seen that it does not
+imply any exhaustion of the field, nor any identification
+of all knowledge with exact or systematic knowledge. The
+process is rather one of gradual penetration, the linking
+up and extension of the area of knowledge by well-defined
+and connected methods of thought. No all-embracing
+plan thought out beforehand by the first founders of
+science, or any of their successors, can be applied systematically
+to the whole range of our experience. It has not
+been so in the past; still less does it seem possible in the
+future. For the most part the discoverer works on steadily
+in his own plot, occupying the nearest places first, and
+observing here and there that one of his lines runs into
+some one else's. Every now and then a greater and more
+comprehensive mind appears, able to treat several systems
+as one whole, to survey a larger area and extend that
+empire of the mind which, as Bacon tells us, is nobler
+than any other.</p>
+
+<p>Of such conquerors Newton was the greatest we have
+yet known, because he brought together into one system
+more and further-reaching lines of communication than
+any one else. He unified the forms of measurement
+which had previously been treated as the separate subjects<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_258" id="Page_258">[258]</a></span>
+of geometry, astronomy, and the newly-born science of
+dynamics. Celestial mechanics embraces all three, and is
+a fresh and decisive proof of the commanding influence
+of the heavenly bodies on human life and thought. Not
+by a horoscope, but by continued and systematic thought,
+humanity was unravelling its nature and destiny in the
+stars as well as in itself. These are the two approaches to
+perfect knowledge which are converging more and more
+closely in our own time. Newton's work was the longest
+step yet taken on the mechanical side, and we must
+complete our notice of it by the briefest possible reference
+to the later workers on the same line, before turning to
+the sciences of life which began their more systematic
+evolution with the discovery of Harvey, a contemporary
+of Newton.</p>
+
+<p>The seventeenth century, with Descartes' application
+of algebra to geometry, and Newton's and Leibnitz's
+invention of the differential and integral calculus, improved
+our methods of calculation to such a point that
+summary methods of vastly greater comprehensiveness
+and elasticity can be applied to any problem of which
+the elements can be measured. The mere improvement
+in the method of describing the same things (cf. e.g.
+a geometrical problem as written down by Archimedes
+with any modern treatise) was in itself a revolution.
+But the new calculus went much farther. It enabled us
+to represent, in symbols which may be dealt with arithmetically,
+any form of regular movement.</p>
+
+<p>As movement is universal, and the most obvious
+external manifestation of life itself, the hopes of a mathematical
+treatment of all phenomena are indefinitely
+enlarged, for all fresh laws or forms might conceivably
+be expressed as differential equations. So to the vision
+of a Poincar&eacute; the human power of prediction appears
+to have no assignable theoretical limit.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_259" id="Page_259">[259]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The seventeenth century which witnessed this momentous
+extension of mathematical methods, also contains
+the cognate foundation of scientific physics. Accurate
+measurement began to be applied to the phenomena
+of light and heat, the expansion of gases, the various
+changes in the forms of matter apart from life. The
+eighteenth century which continued this work, is also and
+most notably marked by the establishment of a scientific
+chemistry. In this again we see a further extension of
+accurate measurement: another order of things different
+in quality began to be treated by a quantitative analysis.
+Lavoisier's is the greatest name. He gave a clear and
+logical classification of the chemical elements then known,
+which served as useful a purpose in that science, as
+classificatory systems in botany and zoology have done
+in those cases. But the crucial step which established
+chemistry, a step also due to Lavoisier, was making the
+test of weight decisive. 'The balance was the <i>ultima ratio</i>
+of his laboratory.' His first principle was that the total
+weight of all the products of a chemical process must be
+exactly equal to the total weight of the substances used.
+From this, and rightly disregarding the supposed weight
+of heat, he could proceed to the discovery of the accurate
+proportions of the elements in all the compounds he was
+able to analyse.</p>
+
+<p>Since then the process of mathematical synthesis in
+science has been carried many stages further. The exponents
+of this aspect of scientific progress, of whom we may
+take the late M. Henri Poincar&eacute; as the leading representative
+in our generation, are perfectly justified in treating
+this gradual mathematical unification of knowledge with
+pride and confidence. They have solid achievement on
+their side. It is through science of this kind that the
+idea of universal order has gained its sway in man's
+mind. The occasional attacks on scientific method, the<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_260" id="Page_260">[260]</a></span>
+talk one sometimes hears of 'breaking the fetters of
+Cartesian mechanics', seem to suggest that the great
+structure which Galileo, Newton, and Descartes founded
+is comparable to the false Aristotelianism which they
+destroyed. The suggestion is absurd: its chief excuse is
+the desire to defend the autonomy of the sciences of
+life, about which we have a word to say later on. But
+we must first complete our brief mention of the greatest
+stages on the mechanical side, of which a full and vivid
+account may be found in such a book as M. Poincar&eacute;'s
+<i>Science et Hypoth&egrave;se</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Early in the nineteenth century a trio of discoverers,
+a Frenchman, a German, and an Englishman, established
+the theory of the conservation of energy. To the labours
+of Sadi Carnot, Mayer, and Joule is due our knowledge of
+the fact that heat which, as a supposed entity, had disturbed
+the physics and chemistry of the earlier centuries,
+was itself another form of mechanical energy and could
+be measured like the rest. Later in the century another
+capital step in synthesis was taken by the foundation
+of astrophysics, which rests on the identity of the physics
+and chemistry of the heavenly bodies with those of the
+earth.</p>
+
+<p>The known universe thus becomes still more one. Later
+researches again, especially those of Maxwell, tend to
+the identification of light and heat with electricity, and
+in the last stage matter as a whole seems to be swallowed
+up in motion. It is found that similar equations will
+express all kinds of motion; that all are really various
+forms of the motion of something which the mind
+postulates as the thing in motion; we have in each
+case to deal with wave-movements of different length.
+The broad change, therefore, which has taken place since
+the mechanics of Newton is the advance from the consideration
+of masses to that of molecules of smaller and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_261" id="Page_261">[261]</a></span>
+smaller size, and the truth of the former is not thereby
+invalidated. Newton, Descartes, Fresnel, Carnot, Joule,
+Mayer, Faraday, Helmholtz, Maxwell appear as one great
+succession of unifiers. All have been engaged in the same
+work of consolidating thought at the same time that they
+extended it. Their conceptions of force, mass, matter,
+ether, atom, molecule have provisional validity as the
+imagined objective substratum of our experience, and
+the fact that we analyse these conceptions still further
+and sometimes discard them, does not in any way invalidate
+the law or general form in which they have enabled
+us to sum up our experience and predict the future.</p>
+
+<p>But now we turn to the other side. In spite of the
+continued progress noted on the mechanical side, it is
+true that the predominant scientific interest changed in
+the nineteenth century from mechanics to biology, from
+matter to life, from Newton to Darwin. Darwin was born
+in 1809, the year in which Lamarck, who invented the
+term biology, published his <i>Philosophie Zoologique</i>. The
+<i>Origin of Species</i> appeared in 1858 after the conservation
+of energy had been established, and the range and influence
+of evolutionary biology have grown ever since.</p>
+
+<p>Before anything can be said of the conclusions in this
+branch of science one preliminary remark has to be made.
+From the philosophical point of view the science of life
+includes all other, for man is a living animal, and science
+is the work of his co-operating mind, one of the functions
+of his living activity. What this involves on the philosophical
+side does not concern us here, but it is necessary
+to indicate here the nature of the contact between
+the two great divisions of science, the mechanical and
+the biological, considered purely as sciences. For, though
+we know that our consciousness as a function of life
+must in some form come into the science of life, and
+is, in a sense, above it all, we are yet able to draw con<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_262" id="Page_262">[262]</a></span>clusions,
+apparently of infinite scope, about the behaviour
+of all living things around us and including ourselves,
+just as we do about a stone or a star. And we are interested
+in this chapter in seeing how this drawing of
+general conclusions keeps growing with regard to the
+phenomena of life, just as it has grown with regard to all
+other phenomena, and we have to consider what sort of
+difference there is between the one class of generalizations
+and the other.</p>
+
+<p>For those of us who are content to rest their conclusions
+on the positively known, who, while not setting any limits
+to the possible extension of knowledge, are not prepared
+to dogmatize about it, it is still necessary to draw a line.
+A dualism remains, name and fact alike abhorrent to
+the completely logical philosophic mind. On the one
+hand the ordinary laws of physical science are constantly
+extending their sphere; on the other, the fact of life still
+remains unexplained by them, and becomes in itself more
+and more marvellous as we investigate it. The general
+position remains much as Johannes M&uuml;ller expressed it
+about the middle of the last century, himself sometimes
+described as the central figure in the history of modern
+physiology. 'Though there appears to be something
+in the phenomena of living beings which cannot be explained
+by ordinary mechanical, physical, or chemical
+laws, much may be so explained, and we may without
+fear push these explanations as far as we can, so long as we
+keep to the solid ground of observation and experiment.'
+Since this was written the double process has gone on
+apace. The chemistry and physics of living matter are
+being sketched, and biologists are more and more inclined
+to study the mechanical expression of the facts of life.
+Mr. Bateson, for instance, tells us that the greatest advance
+that we can foresee will be made 'when it is possible to
+connect the geometrical phenomena of development with<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_263" id="Page_263">[263]</a></span>
+the chemical'. The process of applying physical laws to
+life follows, it would seem, the reverse order of their
+original development. First the chemistry of organic
+matter was investigated, then the physical attraction of
+their molecules, and now their geometry is in question.
+So, says Professor Bateson, the 'geometrical symmetry of
+living things is the key to a knowledge of their regularity
+and the forces which cause it. In the symmetry of the
+dividing cell the basis of that resemblance which we call
+Heredity is contained'.</p>
+
+<p>But such work as this is still largely speculative and in
+the future. It does not solve the secret of life. It does
+not affect the fact of consciousness which we are free to
+conceive, if we will, as the other side of what we call
+matter, evolving with it from the most rudimentary
+forms into the highest known form in man, or still further
+into some super-personal or universal form. This,
+however, is philosophy or metaphysics. We are here
+concerned with the progress of science, in one of its two
+great departments, i.e. knowledge about life and all
+its known manifestations, which from Aristotle onwards
+have been subjected to a scrutiny similar to that which
+has been given to the physical facts of the universe and
+with results in many points similar also. But the facts,
+although superficially more familiar, are infinitely more
+complicated, and the scrutiny has only commenced in
+earnest some hundred years ago. Considering the short
+space for this concentrated and systematic study, the
+results are at least as wonderful as those achieved by the
+physicists. Two or three points of suggestive analogy
+between the courses of the two great branches of science
+may here be mentioned.</p>
+
+<p>We will put first the fundamental question on which,
+as we have seen, no final answer has yet been reached:
+What is life, and is there any evidence of life arising from<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_264" id="Page_264">[264]</a></span>
+the non-living? Now this baffling and probably unanswerable
+question&mdash;unanswerable, that is, in terms which go
+beyond the physical concomitants of life&mdash;has played
+the part in biology which the alchemists' quest played
+in chemistry. It led by the way to a host of positive
+discoveries. Aristotle, the father of biology, believed in
+spontaneous generation. He was puzzled by the case of
+parasites, especially in putrefying matter. Even Harvey,
+who made the first great definite discovery about the
+mechanism of the body, agreed with Aristotle in this
+error. It was left for the minute and careful inquirers
+of the nineteenth century to dispose of the myth. It was
+only after centuries of inquiry that the truth was established
+that life, as we know it, only arises from life. But
+the whole course of the inquiry had illuminated the nature
+of life and had brought together facts as to living things
+of all kinds, plants and animals, great and small, which
+show superficially the widest difference. Illumination by
+unification is here the note, as clearly as in the mathematical-physical
+sciences. All living things are found
+to be built up from cells and each cell to be an organism,
+a being, that is, with certain qualities belonging to it as
+a whole, which cannot be predicated of any collection
+of parts not an organism. The cell is such an organism,
+just as the animal is an organism, and among its qualities
+as an organism is the power of growth by assimilating
+material different from itself. Yet, in spite of this assimilation
+and constant change, it grows and decays as one
+whole and reproduces its like.</p>
+
+<p>Another point of analogy between the animate and the
+inanimate sphere is that the process of study in both has
+been from the larger to the smaller elements. The microscope
+has played at least as decisive a part as the telescope,
+and it dates from about the same time, at the beginning
+of the seventeenth century. Since then it has penetrated<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_265" id="Page_265">[265]</a></span>
+farther and farther into the infinitesimal elements of life
+and matter, and in each case there seems to be no assignable
+limit to our analysis. The cell is broken up into
+physiological units to which almost every investigator
+gives a new name. We are now confronted by the
+fascinating theory of Arrhenius of an infinite universe
+filled with vital spores, wafted about by radio-activity,
+and beginning their upward course of evolution wherever
+they find a kindly soil on which to rest. To such a vision
+the hopes and fears of mortal existence, catastrophes of
+nature or of society, even the decay of man, seem transient
+and trivial, and the infinities embrace.</p>
+
+<p>A third point, perhaps the most important in the comparison,
+is the way by which the order of science has entered
+into our notions of life, through a great theory, the theory
+of evolution or the doctrine of descent. In this we find a
+solid basis for the co-ordination of facts: it was the rise
+of this theory in the hands of one thinker of unconquerable
+patience and love of truth which has put the study of
+biology in the pre-eminent position which it now holds.
+But it is necessary to consider the evolution theory as
+something both older and wider than Darwin's presentation
+of it. Darwin's work was to suggest a <i>vera causa</i> for a
+process which earlier philosophers had imagined almost
+from the beginning of abstract thought. He observed and
+collected a multitude of facts which made his explanations
+of the change of species&mdash;within their limits&mdash;as convincing
+as they are plausible. But the idea that species change, by
+slow and regular steps, was an old one, and his particular
+explanations, natural and sexual selection, are seen on
+further reflection to have only a limited scope.</p>
+
+<p>This is no place, of course, to discuss the details of the
+greatest and most vexed question in the whole science
+of life. But it belongs to our argument to consider it
+from one or two general points of view. Its analogies with,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_266" id="Page_266">[266]</a></span>
+and its differences from, the great generalizations of
+mathematical physics, are both highly instructive. The
+first crude hypothesis of the gradual evolution of various
+vegetable and animal forms from one another may be
+found in the earliest Greek thinkers, just as Pythagoras
+and Aristarchus anticipated the Copernican theory.
+Aristotle gave the idea a philosophic statement which
+only the fuller knowledge of our own time enables us to
+appreciate. He traced the gradual progression in nature
+from the inorganic to the organic, and among living
+things from the simpler to the higher forms. But his
+knowledge of the facts was insufficient: the Greeks had
+no microscope, and the dissecting knife was forbidden on
+the human subject. Then, as these things were gradually
+added to science from the seventeenth century onwards,
+and the record of the rocks gave the confirmation of
+palaeontology, the whole realm of living nature was
+gradually unfolded before us, every form connected both
+in function and in history with every other, every organ
+fulfilling a necessary part, either now or in the past, and
+growing and changing to gain a more perfect accord with
+its environment. Such is the supreme conception which
+now dominates biological science much as the Newtonian
+theory has dominated physics for two hundred years;
+and it is idle to debate whether this new idea is different
+in kind or only in degree from the great law of physics.
+It is a general notion or law which brings together and
+explains myriads of hitherto unrelated particulars; it
+has been established by observation and experiment
+working on a previous hypothesis; it involves measurement,
+as all accurate observation must, and it gives us
+an increasing power of prediction. So far, therefore, we
+must class it with the great mathematical laws and
+dissent from M. Bergson. But seeing that the multitudinous
+facts far surpass our powers of complete colli<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_267" id="Page_267">[267]</a></span>gation,
+that much in the vital process is still obscure,
+that we are conscious in ourselves of a power of shaping
+circumstances which we are inclined in various degrees
+to attribute to other living things, so far we recognize
+a profound difference between the laws of life and the
+laws of physics, and pay our respects to M. Bergson and
+his allies of the neo-vitalist school. Not for the first time
+in history we have to seek the truth in the reconciliation,
+or at least the cohabitation, of apparent contradictories.</p>
+
+<p>To us who are concerned in tracing the progress of
+mankind as a whole, and constantly find the roots of
+progress in the growth of the social spirit, the development,
+that is, of unity of spirit and of action on a wider
+and deeper scale, there is one aspect of biological truth,
+as the evolutionists have lately revealed it, which is of
+special interest. The living thing is an organism of which
+the characteristic is the constant effort to preserve its
+unity. This is in fact the definition of an organism. It
+only dies or suffers diminution in order to reproduce itself,
+and the new creature repeats by some sort of organic
+memory the same preservative acts that its parents did.
+We recognize life by these manifestations. A merely
+material, non-living thing, such as a crystal, cannot thus
+make good its loss, nor can it assimilate unlike substance
+and make it a part of itself. But these things are of the
+nature of life. Now mankind, as a whole, has, if our
+argument is correct, this characteristic of an organism: it
+is bound together by more than mechanical or accidental
+links. It is <i>one</i> by the nature of its being, and the study
+of mankind, the highest branch of the science of life,
+rests, or should rest, upon the basis of those common
+functions by which humanity is held together and distinguished
+from the rest of the animate world.</p>
+
+<p>Just as in passing from the mechanical sciences to that
+of life, we noticed that the general laws of the lower<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_268" id="Page_268">[268]</a></span>
+sphere still held good, but that new factors not analysable
+into those of the former had to be reckoned with, so in
+passing from the animate realm, as a whole, to man its
+highest member, we find that, while animal, and subject
+to the general laws of animality, he adds features which
+distinguish him as another order and cannot be found
+elsewhere. His unity as an organism has a progressive
+quality possessed by no other species. Step by step his
+mind advances into the recesses of time and space, and
+makes the farthest objects that his mind can reach
+a part of his being. His unity of organization, of which
+the humblest animalcule is a simple type, goes far beyond
+the preservation or even the improvement of his species:
+it touches the infinite though it cannot contain it. To
+trace this widening process is the true key to progress,
+the <i>id&eacute;e-m&egrave;re</i> of history. For while man's evolution has
+its practical side, like that of other species,&mdash;the needs
+of nutrition, of reproduction, of adapting himself to his
+environment,&mdash;with man this is the basis and not the end.
+The end is, first the organization of himself as a world-being,
+conscious of his unity, and then the illimitable
+conquest of truth and goodness as far as his ever-growing
+powers extend.</p>
+
+<p>Man's reason is thus, as philosophers have always
+taught, his special characteristic, and takes the place for
+him, on a higher plane, of the law of organic growth
+common to all living things. In this we join hands,
+across two thousand years, with Aristotle: he would have
+understood us and used almost identical language. But
+the content of the words as we use them and their applications
+are immeasurably greater.</p>
+
+<p>The content is the mass of knowledge which man's
+reason has accumulated and partly put in order since
+Aristotle taught. It is now so great that thoroughly to
+master a single branch is arduous labour for a lifetime<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_269" id="Page_269">[269]</a></span>
+of concentrated toil, and at the end of it new discoveries
+will crowd upon the worker and he will die with all his
+earlier notions crying for revision. No case so patent,
+so conclusive, of the reality of human unity and the paramount
+need of organization. The individual here can
+only thrive and only be of service as a small member of
+a great whole, one atom in a planet, one cell in a body.
+The demand which Comte raised more than fifty years
+ago for another class of specialists, the specialists in
+generalities, is now being taken up by men of science
+themselves. But the field has now so much extended
+and is so much fuller in every part, that it would seem
+that nothing less than a committee of Aristotles could
+survey the whole. And even this is but one aspect of
+the matter. Just as the genesis of science was in the
+daily needs of men&mdash;the cultivators whose fields must
+be re-measured after the flooding, the priests who had
+to fix the right hour for sacrifice&mdash;so all through its
+history science has grown and in the future will grow
+still more by following the suggestions of practice. It
+gathers strength by contact with the world and life, and
+it should use its strength in making the world more fit
+to live in. Thus our committee of scientific philosophers
+needs to have constantly in touch with it not one but
+many boards of scientific practitioners.</p>
+
+<p>The past which has given us this most wonderful of
+all the fruits of time, does not satisfy us equally as to the
+use that has been made of it. Our crowded slums do not
+proclaim the glory of Watt and Stephenson as the heavens
+remind us of Kepler and Newton. Selfishness has grown
+fat on ill-paid labour, and jealous nations have sharpened
+their weapons with every device that science can suggest.
+But a sober judgement, as well as the clearest evidence of
+history, dictates a more hopeful conclusion. Industry, the
+twin brother of science, has vastly increased our wealth,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_270" id="Page_270">[270]</a></span>
+our comfort, and our capacity for enjoyment. Medicine,
+the most human of her children, has lengthened our lives,
+fortified our bodies, and alleviated our suffering. Every
+chapter in this volume gives some evidence of the beneficent
+power of science. For religion, government, morality,
+even art, are all profoundly influenced by the knowledge
+that man has acquired of the world around him and his
+practical conclusions from it. These do not, with the
+possible exception of art, contradict the thesis of a general
+improvement of mankind, and science must therefore
+claim a share&mdash;it would seem the decisive share&mdash;in the
+result. We speak, of course, of science in the sense which
+has been developed in this essay, of the bright well-ordered
+centre to our knowledge which is always spreading and
+bringing more of the surrounding fringe, which is also
+spreading, into the well-defined area. In this sense
+religion, morality and government have all within
+historic times come within the range of clear and well-ordered
+thought: and mankind standing thus within
+the light, stands more firmly and with better hope. He
+sees the dark spots and the weaknesses. He knows the
+remedies, though his will is often unequal to applying
+them. And even with this revelation of weakness and
+ignorance, he is on the whole happier and readier to
+grapple with his fate.</p>
+
+<p>If this appears a fair diagnosis of the Western mind in
+the midst of its greatest external crisis, the reason for
+this amazing firmness of mind and stability of society
+must be sought in the structure which science and industry
+combined have built around us. The savage, untutored
+in astronomy, may think that an eclipse betokens the
+end of the world. Science convinces him that it will
+pass. Just so the modern world trained to an order of
+thought and of society which rests on world-wide activities
+elaborated through centuries of common effort, awaits<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_271" id="Page_271">[271]</a></span>
+the issue of our darkened present calmly and unmoved.
+The things of the mind on which all nations have co-operated
+in the past will re-assert their sway. Fundamentally
+this is a triumph for the scientific spirit, the order
+which man has now succeeded in establishing between
+himself and his surroundings.</p>
+
+<p>The country is demanding&mdash;and rightly&mdash;a stronger
+bias in our educational system for teaching of a scientific
+kind; but teachers and professors are not unnaturally
+perplexed. They see the immeasurable scope of the new
+knowledge; they know the labour, often ineffective, that
+has been expended in teaching the rudiments of the old
+'humanities'. And now a task is propounded to them
+before which the old one with all its faults seems definite,
+manageable and formative of character. The classical
+world which has been the staple of our education for
+400 years is a finished thing and we can compass it in
+thought. It lives indeed, but unconsciously, in our lives,
+as we go about our business. This new world into which
+our youth has now to enter, rests also on the past, but it
+is still more present; it grows all round us faster than
+we can keep pace with its earlier stages. How then can
+such a thing be used as an instrument of education where
+above all something is needed of clear and definite purpose,
+stimulating in itself and tending to mental growth and
+activity in after life? We could not, even if we would,
+offer any satisfactory answer here to one of the most
+troubled questions of the day. Decades of experiments
+will be needed before even a tolerable solution can be
+reached. But the argument pursued in this and other
+essays may suggest a line of approach. This must lie
+in a reconciliation between science and history, or rather
+in the recognition that science rightly understood is the
+key to history, and that the history best worth study is the
+record of man's collective thought in face of the infinite<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_272" id="Page_272">[272]</a></span>
+complexities, the barriers and byways, the lights and
+shadows of life and nature. From the study of man's
+approach to knowledge and unity in history each new-coming
+student may shape his own. He sees a unity of
+thought not wholly unattainable, a foundation laid
+beneath the storms of time. To a mind thus trained
+should come an eagerness to carry on the conquests of the
+past and to apply the lessons gained to the amelioration
+of the present.</p>
+
+<p>This we may hope from the well-disposed. But for
+all, the contemplation of a universe where man's mind has
+worked for ages in unravelling its secrets and describing
+its wonders, must bring a sense of reverence as well as
+trust. It is no dry category of abstract truths to which
+we turn and would have others turn, but a world as
+bright and splendid as the rainbow to the savage or the
+forest to the poet or the heavens to the lonely watcher on
+the Babylonian plain. The glories and the depths remain,
+deeper and more glorious, with all the added marvels
+of man's exploring thought. The seeing eye which a true
+education will one day give us, may read man's history
+in the world we live in, and read the world with the full
+illumination of a united human vision&mdash;the eyes of us all.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books for Reference</span></h3>
+
+<div class='indent2'>
+<p>Alcan, <i>De la m&eacute;thode dans les Sciences</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Mach, <i>History of Mechanics</i>, Kegan Paul.</p>
+
+<p>Thomson, <i>Science of Life</i>, Blackie.</p>
+
+<p>Thomson, <i>Science in the Nineteenth Century</i>, Chambers.</p>
+
+<p><i>New Calendar of Great Men</i>, Macmillan.</p>
+
+<p><i>The Darwin Centenary Volume.</i></p>
+
+<p>Bergson, <i>Creative Evolution</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+<div class="footnotes"><h3>FOOTNOTES:</h3>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_80_80" id="Footnote_80_80"></a><a href="#FNanchor_80_80"><span class="label">[80]</span></a> See Lewes, 'Aristotle, a chapter in the History of Science'.</p></div>
+
+<div class="footnote"><p><a name="Footnote_81_81" id="Footnote_81_81"></a><a href="#FNanchor_81_81"><span class="label">[81]</span></a> H. Bouasse, <i>La M&eacute;thode dans les Sciences</i>, Alcan.</p></div>
+</div>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_273" id="Page_273">[273]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XI</h2>
+
+<h2>PROGRESS IN PHILOSOPHY</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">J.A. Smith</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>To contend that there has been progress in Philosophy
+may seem but a desperate endeavour. For the reproach
+against it of unprogressiveness is of long standing: where
+other forms of human knowledge have undoubtedly
+advanced, Philosophy, in modern times at any rate,
+has (so it is said) remained stationary, propounding its
+outworn problems, its vain and empty solutions. Because
+of this failure it has by common consent been deposed
+from its once proud position at the head of the sciences
+and obliged to confess, in the words of the Trojan queen:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i6">modo maxima rerum<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Nunc trahor exul inops.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The charge of unprogressiveness is not made against it
+by its foes alone; the truth of it is admitted by some of
+its best friends. If Voltaire exclaims 'O m&eacute;taphysique,
+m&eacute;taphysique, nous sommes aussi avanc&eacute;s qu'aux temps
+des Druides', Kant sadly admits the fact, sets himself
+to diagnose its cause, and if possible to discover or devise
+a remedy. Yet we must remember that it was philosophers
+who first descried those currents in the world of events
+which the non-philosophic, borrowing the name from
+them, call Progress, who first attempted to determine
+their direction and the possible goal of their convergence,
+and laboured to clear their own and others' minds in
+regard to the meaning, to capture which the name was<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_274" id="Page_274">[274]</a></span>
+thrown out as a net into the ocean of experience. Nor
+must we forget that it was in their own chosen field&mdash;the
+world of human thoughts and actions&mdash;that they
+from the beginning seemed to themselves to find the surest
+evidence of the reality of Progress. While the world that
+surrounded and hemmed them and their fellows in might
+or must be regarded as unchanging and unchangeable,
+doomed for ever to reproduce and monotonously reiterate
+whatsoever it had once done and been, the mind or spirit
+of Man in its own realm seemed capable of going beyond
+all its past achievements and rising to new heights, not
+merely here and there or in isolated instances but in such
+numbers or masses as to raise for long periods of history
+the general level of human efficiency and welfare. It is
+true that many of those who noted these advances or
+profited by them did not always admit that they took
+place in, or were due to the agency of, Philosophy. The
+advances were most often credited to other powers and
+the new territory claimed by their representatives. The
+contributions made by Philosophy to the general improvement
+of human life were and are obscure, difficult to
+trace, easily missed or forgotten. It came about that
+the philosopher was misconceived as one indifferent to
+ordinary human interests and disdainful of the more
+obvious advantages secured by others, pressing and urging
+forward and upward into a cloudland where the light
+was too dim for the eyes of man and the paths too uncertain
+for his feet. Unsatisfied with the region where Man
+had learned by the slow and painful lessons of experience
+to build himself a habitable city he dreamed of something
+higher, aspiring to explore beyond and above where the
+light of that experience shone and illuminated. Perhaps
+the main idea that the name of Philosophy now to most
+suggests is that of a Utopian ideal of knowledge so wide
+and so high that it must be by sane and sober minds<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_275" id="Page_275">[275]</a></span>
+pronounced for ever set beyond the reach of human
+faculty, an ideal which perhaps we cannot help forming
+and which constantly tempts us forward like a mirage,
+but which like a mirage leads us into waste and barren
+places, so much so that it is no small part of human
+wisdom to resist its subtle seductions and to confine our
+efforts to the pursuit of such ends as we may reasonably
+regard as well within the compass of our powers of thought
+and action. It is folly, we are told, to adventure ourselves
+upon the uncharted seas into which philosophers invite
+us, to waste our lives and perhaps break our hearts in the
+vain search for a knowledge that is for ever denied us.
+After all, there is much that we can know, and in the
+knowledge of which we can better the estate of Man,
+relieving him from many of his most pressing terrors
+and distresses. To cherish other hopes is to deceive ourselves
+to our own and our fellows' undoing, to refuse
+them our help and fail to play our part in the common
+business of mankind. There is surely in the world
+enough suffering and sorrow and sin to engage all our
+energies in dealing with them, nor are our endeavours to
+do so so plainly fruitless as to discourage from perseverance
+in them. Where in this task our hearts do faint and
+fail, are there not other means than the discredited nostrum
+of Philosophy to revive our hopes and recruit our
+forces? It was only, we are sometimes reminded, in
+the darkest days of human history that men turned
+desperately to Philosophy for comfort and consolation&mdash;how
+surely and demonstrably, we are told, in vain!
+When other duties are so urgent and immediate, have we
+even the right to consume our energies otherwise than in
+their direct discharge? And is it not presumption to
+ask for any further light than that which is vouchsafed
+to us in the ordinary course of experience or, if that is
+insufficient, in and by Religion?<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_276" id="Page_276">[276]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>Much in this plea for a final relinquishment of aid from
+Philosophy in the furtherance of human progress is
+plausible and more than plausible. Yet the hope or, if
+you will, the dream of attaining some form or kind or
+degree of knowledge which the sciences do not and cannot
+supply and perhaps deny to be possible, some steadiness
+and firmness of assurance other and beyond the confidence
+of religious faith, is not yet extinct, is perhaps inextinguishable,
+and though it often takes extravagant and even
+morbid and repulsive forms, still haunts and tantalizes
+many, nor these the least wise or sane of our kind, so that
+they count all the labour they spend upon its search worth
+all the pains. Not for themselves alone do they seek it;
+they view themselves as not alone in the quest, but
+engaged in a matter of universally human moment. In
+the measure in which they count themselves to have
+attained any result they do not hoard it or grudge it to
+others. The notion of philosophic truth as something
+to be shared and enjoyed only by a few&mdash;as what is
+called 'esoteric'&mdash;is no longer in vogue and is indeed felt
+to involve an essential self-contradiction; rather it is
+conceived as something the value of which is assured and
+enhanced by being imparted. Those who believe themselves
+to be by nature or (it may be) accident appointed
+to the office of its quest, by no means feel that they are
+thereby divided from their fellows as a peculiar people
+or a privileged and exclusive priesthood, but much
+rather as fellow servants enlisted and engaged in the
+public service of mankind. Least of all do they believe
+that their efforts are foredoomed to inevitable failure,
+that progress therein is not to be looked for, or that they
+and their predecessors have hitherto made no advance
+towards what they and, as they also believe, all men sought
+and still seek. To them the history of Philosophy for say
+the last two thousand years is not the dreary and dispiriting<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_277" id="Page_277">[277]</a></span>
+narrative of repeated error and defeat, but the record
+of a slow but secure and steady advance in which, as nowhere
+else, the mind of Man celebrates and enjoys triumphs
+over the mightiest obstacles, kindling itself to an ever-brightening
+flame. Reviewing its own past in history the
+spirit of Philosophy sees its own inner light, which is
+its act and its essence, constantly increasing, spreading
+ever wider into the circumambient dark, and touching
+far-off and hitherto undiscovered peaks with the fire
+of a coming dawn. In place of the starlight of Science
+or the moonlight of Religion it sees a sun arise flooding
+the world with light and warmth and life. High hopes,
+high claims; but can they be made good, or even rationally
+entertained? Suffice it here that they be openly
+avowed and proclaimed to be laid up in the heart of the
+philosophic spirit, 'dreaming', and yet with waking eyes,
+'of things to come'. Or rather shall we not say, seeing
+that its eyes are unsealed and the vision therefore no
+dream, beholding a present&mdash;an ever-present&mdash;Reality?</p>
+
+<p>It was Philosophy, or philosophers, as I have said, that
+first discerned the fact of Progress, named it, and divined
+its lineaments. To Philosophy the name and notion of
+Progress belongs as of right&mdash;the right of first occupation.
+Merely to have invented a name for the fact is no small
+service, for thus the fact was fixed for further study and
+examination. But with the name Philosophy gave us
+the idea, the notion, and therewith the fact began to be
+understood and to become amenable to further and further
+explanation. To this further explanation Philosophy gave
+notable assistance. To 'elaborate our concepts' has been
+said to be the whole business of Philosophy, that is, to
+arrest the vague and shifting meanings that float before
+our minds loosely attached to the words of ordinary
+careless speech, to fix their outlines, distinguishing,
+defining, ordering and organizing until each mass of mean<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_278" id="Page_278">[278]</a></span>ing
+is improved and refined into a thought worthy to be
+called a notion, a fit member of the world of mind,
+a seat and source of intellectual light. In this work
+Philosophy proceeds and succeeds simply by reflecting
+on whatever meaning it has in whatever manner already
+acquired; it employs no strange apparatus or recondite
+methods, only continues more thoughtfully and conscientiously
+to use the familiar means by which the earlier
+simpler meanings were appropriated and developed,
+following the beaten tracks of the mind's native and
+spontaneous movement. Much more rarely than the
+sciences has it recourse to a technical vocabulary, being
+content to express itself in ordinary words though using
+them and their collocations with a careful delicacy and
+painstaking adroitness. To follow it in these uses demands
+an effort, for nothing is perhaps more difficult than to
+force our thoughts to run counter to our customary heedless
+use of words and to learn to employ them even for
+a short time with a steady precision of significance. Yet
+unless this effort is resolutely made we must remain the
+easy prey of manifold confusions and errors which trip
+us in the dark. Our words degrade into tokens which
+experience will not cash&mdash;tangles of symbols which we
+cannot retranslate.</p>
+
+<p>But Philosophy is more than the attempt to refine and
+subtilize our ordinary words so as to fit them for the
+higher service of interpretative thought, more even than
+the endeavour to improve the stock of ideas no matter
+how come by, by which we interpret to ourselves whatever
+it imports us to understand. All this it is and does,
+or strives to do, but only as subsidiary to its true business
+and real aim. All this it might do and do successfully,
+and yet make or bring about no substantial progress in
+itself or elsewhere. And when progress in Philosophy is
+spoken of, it is not either such improvement in language<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_279" id="Page_279">[279]</a></span>
+nor such improvement in ideas that alone or mainly is
+meant.</p>
+
+<p>What is claimed for (or denied to it) under the name of
+Progress is an advance in knowledge, knowledge clear-sighted,
+grounded, and assured, knowledge of some
+authentic and indubitable reality. It is by the attainment
+of such knowledge, by progress in and towards it, that
+the claim of Philosophy to be progressive must stand or
+fall. To the question whether it can make good its claim
+to the possession and increase of this knowledge we must
+give special attention, for if Philosophy fails in this it
+fails in all.</p>
+
+<p>The oldest name for the knowledge in question was
+simply Wisdom and, in some ways, in spite of its apparent
+arrogance this is the best name for what is sought&mdash;or
+missed. Yet from the beginning the name was felt not
+sufficiently to distinguish what was meant from the high
+skill of the cunning craftsman and the worldly wisdom
+of the man of affairs, the statesman or soldier or trader.
+In the case of all these it was difficult to disengage the
+knowledge involved from natural or trained practical
+dexterity. What was desired and required was knowledge
+distinguished but not divorced from practice and application&mdash;'pure
+knowledge' as it was sometimes called; not
+divorced, I repeat, for it was not conceived as without
+bearing upon the conduct of life, but still distinguished,
+as furnishing light rather than profit. For good or evil
+Philosophy began by considering what it sought and hoped
+to reach as pre-eminently knowledge in some distinctive
+sense, and having so begun it turned to reflect once more
+upon what it meant by so conceiving it and to make this
+meaning more precise and clear. So it came to present
+to itself as its aim or goal a special kind or degree of
+knowledge, to be inspired and guided by the hope of that.
+Practical as in many ways was the concern of ancient<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_280" id="Page_280">[280]</a></span>
+philosophy&mdash;its whole bent was towards the bettering
+of human life&mdash;it sought to achieve this by the extension
+and deepening of knowledge, and not either through the
+cultivation or refinement of emotion or the organization
+of practical, civil or social or philanthropic activities.
+It laboured&mdash;and laboured not in vain&mdash;to further the
+increase of knowledge by defining to itself in advance the
+kind or degree of knowledge which would accomplish
+the ultimate aim of its endeavour or subserve its accomplishment.
+Hence we must learn to view with a sympathetic
+eye its repeated essays to give precision and detail
+to the conception or ideal of knowledge.</p>
+
+<p>In form the answer rendered to its request to itself for
+a definition, was determined by the principle that the
+knowledge which was sought and alone, if found, could
+satisfy, was knowledge of the real, or as it was at first
+more simply expressed, of what is, or what really and
+veritably is. Refusing the name of knowledge except
+to what had this as its object, men turned to consider
+the nature of the object which stood or could stand in
+this relation. With this they contrasted what we, after
+them, call the phenomena, the appearances, the manifold
+aspects, constantly shifting with the shifting points of
+view of the observer or many observers of it, inconstant,
+unsteady, superficial, mirrored through the senses and
+imagination, multiplied and distorted in divergent and
+changing opinions, or misrepresented and even caricatured
+in the turbid medium of ordinary speech, like a clouded
+image on the broken waters of a rushing stream. 'It'&mdash;so
+at first they spoke of the object of true or 'philosophic'
+knowledge&mdash;was one and single, eternal and unchangeable,
+a universe or world-order of parts fixed for ever in their
+external relations and inward structure. In each and all
+of us there was, as it were, a tiny mirror that could be
+cleared so as to reflect all this, and in so far as such<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_281" id="Page_281">[281]</a></span>
+reflection took place an inner light was kindled in each
+which was a lamp to his path. Knowing&mdash;for to know
+was so to reflect the world as it really was&mdash;knowing, man
+came to self-possession and self-satisfaction&mdash;to peace
+and joy&mdash;and was even 'on this bank and shoal of time'
+raised beyond the reach of all accidents and evils of
+mortal existence&mdash;looking around and down upon all
+that could harm or hurt him and seeing it to be in its
+law-abiding orderliness and eternal changelessness the
+embodiment of good. So viewing it, man learned to feel
+the Universe his true home, and was inspired not only
+with awe but with a high loyalty and public spirit. 'The
+poet says "Dear City of Cecrops", and shall I not say
+"Dear City of God"?'</p>
+
+<p>The knowledge thus reached or believed to be attainable
+was more and more discriminated from what was offered
+or supplied by Art or Science or Religion, though it was
+still often confused with each and all of them. As opposed
+to that of Art, it was not direct or immediate vision
+flashed as it were upon the inner eye in moments of inspiration
+or excitement; as opposed to that of Science, it was
+a knowledge that pierced below the surface and the
+seeming of Nature and History; as opposed to that of
+Religion (which was rather faith than knowledge), it was
+sober, unimaginative, cleansed of emotional accompaniment
+and admixture, the 'dry light' of the wise soul. True
+to the principle which I have stated, ancient Philosophy
+proclaimed that the only knowledge in the end worth
+having was knowledge of Fact&mdash;of what lay behind all
+seeming however fair&mdash;Fact unmodified and unmodifiable
+by human wish or will; it bade us know the world in
+which we live and move and have our being, know it as
+it is truly and in itself, and knowing it love it, loyally
+acquiescing in its purposes and subserving its ends. In
+all this there was progress (was there not?) to a view, to<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_282" id="Page_282">[282]</a></span>
+a truth (how else shall we speak of it?) which has always,
+when apprehended, begotten a high temper in heroic
+hearts. Surely in having reached in thought so high and
+so far the mind of man had progressed in knowledge and
+in wisdom.</p>
+
+<p>But now a change took place, from which we must date
+the rise or birth of modern philosophy. Hitherto on the
+whole the mind of man had looked outward and sought
+knowledge of what lay or seemed to lie outside itself.
+So looking and gazing ever deeper it had encountered
+a spectacle of admirable and awe-compelling order, yet
+one which for that very reason seemed appallingly
+remote from, if not alien to, all human businesses and
+concerns. Now it turned inward and found within itself
+not only matter of more immediate or pressing interest,
+but a world that compelled attention, excited curiosity,
+rewarded study. Slowly and gradually the knowledge of
+this, the inner world&mdash;the world of the thinker's self&mdash;became
+the central object of philosophic reflection. The
+knowledge that was most required&mdash;that was all-important
+and indispensable (so man began explicitly to realize)&mdash;was
+knowledge of the Self, not of the outer world that at
+best could never be more than known, but of the self
+that knew or could know it, that could both know
+and be known. Henceforward what is studied is not
+knowledge of reality&mdash;of any and every reality&mdash;or of
+external reality, but knowledge of the Self which can
+know as well as be known. And the process by which it
+is sought is reflection, for the self-knowledge is not the
+knowledge of other selves, but the knowledge of just
+that Self which knows itself and no other. Thus the
+knowledge sought is once more and now finally distinguished
+from the knowledge offered or supplied by Art
+or Science or Religion: not by Art, for the Self cannot
+appear and has no seeming nor can it any way be pictured<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_283" id="Page_283">[283]</a></span>
+or described or imagined; not by Science, for it lies beyond
+and beneath and behind all observation, nor can it be
+counted or measured or weighed; not by Religion, for
+knowledge of it comes from within and the disclosure of
+its nature is by the self-witness of the Self to its self, not
+by revelation of any other to it. Thus there is disclosed
+the slowly-won and slowly-revealed secret of modern
+Philosophy, that the knowledge which is indispensable,
+which is necessary as the consummation and key-stone
+of all other knowledge, is knowledge of the knowing-self,
+self-knowledge, or, as it is sometimes more technically
+called, self-consciousness, with the corollary that this
+knowledge cannot be won by any methods known to or
+specially characteristic of Science or Art or Religion. To
+become self-conscious, to progress in self-consciousness
+is the end, and the way or means to it is by reflection&mdash;the
+special method of Philosophy.</p>
+
+<p>This is the step in advance made by the modern spirit
+beyond all discoveries of the ancients; it is the truth by
+the apprehension of which the modern spirit and its world
+is made what it is. Not outside us lies Truth or the Truth:
+Truth dwelleth in the inner man&mdash;<i>in interiore hominis
+habitat veritas</i>. Is this not progress, progress in wisdom,
+and to what else can we ascribe the advance save to
+Philosophy?</p>
+
+<p>It was one of the earliest utterances of modern Philosophy,
+and one which it has never found reason to retract,
+that the Self which knows can and does know itself better
+than aught else whatsoever, and in that knowledge can
+without end make confident and sure-footed advance.
+To itself the Self is the most certain and the most knowable
+of all realities&mdash;with this it is most acquainted, this it
+has light in itself to explore, of this it can confidently
+foresee and foretell the method of advance to further and
+further knowledge. It knows not only its existence but<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_284" id="Page_284">[284]</a></span>
+its essence, its nature, and it knows by what procedure,
+by what ordered effort or exercise of will it can progress
+to height beyond height of its self-knowledge. I say, it
+knows it, but it also knows that that knowledge cannot be
+attained all at once or taken complete and ready-made,
+for it <i>is</i> itself a progress, a self-created and self-determined
+progress, and on that condition progress alone is or is real.
+For it to be is not to be at the beginning or at the end of
+this process, but to be always coming to be, coming to be
+what it is not and yet also what it has in it to be. Of
+nothing else is Progress so intimately the essence and very
+being; if we ask 'What progresses or evolves?', the most
+certain answer is 'The spirit which is in man, and what
+it progresses in, is knowledge of itself, which is wisdom'.
+Speaking of and for Philosophy I venture to maintain
+that nothing is more certain than that that spirit which
+has created it has grown, is growing, and will ever grow in
+wisdom, and that by reflection upon itself and its history&mdash;nor
+can the gates of darkness and error prevail against
+the irresistible march of its triumphant progress.</p>
+
+<p>As we look back the history of Philosophy seems
+strewn with the debris of outworn or outlived errors,
+but out of them all emerges this clear and assured truth,
+that in self-knowledge lies the master-light of all our
+seeing, inexhaustibly casting its rays into the retreating
+shadow world that now surrounds us, melting all mists
+and dispelling all clouds, and that the way to it is unveiled,
+mapped and charted in advance so that henceforward we
+can walk sure-footedly therein. Yet that does not mean
+that the work of Philosophy is done, that it can fold its
+hands and sit down, for only in the seeking is its prize
+found and there is no goal or end other than the process
+itself. For this too is its discovery, that not by, but in,
+endless reflection is the Truth concerning it known, the
+Truth that each generation must ever anew win and earn<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_285" id="Page_285">[285]</a></span>
+it for itself. The result is not without the process, nor
+the end without the means: the fact <i>is</i> the process and
+other fact there is none. In other forms of so-called
+'knowledge' we can sever the conclusion from its premisses,
+and the result can be given without the process,
+but with self-knowledge it is not so and no generation,
+or individual, can communicate it ready-made to another,
+but can only point the way and bid others help themselves.
+And if this, so put, seems hard doctrine, I can only remind
+you that to philosophize has always meant 'to think by
+and for oneself'.</p>
+
+<p>It is perhaps more necessary to formulate the warning
+that what is here called self-knowledge and pronounced
+to constitute the very essence of the spirit that is in man,
+is far removed from what sometimes bears its name, the
+extended and minute acquaintance by the individual
+mind with its individual peculiarities or idiosyncrasies,
+its weaknesses and vanities, its whims and eccentricities;
+nor is it to be confused with the still wider acquaintance
+with those that make up our common human nature in
+all its folly and frailty which is sometimes called 'knowledge
+of human nature'; no, nor with such knowledge
+as psychological science, with its methods of observation
+and induction and experiment, offers or supplies. It is
+knowledge of something that lies far deeper within us&mdash;'the
+inward man', which is not merely alike or akin
+but is the same in all of us; beneath all our differences,
+strong against all our weaknesses, wise against all our
+follies, what each of us rightly calls his true self and yet
+what is not his alone, but all men's also. As we reflect
+upon it duly, what discloses or reveals itself to us is
+a self which is both our very own and yet common or
+universal, the self of each and yet the self of all. The more
+we get to apprehend and understand it, the more we become
+and know ourselves, not so much as being but as becoming<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_286" id="Page_286">[286]</a></span>
+one with one another; the differences that sunder us in
+feeling and thought and action melting away like mist.
+The removal of these differences is just the unveiling of
+it, in which it at once comes to be and to be known.
+In coming to know it we create it. The unity of the spirit
+thus becomes and is known as indubitable fact, or rather
+(I must repeat) not as fact, as if it were or were anything
+before being known, but as something which is ever more
+and more coming to be, in the measure in which it is coming
+to be known&mdash;known to itself. For this is the hard lesson
+of modern philosophy, that our inmost nature and most
+genuine self is not aught ready-made or given, but something
+which is created in and by the process of our
+coming to know it, which progresses in existence and
+substantiality and value as our knowledge of it progresses
+in width and depth and self-assurance. The process is
+one of creative&mdash;self-creative&mdash;evolution, in which each
+advance deposits a result which prescribes the next step
+and supplies all the conditions for it, and so constantly
+furnishes all that is required for an endless progress in
+reality and worth. This is the process in which the spirit
+of man capitalizes and substantiates its activities, committing
+its gains to secure custody, amassing and using
+them for its self-enrichment&mdash;in which it depends on no
+other than itself and is sovereign master of its future and
+its fate. This is the way in which selves are made, or
+rather, make themselves.</p>
+
+<p>This is the discovery of modern Philosophy, the now
+patent secret which it offers for the interpretation of all
+mysteries and the solving of all problems&mdash;and it offers
+it with unquestioning assurance, for it has explored the
+ground and has awakened to the true method of progress
+within it. And as I have said or implied, to the reflective
+mind regress is impossible, it cannot go back upon itself,
+and with due tenderness and gratitude it has set behind<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_287" id="Page_287">[287]</a></span>
+it the things of its unreflective childhood. It stands on
+the stable foundation of the witness of the spirit within
+us to itself, to its own nature, its own powers and its own
+rights; it knows itself as the knower, the interpreter, the
+teacher, and therefore the master and maker of itself.
+Yet we must not identify or confuse this our deeper or
+deepest self which we thus create with the separate selves
+or souls which each of us is; it is not any one of them
+nor all of them together, unless we give to the word
+'together' a new and more pregnant sense than it has
+yet come to bear. It is not the 'tribal' or 'collective'
+or 'social' self, for it is not made by congregation or
+collection or association, but by some far more intimate
+unification than is signified by any of these terms, namely
+by coming together in and by knowledge. It is the spirit
+which is in us all and in which we all are, which is more yet
+not other than we, without which we are nothing and do
+nothing and yet which is veritably the spirit of man, the
+immortal hero of all the tragedy and comedy&mdash;the whole
+drama&mdash;of human history; it is of this spirit as it is by
+it, that Philosophy has in repeated and resolute reflection
+come to know the nature and the method of its progress.
+Such knowledge has come into the world and prevails
+more widely and more potently than ever before; possessed
+in fullness by but a few, it is open and available
+to all and radiates as from a beacon light over the whole
+field of human experience; at that fire every man can
+light his candle. This is the light in which alone the record
+of man's thoughts and achievements can be construed
+and which exhibits them as steps and stages on that
+triumphant march to higher and higher levels such as
+alone we can rightly name Progress. Where else than in
+History, and, above all, in the History of Knowledge, is
+Progress manifested, and in that where more certainly
+than in the unretreating and unrevoked advance towards<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_288" id="Page_288">[288]</a></span>
+a deeper, a truer, a wiser knowledge of itself by the spirit
+that is in and is, Man?</p>
+
+<p>Yes, such knowledge, truth and wisdom now exists and
+is securely ours, though to inherit it each generation and
+each individual must win it afresh and having won it
+must develop and promote it, or it ceases not only to work
+but to be. For it exists only as it is made or rather only
+in the act and fact of its progress, and so for it not to
+progress is at once to return to impotence and nothingness.
+And it is we who maintain it in being, maintaining it by
+endless reiterated efforts of reflection, and so maintaining
+it we maintain ourselves, resting or relying upon it and
+using it as a source of strength and a fulcrum or a platform
+for further effort. Upon self-knowledge in this sense all
+other 'knowledge' reposes; upon it and the knowledge of
+other selves and the world, which flows from it, depends
+the possibility of all practical advance. In the dark all
+progress is impossible.</p>
+
+<p>But since this discovery was made and made good, the
+spirit of Philosophy has not stood still; it has gone on,
+and is still going on, to extend and deepen and secure its
+conquests. Once more it has turned from its fruitful
+and enlightening concentration on the inner self and its
+life to review what lies or seems to lie around and outside
+it. It finds that those who have stayed, or fallen, behind
+its audacious but justified advance in self-knowledge, still
+cherish a view of what is external to this (the true or real
+self so now made patent), thoughts or fancies which
+misconceive and misrepresent it&mdash;thoughts persisted in
+against the feebler protesting voices of Art and Religion
+and so held precariously and unstably though apparently
+grounded upon the authority of Science. To the unphilosophic
+or not yet philosophic mind the spirit of man, already
+in imagination multiplied and segregated into individual
+'souls', appears to be surrounded with an environment<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_289" id="Page_289">[289]</a></span>
+of alien character, often harsh to man's emotions, often
+rebellious or untractable to his purposes, often impenetrable
+to his understanding, and in a word indifferent or
+hostile to his ideals and aspirations after progress and good.
+Nay, the individual souls seem to act towards one another
+separately and collectively as such hindrances, and again,
+each individual soul seems to be encrusted with insuperable
+impediments. Even the light within is enclosed in an
+opaque screen which prevents or counteracts its outflow,
+so that the spirit within is as it were entombed or imprisoned.
+'Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems us in,'
+we cannot communicate with one another or join with
+one another in thought or deed; and the hope of progress
+seems defeated by the recalcitrant matter that shell upon
+shell encases us. The world of our bodies, of the bodies and
+spirits of others, and all the vast <i>compages</i> of things and
+forces which we call 'Nature' blinds and baffles us, mocks
+our hopes and breaks our hearts. How idle to dream that
+amidst and against all this neutrality or hostility any
+substantial or secure advance can be made!</p>
+
+<p>In answer to all these thoughts, these doubts and fears,
+Philosophy is beginning with increasing boldness to speak
+a word, not of mere comfort and consolation, but of secure
+and confident wisdom. All this so-called 'external'
+nature and environment is not hostile or alien to the
+self or spirit which is in man, it is akin and allied to it
+as we now know it to be. Whatever is real and not merely
+apparent in History or Nature is rational, is of the same
+stuff and character as that which is within us. It too
+is spiritual, the appearance and embodiment of what is
+one in nature and mode of being with what lies deepest
+and is most potent in us. So far as it is not that, it is
+appearance and not reality, woven like a dream by
+imagination or endowed with an unstable and shifting
+quasi-reality by our thoughts and suppositions and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_290" id="Page_290">[290]</a></span>
+fancies about we know not what. Not that it is an illusion,
+still less a delusion, rather what it is is the outward
+and visible sign of an inward and spiritual reality, a symbol
+beautiful, orderly, awe-inspiring yet mutilated, partial,
+confused, of something deeper and more real, the expression,
+the face and gesture, of a spirit that, as ours does,
+knows itself, its own profound being and meaning, and
+does what it does in the light of such knowledge, a spirit
+which above all progresses endlessly towards and in a
+richer and fuller knowledge of itself. What we call Fact&mdash;historical
+or natural&mdash;is essentially such an expression,
+on the one hand a finished expression, set in the past
+and therefore for ever beyond the possibility of change
+and so of progress, an exhausted or dead expression, on
+the other hand a passing into the light of what was before
+unknown even to the expresser's self, an act by which
+was made and secured a self-discovery or self-revelation,
+a creative act of self-knowledge and so significant and
+interpretable. This double character of events in History
+and Nature is dimly descried in what we specially call
+'nature', but comes more fully into view in the sphere
+of human history, where each step is at once a deed and
+a discovery, a contribution to the constitution of the world
+of fact and a fulguration of the light within illuminating
+facts as the condition of its own inexhaustible continuance.
+The world of Fact, artistic or aesthetic, scientific, moral,
+political, economic, is what the spirit builds round itself,
+creating it out of its own substance, while it itself in
+creating it grows within, evolving out of itself into itself
+and advancing in knowledge or wisdom and power. And
+out of its now securely won self-knowledge it declares
+that it&mdash;itself&mdash;is the source and spring of all real fact
+whatsoever, which is its self-created expression, made by
+it in its own interests, and for its own good, the better<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_291" id="Page_291">[291]</a></span>
+and better to know itself. Nothing is or can be alien,
+still less hostile to it, for 'in wisdom has it made them
+all'. Looking back and around it re-reads in all fact the
+results of its own power of self-expression. Nothing is but
+what it has made.</p>
+
+<p>All this might perhaps have been put very simply by
+saying that ever since man has set himself to know his
+own mind in the right way, he has succeeded better and
+better, and that in knowing his own mind he has come to
+know and is still coming to know all else beside, including
+all that at first sight seems other than, or even counter
+to, his own mind. He has learned what manner of being
+he is, how that being has been made and how it continues
+to be made and developed, and again, how in the course of
+its self-creation and self-advance it deposits itself in 'fact'
+and reflecting on that fact rises beyond and above itself
+in knowledge and power. He is mind or spirit, and what
+lies behind and around him is spiritual. As he reflects
+upon this the meaning of it becomes ever more clear
+and distinct, ordered and organized, and at the same time
+more substantial, more real, more lively and potent. In
+becoming known what was before dead and dark and
+threatening or obstructive or hostile is made transparent,
+alive, utilisable, contributing to the constantly growing
+self that knows and is known. Here is the growing point
+of reality, the <i>fons emanationis</i> of truth and worth and
+being, evidencing its power not as it were in increase of
+bulk, but in the enhancing of value. And surely here is
+Progress, which consists not in mere enlargement or
+expansion but in the heightening of forces to a new power&mdash;in
+a word, in their elevation to a more spiritual, a more
+intelligent and therefore more potent, level.</p>
+
+<p>To the artistic eye the universe presents itself as a vast
+and moving spectacle, to the scientific mind as the theatre
+of forces which repeat their work with a mechanical<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_292" id="Page_292">[292]</a></span>
+uniformity or perhaps fatally run down to a predestined and
+predictable final arrest, to the devout or religious soul as
+the constant efflux of a beneficent will, unweariedly kind,
+caring for the humblest of its creatures, august, worshipful,
+deserving of endless adoration and love, while to the philosophic
+mind it is known and ever more to be known
+as the self-expression of a mind in essence one with all
+minds that know it in knowing themselves, know it as
+the work or product of a mind engaged or absorbed in
+knowing itself, and so creating itself and all that is
+requisite that it may learn more and more what is hidden
+or stored from all eternity within its plenitude. At least
+we may say that the conception of a Mind which in order
+to know itself creates the conditions of such knowledge,
+which wills to learn whatever can be learned of itself from
+whatever it does, supplies the best pattern or original
+after which to model our vaguer and more blurred
+conceptions of progressive existence and being elsewhere.
+It furnishes to us an ideal of a progress which realizes or
+maintains and advances itself, for it is independent upon
+external conditions. The Progress of Philosophy or of
+Wisdom is a palmary instance of progress achieved out of
+the internal resources of that which progresses. And after
+this pattern we least untruly and least unworthily conceive
+the mode of that eternal and universal Progress which is
+the life of the Whole within and as part of which we live.</p>
+
+<p>The aim of Philosophy is not edification but the
+possession and enjoyment of Truth, and the Truth may
+wear an aspect which, while it enlightens, also blinds or
+even at first appals and paralyses. And certainly Reality
+or Philosophy as has come to know it and proclaims it
+to be, is not such as either directly to warm our hearts or
+stimulate our energies. Not to do either has Philosophy
+come into the world, nor so does it help to bring Progress
+about; nor does it offer prizes to those who pursue either<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_293" id="Page_293">[293]</a></span>
+moral improvement or business success, nor again does it
+increase that information concerning 'nature' and men
+which is the condition of the one and the other, yet to those
+who love Truth and who will buy no good at the sacrifice
+of it, what it offers is enough, and to progress towards and
+in it is for them worth all the world beside; it is, if not
+the only real progress, that in the absence of which all
+other progress is without worth or substance or reality.
+In the end, if any advance anywhere is claimed or asserted,
+must we not ask: Is the claim founded on truth, is the
+good or profit seemingly attained a (or the) true good? To
+whom or to what is it good? Can we stop short of the
+endeavour to assure ourselves beyond question or doubt
+that we are right in what answers we render? And
+where or by what means can we reach this save by turning
+inward on meditation or reflection, that is by philosophizing?
+<span class='correction' title='Ei philosophêteon philosophêteon, ei de mê, philosophêteon; pantôs ara philosophêteon'>&#917;&#7984; &#966;&#953;&#955;&#959;&#963;&#959;&#966;&#951;&#964;&#8051;&#959;&#957; &#966;&#953;&#955;&#959;&#963;&#959;&#966;&#951;&#964;&#949;&#959;&#957;, &#949;&#7984; &#948;&#8050; &#956;&#8053;, &#966;&#953;&#955;&#959;&#963;&#959;&#966;&#951;&#964;&#8051;&#959;&#957;;
+&#960;&#8049;&#957;&#964;&#969;&#962; &#7940;&#961;&#945; &#966;&#953;&#955;&#959;&#963;&#959;&#966;&#951;&#964;&#8051;&#959;&#957;</span>. Thither the mind of man
+has always turned when the burden of the mystery
+of its nature and fate has weighed all but intolerably
+upon it, and turning has never found itself betrayed, but
+from knowledge of itself has drawn fresh hope and
+strength to resume the uninterrupted march of Progress
+which is its life and its history, its being, its self-formation,
+in courage moving forwards in and towards the light. It
+is as if such light were not merely the condition of its
+welfare, but the food on which it lived, the stuff which it
+transmuted into substance and energy, out of it making,
+maintaining and building its very self. So under whatever
+name, whether we call what we are doing Philosophy or
+something else, the search for more and more light upon
+ourselves and our world is the most indispensable activity
+to which the leagued and co-operative powers of Man can
+be devoted. Fortunately it is also that in which success
+or failure depends most certainly upon ourselves and in<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_294" id="Page_294">[294]</a></span>
+which Progress can with most confidence be looked for.
+In it we cannot fail if we will to take sufficient trouble;
+the means to it are open and available; it is our fault
+if we do not employ them and profit by them. If we have
+less wisdom than we might have, it is never any one's
+fault but our own. The door of the treasure-house of
+Wisdom stands ever open.</p>
+
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">Books for Reference</span></h3>
+
+<div class='indent2'>
+<p>C. C. J. Webb, <i>History of Philosophy</i> (Home University Library).</p>
+
+<p>Burnet, <i>History of Greek Philosophy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>E. J. Bevan, <i>Stoics and Sceptics</i>.</p>
+
+<p>H&ouml;ffding, <i>History of Modern Philosophy</i> (translated).</p>
+
+<p>Royce, <i>The Spirit of Philosophy</i>.</p>
+
+<p>Merz, <i>History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century</i>.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" /><p><span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_295" id="Page_295">[295]</a></span></p>
+<h2>XII</h2>
+
+<h2>PROGRESS AS AN IDEAL OF ACTION</h2>
+
+<h3><span class="smcap">J. A. Smith</span></h3>
+
+
+<p>Throughout this course of lectures, now come to its
+close, we have together been engaged in a theoretical
+inquiry. We have been looking mainly towards the past,
+to something therefore for ever and in its very nature set
+beyond the possibility of alteration by us or indeed at all.
+'What is done not even God can make to be undone.'
+Were it otherwise it could not be fact or reality and so
+not capable of being theorized or studied. In the words
+of our programme we have analysed what is involved
+in the conception of Progress, shown when it became
+prominent in the consciousness of mankind and how far
+the idea has been realized&mdash;that is has become fact&mdash;in
+the different departments of life. We have taken Progress
+as a fact, something accomplished, and have attempted
+so taking it to explain or understand it. We have not
+indeed assumed that it is confined to the past, but have
+at times enlarged our consideration so as to recognize its
+continuance in the present and to justify the hope of its
+persistence in the future. Some of us would perhaps go
+further and hold that it has, by these and similar reflections,
+come to be part of our assured knowledge that it
+must so continue and persist. But however we have
+widened our purview, what we call Progress has remained
+to us a course or movement which still presents the appearance
+of a fact which is largely, if not wholly, independent
+of us&mdash;a fact because independent of us&mdash;to which we can<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_296" id="Page_296">[296]</a></span>
+occupy no other attitude than that of interested spectators,
+interested and concerned, moved or conditioned by it
+but not active or co-operative in it. So far as it is in
+process of realization in the vast theatre of nature, inorganic
+or organic, dead or living, that surrounds us, it
+pursues its course in virtue of powers not ours and
+unamenable to our control. And even when we view it
+within the closer environment of human history its current
+seems to carry us irresistibly with it. Its existence is
+indeed of very practical concern to us, but apparently all
+we can do is to come to know it, and knowing it to allow
+for it as or among the set conditions of our self-originated
+or self-governed actions if such actions there be.</p>
+
+<p>The clearer we have become as to the nature of Progress,
+the more it would appear that it must be for us, because
+it is in itself, a fact to be recognized in theory, taken into
+account and reckoned with. It is or it is not, comes to be
+or does not come to be, and what we have first and foremost
+to seek, is light upon its existence and character as it
+is or occurs. Light, we hope, has been cast upon it. We
+have learned that in its inmost essence and to its utmost
+bounds Reality&mdash;what lies outside and around us&mdash;is not
+fixed, rigid, immobile, was not and is not and cannot be as
+the ancient or mediaeval mind feigned or fabled, something
+beyond the reach of time and change&mdash;static or stationary&mdash;but
+is itself a process of ceaseless alteration. We have
+learned also to be dissatisfied with the compromise which,
+while acknowledging such alteration, all but withdraws
+it in effect by asserting it to be either in gross or in detail
+a process of mere repetition. The system of laws which
+science had taught us to consider as the truth of nature
+is itself now known to be caught in the evolutionary process,
+and to be undergoing a constant modification. As
+in the modern state, so in Nature, the legislative power
+is not exhausted but incessantly embodies itself in novel<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_297" id="Page_297">[297]</a></span>
+forms. Nature itself&mdash;<i>natura naturans</i>&mdash;is now conceived,
+and rightly conceived, as a power not bound to laws
+other than those which it makes for or imposes on itself,
+and as in its operations at least analogous to a will self-determined,
+self-governing, creative of the ways and means
+by which its purpose or purposes are achieved. What
+that purpose is we have begun to apprehend, and to see
+its various processes as converging or co-operating
+towards its fulfilment. In the mythological language
+which even Science is still obliged to use, we now speak
+of Nature as 'selecting' or 'devising', and we ascribe
+to it a large freedom of choice wisely used. We can
+already at least define the process as guided towards
+a greater variety and fullness and harmony of life, or (with
+a larger courage) as pointed towards a heightening or
+potentiation of life. So defining its goal we can sympathize
+with and welcome the successful efforts made toward
+it, and so feel ourselves at heart one with the power that
+carries on the process in its aspirations and its efforts.
+But still, we cannot help feeling, it and all its ways lie
+outside us, and to us it remains an alien or foreign power.
+I venture to repeat my contention that this is so just
+because, however much we come to learn of its ways, we
+do not feel that we are coming to understand it any
+better, getting inside it, as we do get inside and understand
+human nature. Its progress is a change, perhaps
+a betterment, in our environment&mdash;in externals&mdash;and
+takes place very largely whether we will and act or no.
+The larger our acquaintance with it, the more does its
+action seem to encroach upon the domain within which
+our volitions and acts can make any difference. Even in
+social life we seem in the grip and grasp of forces which
+carry us towards evil or good whether we will or no.
+<i>Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt.</i> The whole known
+universe outside and around us presents to us the spectacle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_298" id="Page_298">[298]</a></span>
+of what has been called a <i>de facto</i> teleology, and just
+because it is so, and so widely and deeply so, it leaves
+little or no room for us to set up our ideals within it and
+to work for their realization. The fact that the laws
+which prevail in it are modifiable and modified makes no
+difference; they modify themselves, and in their different
+forms still constrain us. And no matter how increasingly
+beneficent they may in their action appear, they are still
+despotic and we unfree. The rule of laws which Science
+discovers encroaches upon our liberties and privacies.
+What we had hitherto thought our very own, the movement
+of our impulses and desires and imaginations, are
+reported by science to be subject to 'laws of association',
+and we are borne onwards even if also at times
+upwards on an irresistible flood. We remain bound by the
+iron necessity of a fate that invades our inmost being&mdash;which
+will not let us anywhere securely alone. I repeat
+that it matters not how certainly the trend of the tide,
+which sets everywhere around and outside us, is towards
+what is good or best for us, it still is the case that it presents
+itself as neither asking for from us nor permitting to us
+the formation of any ideals of ours nor any prospect of
+securing them by our efforts. Were the fact of Progress
+established and conclusively shown to be all-pervasive
+and eternal, it still would bear to us the aspect of a paternal
+government which did good to and for us, but all the
+more left less and less to ourselves.</p>
+
+<p>This will doubtless be pronounced an exaggeration, and
+we may weakly refuse to face the impression naturally
+consequent upon the progress we have made in the ascertainment
+of the facts concerning the world in which we
+live. But does not the impression exist? The hateful
+and desolating impression made on us earlier by the
+thought of a 'block' universe, once for all and rigidly
+fixed in unalterable and uniform subjection to eternal<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_299" id="Page_299">[299]</a></span>
+and omnipresent law, has dissolved like the baseless
+fabric of a vision. And why? Just because being found
+intolerable it was faced and put to the question. Now
+that there has been substituted for it the spectacle of
+a universe necessarily or fatally evolving&mdash;or, as we have
+said, progressing&mdash;does it not, while still evoking the old
+awe or reverence, do anything but still daunt and dishearten
+us? What is our part, we ask, our very own part within
+all this? What can we within it do? And the answer,
+that it is ours, if we will, to enter into and live in the
+contemplation of all this no longer appeals to us. In such
+a progressive universe we can no longer feel ourselves
+'at home'. In it our active nature would seem to exist
+only to be disappointed and rebuffed.</p>
+
+<p>The only progress which we can care for is the progress
+which we ourselves bring about, or can believe that we
+bring about, in ourselves or our fellows or in the world
+immediately around us. So long as what is so named is
+something devised and executed by a power not our own&mdash;not
+the same as our own&mdash;it may call out from us gratitude
+and reverence, but the spectacle of the reality of such
+Progress cannot exercise the attractive force nor, so far
+as it is realized, beget that creative joy which accompanies
+even humble acts in which we set an ideal of our own
+before ourselves, and see it through our efforts emerge into
+actual existence. A practical ideal must be through and
+through of our own making. It must be devised by us and
+set to ourselves for our pursuit, and its coming to be, or be
+real, must be our doing. The very idea of it must be our
+own, not given or prescribed, still less imposed, and the process
+towards it must be our doing too. That there should,
+on their view of it, ever be protest and rebellion against its
+tyrannous demands appears to me reasonable and right,
+and those who make it to be guarding the immediate
+jewel of man's nature. We should, we might say, if this<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_300" id="Page_300">[300]</a></span>
+were the whole truth about the universe, acknowledge
+ourselves as its sons bound to gratitude and obedience
+because of the fatherly care for us, but it would be an
+essential complement to our family loyalty that we should
+insist upon and make good our claims to be grown-up
+sons and fellow citizens, declining to pronounce it wholly
+good, if those claims were denied to us. Now all these
+conditions seem to make straight against the possibility
+of regarding Progress, in the view of it we have hitherto
+taken, as an ideal of our action.</p>
+
+<p>In view of this character of the known fact of Progress,
+so discouraging and disabling to our active or practical
+nature, certain suggestions have been made which are
+thought to relieve us from these effects. It is said sometimes
+that this fatal&mdash;if beneficent or beneficial, still
+fatal&mdash;progress leaves as it were certain interstices in
+the universe within which it loses its constraining force,
+petty provinces but sufficient, where man is master and
+determines all events, from which even, it is sometimes
+conceded, some obscure but important influences are
+permitted to flow, modifying his immediate surroundings,
+little sanctuaries where the spirit that is in him and is his
+devises and realizes ideals of its own. But the notion
+of such sacrosanct and inviolable autonomies is being
+steadily undermined, and they are felt, as science becomes
+more dominant over our imaginations and emotions, to
+be no more than eddies in the universal stream, only
+apparently distinct and self-maintained, means made and
+broken for its purpose, really products and instruments
+of the world-progress. At any rate, it has been denied
+that they can rightfully be thought to stand outside it
+or themselves to exercise any effect upon their fortunes
+and their fate, still less upon their environment. Another
+suggestion fully and frankly acknowledges this, but
+though denying to us any power to affect either the form<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_301" id="Page_301">[301]</a></span>
+or the direction of the currents on which we are borne
+along, declares still open to us the possibility of affecting
+their speed, and bids us find satisfaction in the thought
+that by taking thought or resolve we can hasten or delay
+their and the universal movement. Still another view,
+abandoning even that hope, proclaims one last choice
+open to us, namely, that of sullen submission to, or glad
+and loyal acquiescence in, its irresistible sway. But surely
+all these suggestions are idle, and but for a moment conceal
+or postpone the inevitable conclusion that if Progress
+was, is and must or will be, that is, is necessary, what we
+think or do makes no difference, and can make no difference
+to or in it. Whether or no we convert the fact into
+an ideal, whether or no we set it before as our aim and
+exert ourselves to work for it, it goes on its way all the
+same. Either then it is not a fact, never was, and never
+will be a fact, or it is no possible ideal for which we can
+act. To be or become a fact, it must be independent of
+our action or our consent or our liking; if it is not all
+these it is not an ideal of action, or at any rate not so
+for us. I must repeat that what is or can be an ideal of
+action for us must be wholly and solely of our making,
+the very thought of it self-begotten in our mind, every
+step to its actual existence the self-created deed of our
+will. Not that either idea or act comes into being in
+a void or without suggestion and assistance from without
+us, but still so that the initiative lies in what we think
+or do, and so that without us it is unreal and impossible.
+It is enough, indeed, that we should be contributory, but
+the ideal must be such that without our irreplaceable
+co-operation it must fail. The only Progress in which
+we can take an active interest or make an ideal of action,
+is one which we conceive and execute, and that the fact
+we call Progress is not.</p>
+
+<p>So far we have found much argument to show that<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_302" id="Page_302">[302]</a></span>
+what we have hitherto called Progress is not and cannot
+be an ideal of action, or at least of our action. And now
+we must face another argument more plain and apparently
+fatal, indeed, specially or peculiarly fatal. For the
+very notion of Progress is of a process which continues
+without end, or we have the dilemma that it is either
+endless or runs to an end in which there is no longer
+Progress but something else. In either case it is not
+itself an end or the end, and whatever an ideal of action
+is, it must be an end&mdash;something beyond which there is
+nothing, which has no Beyond at all. To set before oneself
+as an ideal of action what one certainly knows to be
+incapable of attainment or accomplishment, incapable of
+coming to an end&mdash;that is surely futile and vain. Without
+a best, better or better-and-better has no meaning, and
+when the best is reached Progress is no more.</p>
+
+<p>The objection may be put in various ways, as thus.
+What we seek or want or work for, is to be satisfied, and
+satisfaction is a state, not a process or a progress. Or
+again, acting is a process of seeking, seeking and striving
+for something, and surely the seeking cannot itself be
+the object of the search. Or once more, what we act for
+is, as we must conceive it, something complete, finished,
+perfect, but Progress is essentially something incomplete,
+unfinished, imperfect. We all feel this, and at times at
+least the thought that what we seek flies ever before,
+affrights and paralyses: recoiling from such a prospect,
+we set before our imaginations as the reward or result
+of our labours, not movement but rest, not creation or
+production but consumption and fruition. We dream
+of one day coming to participate in a life or experience
+so good that there is no change from less good to more
+good possible within it, and which, if it can be said to
+progress at all, only, in Milton's magnificent words, 'progresses
+the dateless and irrevoluble circle of its own<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_303" id="Page_303">[303]</a></span>
+perfections, joining inseparable hands with joy and bliss
+in over-measure for ever'. Once this ideal has presented
+itself to our hopes or desires, it degrades by comparison
+with it to a second-best, the former ideal of endless
+development from lower to higher. What we want and
+seek is to be there, to have done with getting there. 'Here
+is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the cup with
+the roses around it.' Compared with this, how disconsolate
+a prospect is that 'of the sea that hath no shore
+beyond it, set in all the sea'&mdash;the endless voyage or quest.
+Not Progress is or can be the end, but achievement and
+the enjoyment of it. The progress is towards and for the
+end; the end is the supreme good and the progress is only
+good because of it, because it is on the way that leads to
+it, the way we are content to travel only because it leads
+there. Once more, and on still surer grounds, we must
+pronounce what we have come to know as Progress to
+be no possible ideal of action. What draws us on is the
+hope of something to be attained in and by the progress.
+To take Progress, which on the one hand is a fact and on
+the other is an incomplete fact, to be the end of our
+striving and our doing is to acquiesce in a self-contradiction.</p>
+
+<p>Yet the counter-ideal of a state in which we shall
+simply rest from our labours and sit down to enjoy the
+fruits of them does not promise satisfaction either, and
+so cannot be the end or ideal. Our desire and our endeavour
+is not for a moveless, changeless, undeveloping
+perfection. In fact, so often as the dream of such a state
+attained has presented itself, it has to thoughtful minds
+appeared anything but attractive or desirable. Our desire
+is to go on, and for that we are willing to pay a price&mdash;nay,
+it is for more than merely to go on, it is to advance
+and increase in perfection, so much so that the ideal itself
+once more slews round into its opposite and the search<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_304" id="Page_304">[304]</a></span>
+appears worth more than the attainment. It seems that
+we were not on the other view so wholly wrong, but must
+try so to frame our ideal of action as to unite both
+characters and satisfy both demands at once, so that it
+shall be at once a state and a movement or process, an
+achievement and a progress, a rest or quiet and a striving
+after it, a perfection and a perfecting. The combination
+at first sight appears impossible. Yet both characters it
+must combine. Here again, I must confess that the idea
+of mere Progress, even as achieved by our own efforts,
+seems to me to omit something essential to an ideal of
+action&mdash;of what is worth while our acting for. What is
+to be an ideal of action must have the character of a fulfilment&mdash;something
+to be consumed, not merely eternally
+added to. For this character of the (or any) ideal of
+action the best name is fruition or enjoyment. And the
+defect in the conception of it as Progress is that it seems
+to postpone this without a date.</p>
+
+<p>Let us put this truth which we have discovered concerning
+Progress in a nutshell, hiding or disregarding the
+internal contradiction. What is the nature, what is the
+kind of reality, which we have learned to ascribe to
+Progress (for we did pronounce it real and essentially
+capable of being realized)? It is that it is fact, yet fact
+not made but in the making; it is just the name for
+what is real only through and in the process of becoming
+real or being realized. Now I have already elsewhere
+pointed out that while a realization which is also a reality,
+or a reality which is also a realization, is in nature or
+what is external to us a mystery and a puzzle, it is just
+when we look inwards the open secret of our being; in
+our life or action regarded from within, it appears as
+something which is only dark because it is so close and
+familiar to us that inspection of it is difficult, not because
+it is in itself opaque or unintelligible. To its exemplifi<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_305" id="Page_305">[305]</a></span>cation
+or illustration there we must turn for light upon
+our problem.</p>
+
+<p>Let us for the time disregard the pressure exercised
+upon us by the suggestions of physical science, or even,
+I may add, popular and imaginative or opinionative&mdash;which
+is Latin for 'dogmatic'&mdash;Religion, and examine
+how Progress takes place, or is realized and real, within
+our spirits, or that spirit which is within us. The inward
+process is one by which that spirit is or is real only in the
+act or fact of being or coming to be realized, or rather of
+realizing itself, and the way in which it so becomes or
+makes itself real is by acknowledging its own past, treating
+it as fact, recognizing its failures or imperfections therein,
+projecting on the future an idea or ideal of itself, suggested
+by those apprehended wants or defects, of what
+it might be, and using that to supply itself with both
+energy and guidance, drawing from its own past both
+strength and light. In all this it acts autonomously, out
+of itself, and creates both the requisite light and the
+indispensable force, making its very limitations into new
+sources and reservoirs of both.</p>
+
+<p>We do not sufficiently note and hold and use the indubitable
+truth that, in contradistinction to what we call
+Nature, the forces of the spirit reinforce and re-create
+themselves in their use, are in their use not consumed
+but reinvigorated, not dissipated or degraded but recollected
+and elevated, not expended but enhanced.
+There is in the realm of spirit which is our nature and
+our world no law of either the conservation or the degradation
+of energy. We must not allow ourselves to be
+brow-beaten by arguments drawn from the obscurer
+region of physical and external nature. We know ourselves
+to be energies or energizing powers which increase
+and do not waste by exercise. That is what we ought
+to mean by saying that we are wills and not forces,<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_306" id="Page_306">[306]</a></span>
+spiritual not physical or natural beings. If need be to
+confirm ourselves in this knowledge, let us think of what
+takes place, has taken place in the advance of knowledge,
+and particularly of the most important kind of knowledge,
+viz. self-knowledge, how we make it by our reflection
+upon what we have already in respect of it achieved,
+recognize how it or we have fallen short or over-shot our
+mark, define what is required to make good its deficiencies,
+and find ourselves thereby already in actual possession
+of the preconceived supplement. The real, the fact, what
+is attained or accomplished in and by us, prescribes and
+facilitates, or rather supplies, its own missing complement
+of perfection. The process carries itself on, the
+progress realizes itself, the ideal translates itself into the
+fact or actuality: it accomplishes itself and yet it is the
+doing of our very self, of the spirit within us. All this is
+not merely our doing, it is our being, it is the process by
+which we make our minds, our souls, our very selves
+or self.</p>
+
+<p>That man is essentially an, or rather the, ideal-forming
+animal (or rather spirit) has long been noted, and also
+that the formation of ideals is an indispensable factor in
+his progress, which is his life and very being. But all
+the same, this is sometimes put in such a way as to make
+action, or at least human action, a dispensable accident
+in the universe, an ineffective and unsubstantial unreality,
+while at the same time those who put it thus, profess
+to see through the illusion and to enjoy moments of
+insight which recognize its nullity. This way of putting
+it in my judgement intolerably misconceives and misrepresents
+the truth.</p>
+
+<p>Our ideals of action must be self-made or self-begotten,
+but yet they must be congruent with known fact; but
+the manner of such congruence is hard to see, hard to
+express. Ideals cannot be themselves facts, and therefore<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_307" id="Page_307">[307]</a></span>
+cannot be known, but on the other hand they cannot be
+mere imaginations or suppositions or beliefs, still less, of
+course, illusions or delusions. They are not visionary,
+and the apprehension of them is a sort or degree of perception.
+They point beyond themselves to some higher
+fact which is not cognizable by our senses or perhaps our
+understanding, but which is yet genuinely cognizable and
+so in some high sense fact. Yet they are not, as we envisage
+them, the fact to which they point, but a substitute for
+or representative of that&mdash;an anticipation of or prevision
+of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind or degree of
+reality is sometimes called 'validity'&mdash;a term I do not
+like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with
+the connotation of a certain incumbency and imperativeness
+as well as of an appeal or adjustment to our nature
+as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is that their
+reality&mdash;it seems a paradox that an ideal should possess
+'reality'&mdash;consists in their suggestiveness of modes of
+action and their applicability to it, all this being supported
+by the conception of a state of affairs beyond
+and around us which makes it 'right'.</p>
+
+<p>If all this is so, Progress as an ideal of action cannot be
+precisely identical with Progress as a fact or object of
+actual or possible knowledge. We can never know what
+we are aiming at. But though different, the two are and
+must be congruent, and this may be enough to justify us in
+using the one name for the two. Unless there were Progress
+as fact everywhere and always in the universe&mdash;outside
+us&mdash;in Nature and History, and unless we took ourselves
+genuinely to apprehend this, we could not form the practical
+ideal of Progress, or at least the ideal could not be
+right. But the difference remains, and we must be prepared
+for and allow for it; though we can use the knowledge
+we obtain of the fact of Progress to control and
+guide our formulation of the practical ideal, we cannot<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_308" id="Page_308">[308]</a></span>
+identify the one with the other. Our imagining and our
+supposing of what is best for or obligatory upon us to do
+or work for, must go on under conditions&mdash;the conditions
+of what we know as to the nature of ourselves and our
+surroundings&mdash;and yet under these conditions has a very
+large liberty or autonomy.</p>
+
+<p>The Progress which is to serve as a practical ideal is
+not and cannot be the Progress that we know, but must
+be the result of imagination or supposition, and it is high
+and necessary wisdom to trust our imaginations and
+aspirations. The forms which it rightly takes cannot be
+determined by what we have learned in or from the past;
+it cometh not with observation, and the sources of experience
+cannot of themselves supply us with it, and though
+it comes in and with experience, it does not come from or
+out of it. Yet it is due to an impression made upon us
+by the Universe as we by our faculties apprehend it, and
+is not merely subjective or of subjective origin. Begotten
+of the imagination, it is appearance, not ultimate reality,
+and it cannot be thought out or wholly evacuated of
+mystery and perplexity. Is this not involved in the language
+we use of it, proclaiming it practical and therefore
+not theoretical?</p>
+
+<p>Nevertheless, while I must acknowledge this insuperable
+difference between the Progress we can make our
+end or ideal and the Progress we believe that in ourselves
+and around us we apprehend, I still would lay renewed
+stress upon the congruence and affinity of the two, and
+urge that the perception of the one&mdash;the Progress without
+us&mdash;and the pursuit of the other&mdash;the Progress within
+us&mdash;support and fertilize each the other. The more we
+know or can learn of the one the more effectively do we
+pursue the other, and conversely. The light and the
+fruits are bound together: the theory and the practice
+of Progress cannot be dissevered without the ruin of both.<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_309" id="Page_309">[309]</a></span></p>
+
+<p>The ideal of Progress which we present to ourselves is
+and must be one which is partly determined or limited
+by past achievement and partly enlarged by the study
+of what powers higher than our own have accomplished
+and are accomplishing. The formation of it must move
+constantly between a respect for what has been achieved
+and a worship, so to speak, for what is far better than
+anything that yet has been or become fact, and therefore
+incumbent or imperative upon us.</p>
+
+<p>The mode and manner of the Progress which is achieved
+in the Universe has become in various ways clearer to us
+and opens out undreamt-of possibilities, and our assurance
+of its reality is ever more and more confirmed, while
+on the other hand its actual or past results at the lower
+level of nature have grown and are growing more familiar.
+We see that Progress is the essential and therefore eternal
+form of life and spiritual being, which endows it everywhere
+with worth and substance. With this comes the
+conviction that the source of all this lies inward, in that
+inwardness where our true selves lie and springs from the
+very nature of that. The spirit which is within us is not
+other than the spirit which upholds and maintains the
+whole Universe and works after the same fashion. And
+with regard to this its manner of working, we have learned
+that it proceeds by taking account of its own past achievements,
+imagining or conceiving for itself tasks relevant to
+these but not limited by them, and finds in that the conditions
+and stimulus to their actualization. It is our business
+to imitate this procedure and so to contribute to the advance
+of the whole. No work so done is or can be lost. We
+are justified in supposing that in so doing we are leagued
+together in effective co-operation with one another and
+with all other forces at work in the whole. In and through
+us, though not in and through us only, Progress goes on,
+drawing us along with it. Inner and outer Progress, free<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_310" id="Page_310">[310]</a></span>
+allegiance and loyal subjection concur and do not clash,
+and the world in which we live and act appears to us as
+it is&mdash;a city of God which is also a self-governed and self-administered
+city of free men.</p>
+
+<p>But above all, what it prescribes to us is the duty&mdash;another
+name for 'the ideal of action'&mdash;to seek first light
+as to the true nature of our world and ourselves, dismissing
+and disregarding all appearance, however charming
+or seductive. Unless we learn to see Progress as universal
+and omnipresent and omnipotent, we shall set before
+ourselves ideals of action which are false and treacherous.
+We must exert ourselves not merely to apprehend, but
+to dwell in the apprehension and vision of it.</p>
+
+<p>And if there were no other reason, we should know it
+for the right ideal&mdash;this command first to seek light&mdash;because
+it is the hardest thing that can be asked of us
+or that we can ask of ourselves. But what is thus asked
+is not mere Faith and Hope, but a loyal adherence to the
+knowledge which is within us.</p>
+
+<p>Is this not the hardest? To-day, when over there in
+France and Flanders, and indeed almost all over Europe,
+as in a sort of Devil's smithy, men are busied in the most
+horrid self-destruction. The accumulated stores of age-long
+and patient industry are being consumed and annihilated;
+the works and monuments of civilized life are
+laid low: all physical and intellectual energies are bent
+to the service of destruction. The very surface of the
+kindly and fertile earth is seamed and scarred and wasted.
+And the human beings who live and move in this inferno,
+are jerked like puppets hither and thither by the operation
+of passions to which we dare not venture to give
+names, lest we be found either not condemning what defiles
+and imbrutes our nature or denying our meed of praise
+and gratitude to what ennobles it. All this portentous
+activity and business flows from no other fount and is<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_311" id="Page_311">[311]</a></span>
+fed by no other spring than the spirit which is within us,
+that spirit which has created that wealth, material, artistic,
+spiritual, which it is so busily engaged in wrecking and
+undoing. It is still as of old, making History, making it
+in the old fashion with the old ends in view and by the
+exercise of its old familiar powers. And if in this tragic
+scene or episode we cannot still read the features of
+Progress, our theory is a baseless dream, and we can
+frame no valid or 'right' ideal of action. For except to
+an environment known to be still, because always, the
+work and self-expression of a spirit akin to, and indeed
+identical with our own, and except as knowing ourselves
+to be still, because always, in all our ways of working its
+vehicles and instruments, we can neither define nor realize
+any ideals of action at all. This war is not an accident,
+nor an outburst of subterranean natural forces, but the
+act and deed of human will, and being so it cannot be
+merely evil.</p>
+
+<p>What, then, can we read not into, but out of, the tragic
+spectacle now being enacted, not merely before but in,
+through, and by us? Unless we have all along been
+mistaken, the victims of mere delusion and error, here,
+too, there has been and still is Progress. Primarily and
+principally what is taking place, is a tremendous revelation
+of the potencies which in our nature&mdash;in that which
+makes us men&mdash;have escaped our notice and therefore,
+because unseen or ignored, working in the dark, have not
+yet been drawn upon and utilized. There has been and
+still is going on, an enormous increase of self-knowledge.
+At first sight this seems wholly an opening up of undreamt-of
+evil. Side by side there has come to us a parallel revelation
+of undreamt-of good. I must bear witness to my
+conviction that we are beholding a tremendous inrush
+or uprush of good into man and his world. But what I
+wish to dwell upon is the growing and ever-confirmed<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_312" id="Page_312">[312]</a></span>
+revelation of an intimate relation or connexion between
+the two which is the very spring of Progress, viz. that
+the supply of good is not only adequate and more than
+adequate to the utmost demand made upon it, in the combating
+of the evil, and that for this reason, that while on
+the one hand the evil that impedes or counter-works the
+good is itself of spiritual origin, its existence and power
+is conditioned by the law that it must evoke and stimulate
+the very power which it attempts to crush and
+defeat. This is, as I have said, the now discovered and
+known spring of Progress both within and without us,
+that whatsoever is evil, evil just because it is enacted
+and does not merely occur, passes within the reach of
+knowledge and understanding, and in the measure that
+it passes into the light, not merely loses its sting and its
+force, but is convertible and converted into a strengthening
+condition of that which in its first appearance it seemed
+merely to thwart. Even regress is seen to be a necessary
+incident in progress, and the seasons which we call periods
+of decadence to be occasions in which the spirit progresses
+in secret, recruiting itself not by idleness or rest, but
+genuinely refreshing and recreating itself.</p>
+
+<p>The view here suggested is no sentimental optimism.
+The drama of the universe is no comedy or even melodrama,
+but a tragedy or epic of heroism, and more
+especially is this the character of the history of the spirit
+which is in Man and is Man. The evil we enact is real
+evil, the only real evil, the checks which our disobedience
+or disloyalty imposes upon the course of good, are genuine
+retardations or frustrations; nevertheless they are not
+wholly evil, for nothing is such, but are the means which
+the spirit that has begotten them, utilizes in its eternal
+Progress and wins out of them a richness, a complex and
+varied harmony to which they are compelled to contribute.
+Our ideal of action must therefore in principle<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_313" id="Page_313">[313]</a></span>
+acknowledge as essential, what I have called the 'tragic'
+character suggested by the spectacle of the war, the fear and
+agony which we imagine in Nature and comprehendingly
+discern in human history. The Progress which we can
+achieve or contribute to&mdash;which we can make our ideal
+of action&mdash;is one which cannot rightly be conceived otherwise
+than in its essence a victory over evil, and that it
+may be evil, it must come and be done in the dark. For the
+spirit in progressing deposits what, being abandoned by
+it, corrupts into venomous evil, but except in meeting and
+combating that, it cannot progress. And it can only
+combat it by getting to know it, for in darkness and
+ignorance it can make no secure advance.</p>
+
+<p>It has been profoundly said that to know all is to forgive
+all. Let us rather say that in coming to know its own
+past, the Spirit which is in Man can without undoing it&mdash;that
+it cannot&mdash;make it contributory to its own wealth
+of being, can, as I have said, utilize it for its own purposes,
+which are summed up in the knowing of itself. There
+is and can be nothing in its deeds which it cannot know,
+and so digest and assimilate and absorb into its own
+substance.</p>
+
+<p>In this interpretation of the meaning&mdash;the veiled but
+not hidden meaning of what has taken place and is taking
+place in the world&mdash;or rather in us and enacted by us,
+I seem to myself not to be expressing any private imagination
+or supposition which may or may not be so, but
+a certainty that it must be so. Either it is so or 'the
+pillared firmament is rottenness and earth's base built
+on stubble'. And this means that everywhere and always,
+but most specially and centrally and potently in man's
+spirit, there is Progress, in spite of checks and hindrances
+which come from within it, a constant if chequered
+advance in true worth or value. And that knowledge I
+build on grounded and reasoned hope that it will and<span class='pagenum'><a name="Page_314" id="Page_314">[314]</a></span>
+must continue&mdash;how, I do not know, but can only surmise
+and conjecture and imagine.</p>
+
+<p>To the question, What, then, ought we to do? I can
+only reply first and foremost, Labour to retain this
+truth, fostering and developing it, verifying it as we
+have been doing in all the varied departments of human
+experience, exercising our imaginations while at the
+same time sobering and controlling them by the light
+that comes from it. If we are true to it and do not
+through slackness forget and lose it, we shall find
+arising spontaneously out of the depths of our self worthy
+and feasible ideals of action, the pursuit of which will not
+betray us or leave us without an ever-growing assurance
+that in bending and directing all our powers to their
+realization we are the agents of that Progress which is
+the source of all being and all worth whatsoever. If we
+will to learn from our own past, we can convert anything
+that is evil in it into an occasion, an opportunity, a means
+to good which without it were not possible. Thus we can
+even do what seems utterly impossible, for we can without
+forgetting or ignoring or denying, forgive ourselves even
+the evil which we have done. Yes, even the darkest and
+worst evil, the disloyalty to ourselves, to the best and
+deepest within us, which all but achieved the impossibility
+of finally defeating the march of Progress. For
+the basis and ground of our belief in the reality, and
+therefore the eternity, of Progress lies in this, that the
+now known nature of the Spirit which is in Man and not
+in Man alone, is that it can heal any wounds that it can
+inflict upon itself, can find in its own errors and failures,
+in its own mistakes and misdeeds, if it only will, the
+materials of richer and fuller and worthier life.</p>
+
+
+<div class='transnote'>
+<a name="transnotes" id="transnotes"></a><h3>Transcriber's Notes</h3>
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_26">26</a>: Opening and closing quotes added to "Beg humbly that he unlock the door."</p>
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_89">89</a>: <i>Suma Theologica</i> <i>sic</i></p>
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_92">92</a>: course amended to coarse</p>
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_165">165</a>: preventible amended to preventable</p>
+
+<p>Page <a href="#Page_299">299</a>: missing word "is" added ("so far as it is realized")</p>
+
+<p>The footnote number is for footnote 81 is missing in the
+original text. The location of the number that has been
+added is only an assumption.</p>
+
+<p>Discrepancies between the Table of Contents and chapter
+headings ("Government"/"Progress in Government";
+"Industry"/"Progress in Industry"; "Art"/"Progress in Art";
+"Science"/"Progress in Science" and "Philosophy"/"Progress
+in Philosophy") have been retained.</p>
+</div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,9885 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Progress and History, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Progress and History
+
+Author: Various
+
+Editor: F. S. Marvin
+
+Release Date: January 31, 2009 [EBook #27948]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROGRESS AND HISTORY ***
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+
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+Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
+http://www.pgdp.net
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+  +------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Note                                         |
+  |                                                            |
+  | Obvious typographical errors have been corrected in        |
+  | this text. For a complete list, please see the bottom of   |
+  | this document.                                             |
+  | Text printed using the Greek alphabet in the original book |
+  | is shown as follows: [Greek: logos]                        |
+  +------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+PROGRESS AND
+HISTORY
+
+_ESSAYS ARRANGED AND EDITED_
+
+BY
+
+F. S. MARVIN
+
+LATE SENIOR SCHOLAR OF ST. JOHN'S COLLEGE, OXFORD
+
+AUTHOR OF 'THE LIVING PAST'
+
+EDITOR OF 'THE UNITY OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION'
+
+
+'Tanta patet rerum series et omne futurum
+Nititur in lucem.'
+                    LUCAN.
+
+
+_THIRD IMPRESSION_
+
+
+
+HUMPHREY MILFORD
+
+OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
+LONDON  EDINBURGH  GLASGOW  NEW YORK
+TORONTO  MELBOURNE  CAPE TOWN  BOMBAY
+
+1919
+
+
+PRINTED IN ENGLAND AT THE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE
+
+
+This volume is a sequel to _The Unity of Western Civilization_ published
+last year and arose in the same way, from a course of lectures given at
+the Woodbrooke Settlement, Birmingham.
+
+The former book attempted to describe some of the permanent unifying
+factors which hold our Western civilization together in spite of such
+catastrophic divisions as the present war. This book attempts to show
+these forces in growth. The former aimed rather at a statical, the
+present at a dynamical view of the same problem. Both are historical in
+spirit.
+
+It is hoped that these courses may serve as an introduction to a series
+of cognate studies, of which clearly both the supply and the scope are
+infinite, for under the general conception of 'Progress in Unity' all
+great human topics might be embraced. One subject has been suggested for
+early treatment which would have especial interest at the present time,
+viz. 'Recent Progress in European Thought'. We are by the war brought
+more closely than before into contact with other nations of Europe who
+are pursuing with inevitable differences the same main lines of
+evolution. To indicate these in general, with stress on the factor of
+betterment, is the aim of the present volume.
+
+F.S.M.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+                                                                  PAGE
+
+   I. THE IDEA OF PROGRESS                                           7
+
+         By F. S. MARVIN.
+
+  II. PROGRESS IN PREHISTORIC TIMES                                 27
+
+        By R. R. MARETT, Reader in Social Anthropology,
+          Oxford.
+
+ III. PROGRESS AND HELLENISM                                        48
+
+        By F. MELIAN STAWELL, late Lecturer at
+          Newnham College, Cambridge.
+
+  IV. PROGRESS IN THE MIDDLE AGES                                   72
+
+        By the Rev. A. J. CARLYLE, Tutor and
+          Lecturer at University College, Oxford.
+
+   V. PROGRESS IN RELIGION                                          96
+
+        By BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUeGEL.
+
+  VI. MORAL PROGRESS                                               134
+
+        By L. P. JACKS, Principal of Manchester
+          New College, Oxford.
+
+ VII. GOVERNMENT                                                   151
+
+        By A. E. ZIMMERN, late Fellow of New
+          College, Oxford.
+
+VIII. INDUSTRY                                                     189
+
+        By A. E. ZIMMERN.
+
+  IX. ART                                                          224
+
+        By A. CLUTTON BROCK.
+
+   X. SCIENCE                                                      248
+
+        By F. S. MARVIN.
+
+  XI. PHILOSOPHY                                                   273
+
+        By J. A. SMITH, Waynflete Professor of
+          Mental and Moral Philosophy, Oxford.
+
+ XII. PROGRESS AS AN IDEAL OF ACTION                               295
+
+        By J. A. SMITH.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE IDEA OF PROGRESS
+
+F. S. MARVIN
+
+
+The editor of these essays was busy in the autumn of last year collating
+the opinions attached by different people to the word 'progress'. One
+Sunday afternoon he happened to be walking with two friends in Oxford,
+one a professor of philosophy, the other a lady. The professor of
+philosophy declared that to him human progress must always mean
+primarily the increase of knowledge; the editor urged the increase of
+power as its most characteristic feature, but the lady added at once
+that to her progress had always meant, and could only mean, increase in
+our appreciation of the humanity of others.
+
+The first two thoughts, harmonized and directed by the third, may be
+taken to cover the whole field, and this volume to be merely a
+commentary upon them. What we have to consider is, when and how this
+idea of progress, as a general thing affecting mankind as a whole, first
+appeared in the world, how far it has been realized in history, and how
+far it gives us any guidance and hope for the future. In the midst of a
+catastrophe which appears at first sight to be a deadly blow to the
+ideal, such an inquiry has a special interest and may have some
+permanent value.
+
+Words are the thought of ages crystallized, or rather embodied with a
+constantly growing soul. The word 'Progress', like the word 'Humanity',
+is one of the most significant. It is a Latin word, not used in its
+current abstract sense until after the Roman incorporation of the
+Mediterranean world. It contains Greek thought summed up and applied by
+Roman minds. Many of the earlier Greek thinkers, Xenophanes and
+Empedocles as well as Plato and Aristotle, had thought and spoken of a
+steady process in things, including man himself, from lower to higher
+forms; but the first writer who expounds the notion with sufficient
+breadth of view and sufficiently accurate and concrete observation to
+provide a preliminary sketch, was the great Roman poet who attributed
+all the best that was in him to the Greeks and yet has given us a highly
+original picture of the upward tendency of the world and of human
+society upon it. He, too, so far as one can discover, was the first to
+use the word 'progress' in the sense of our inquiry. The passage in
+Lucretius at the end of his fifth book on the Nature of Things is so
+true and brilliant and anticipates so many points in later thought that
+it is worth quoting at some length, and the poet's close relation with
+Cicero, the typical Greco-Roman thinker, gives his ideas the more weight
+as an historical document.
+
+He begins by describing a struggle for existence in which the less
+well-adapted creatures died off, those who wanted either the power to
+protect themselves or the means of adapting themselves to the purposes
+of man. In this stage, however, man was a hardier creature than he
+afterwards became. He lived like the beasts of the field and was
+ignorant of tillage or fire or clothes or houses. He had no laws or
+government or marriage, and though he did not fear the dark, he feared
+the real danger of fiercer beasts. Men often died a miserable death, but
+not in multitudes on a single day as they do now by battle or shipwreck.
+
+The next stage sees huts and skins and fire which softened their
+bodies, and marriage and the ties of family which softened their
+tempers. And tribes began to make treaties of alliance with other
+tribes.
+
+Speech arose from the need which all creatures feel to exercise their
+natural powers, just as the calf will butt before his horns protrude.
+Men began to apply different sounds to denote different things, just as
+brute beasts will do to express different passions, as any one must have
+noticed in the cases of dogs and horses and birds. No one man set out to
+invent speech.
+
+Fire was first learnt from lightning and the friction of trees, and
+cooking from the softening and ripening of things by the sun.
+
+Then men of genius invented improved methods of life, the building of
+cities and private property in lands and cattle. But gold gave power to
+the wealthy and destroyed the sense of contentment in simple happiness.
+It must always be so whenever men allow themselves to become the slaves
+of things which should be their dependants and instruments.
+
+They began to believe in and worship gods, because they saw in dreams
+shapes of preterhuman strength and beauty and deemed them immortal; and
+as they noted the changes of the seasons and all the wonders of the
+heavens, they placed their gods there and feared them when they spoke in
+the thunder.
+
+Metals were discovered through the burning of the woods, which caused
+the ores to run. Copper and brass came first and were rated above gold
+and silver. And then the metals took the place of hands, nails, teeth,
+and clubs, which had been men's earliest arms and tools. Weaving
+followed the discovery of the use of iron.
+
+Sowing, planting, and grafting were learnt from nature herself, and
+gradually the cultivation of the soil was carried farther and farther up
+the hills.
+
+Men learnt to sing from the birds, and to blow on pipes from the
+whistling of the zephyr through the reeds: and those simple tunes gave
+as much rustic jollity as our more elaborate tunes do now.
+
+Then, in a summary passage at the end, Lucretius enumerates all the
+chief discoveries which men have made in the age-long process--ships,
+agriculture, walled cities, laws, roads, clothes, songs, pictures,
+statues, and all the pleasures of life--and adds, 'these things practice
+and the experience of the unresting mind have taught mankind gradually
+as they have progressed from point to point'.[1]
+
+It is the first definition and use of the word in literature. If we
+accept it as a typical presentation of the Greco-Roman view, seen by a
+man of exceptional genius and insight at the climax of the period, there
+are two or three points which must arrest our attention. Lucretius is
+thinking mainly of progress in the arts, and especially of the arts as
+they affect man's happiness. There is no mention of increase in
+knowledge or in love. As in the famous parallel passage in Sophocles'
+_Antigone_, it is man's strength and skill which most impressed the
+poet, and his skill especially as exhibited in the arts. Compared with
+what we shall see as typical utterances of later times, it is an
+external view of the subject. The absence of love as an element of
+progress carries with it the absence of the idea of humanity. There is
+no conception here, nor anywhere in classical thought before the Stoics,
+of a world-wide Being which has contributed to the advance and should
+share fully in its fruits. Still less do we find any hint of the
+possibilities of an infinite progress. The moral, on the contrary, is
+that we should limit our desires, banish disturbing thoughts, and settle
+down to a quiet and sensible enjoyment of the good things that
+advancing skill has provided for us. It is, of course, true that
+thoughts can be found in individual writers, especially in Plato and
+Aristotle, which would largely modify this view. Yet it can hardly be
+questioned that Lucretius here represents the prevalent tone of
+thoughtful men of his day. They had begun to realize the fact of human
+progress, but envisaged it, as was natural in a first view, mainly on
+the external side, and, above all, had no conception of its infinite
+possibilities.
+
+When we turn to typical utterances of the next great age in history the
+contrast is striking. Catholic doctrine had absorbed much that was
+congenial to it from the Stoics, from Plato and Aristotle, but it added
+a thing that was new in the world, a passionate love and an overpowering
+desire for personal moral improvement. This is so clear in the greatest
+figures of the Middle Ages, men such as St. Bernard and St. Francis, and
+it is so unlike anything that we know in the world before, that we are
+justified in treating it as characteristic of the age. To some of us,
+indeed, it will appear as the most important element in the general
+notion of progress which we are tracing. It so appeared to Comte.[2] Of
+numberless passages that might be quoted from fathers and doctors of the
+Church, a few words from Nicholas of Cusa must suffice. He was a divine
+of the early fifteenth century, true to the faith, but anxious to
+improve the discipline of the Church. To him progress took an entirely
+spiritual form. 'To be able to understand more and more without end is
+the type of eternal wisdom.... Let a man desire to understand better
+what he does understand and to love more what he does love and the whole
+world will not satisfy him.'
+
+Here is a point of view so different from the last that we find some
+difficulty in fitting it into the same scheme of things. Yet both are
+essential elements in Western civilization; both have been developed by
+the operations of similar forces in the world civilized and incorporated
+by Greece and Rome.
+
+The Catholic divine looks entirely inward for his idea of progress, and
+his conception contains elements of real and permanent validity, of
+which our present notions are full. His eyes are turned towards the
+future and there is no limit to his vision. And though the progress
+contemplated is within the soul of the individual believer, it rests on
+the two fundamental principles of knowledge and love which are both
+essentially social. The believer may isolate himself from the world to
+develop his higher nature, but the knowledge and the love which he
+carries with him into his solitude are themselves fruits of that
+intercourse with his fellows from which an exclusive religious ideal
+temporarily cuts him off.
+
+Nor must we forget that Catholic doctrine and discipline, though aiming
+at this perfection of the individual rather than of the race, was
+embodied in an organization which carried farther than the Roman Empire
+the idea of a united civilization and furnished to many thinkers,
+Bossuet as well as Dante, a first sketch of the progress of mankind.
+
+But it is clear that this construction was provisional only, either on
+the side of personal belief and practice, or of ecclesiastical
+organization; provisional, that is, if we are looking for real unity in
+the mind of mankind. For we need a doctrine, a scheme of knowledge, into
+which all that we discover about the world and our own nature may find
+its place; we need principles of action which will guide us in attaining
+a state of society more congruent with our knowledge of the
+possibilities of the world and human nature, more thoroughly inspired
+by human love, love of man for man as a being living his span of life
+here and now, under conditions which call for a concentration of skill
+and effort to realize the best. The breaking of the old Catholic
+synthesis, narrow but admirable within its limits, took place at what we
+call the Renascence and Reformation; the linking up of a new one is the
+task of our own and many later generations. Let it not be thought that
+such a change involves the destruction of any vital element in the idea
+of progress already achieved; if true and vital, every element must
+survive. But it does involve an acceptance of the fact that progress, or
+humanity, or the evolution of the divine within us--however we prefer to
+phrase it--is a larger thing than any one organization or any one set of
+carefully harmonized doctrines. The truth, and the organ in which we
+enshrine it, must grow with the human minds who are collectively
+producing it. The new unity is itself progress.
+
+It must give us confidence in facing such a prospect to observe that at
+each remove from the first appearance of the idea of progress in the
+world man's use of the word has carried more meaning and, though
+sometimes quieter in tone, as in recent times, is better grounded in the
+facts of life and history. Such an advance in our conceptions took place
+after the Renascence. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, when
+the art and science of the ancient world had been recovered, the word
+and the idea of progress started on a fresh course of unexampled vigour.
+The lines were closer to those of the pre-Christian than of the Catholic
+world, but it would be by no means true to call them pagan. When Bacon
+and Descartes begin to sound the modern note of progress, they think
+primarily of an advance in the arts and sciences, but there is a
+spiritual and human side to their ideal which could not be really
+paralleled in classical thought. The Spirit of Man is now invoked, and
+this, not in the sense of an elite, the builders of the Greek State or
+the rulers of the Roman Empire, but of mankind as a whole. This is
+Christian, or perhaps we should say, Stoical-Christian. Thus Descartes
+tells us that he looks to science to furnish us ultimately with an art
+which will make us 'masters and possessors of nature ... and this not
+solely for the pleasure of enjoying with ease the good things of the
+world, but principally for the preservation and improvement of human
+health which is both the foundation of all other goods and the means of
+strengthening the spirit itself' ('Discours de la Methode'). It is
+significant that the two words Progress and Humanity come into use in
+their modern sense side by side. The latter is the basis and the ideal
+of the former.
+
+But the new thing which had come into the world at this point, and gives
+a fresh impulse and content to the idea of progress, is the development
+of science. The Greeks had founded it and, as we shall see in a later
+chapter, it was the recovery of the Greek thread which gave the moderns
+their clue. But no one before the sixteenth century, before the marvels
+revealed by Galileo's telescope and knit up by Newton's synthetic
+genius, could have conceived the visions of human regeneration by
+science which light up the pioneers of the seventeenth century and are
+the gospel of the eighteenth.
+
+We turn to the eighteenth century, and primarily to the school of
+thinkers called 'philosophes' in France, for the fullest and most
+enthusiastic statement of progress as a gospel. It is, of course,
+European, as all the greatest advances of thought have been; and German
+thinkers, as well as English, stand with the French in the vanguard.
+Kant and Herder, from different points of view, thought it out perhaps
+more thoroughly than any one else at that time; but the French believed
+in it as a nation and were willing to stake their lives and souls on the
+belief. Thus Turgot, before the Revolution, declared that 'the total
+mass of the human race marches continually though sometimes slowly
+towards an ever-increasing perfection'. And Condorcet, in the midst of
+the Revolution, while himself under its ban, painted a picture 'of the
+human race, freed from its chains, and marching with a firm tread on the
+road of truth and virtue and happiness'.
+
+Here is the gospel in its purest and simplest form, and when we are
+inclined to think that the crimes and the partial failure of the
+Revolution discredit its principles, it is well to remember that the man
+who believed in them most systematically, expounded his belief with
+perfect calmness and confidence as he lay under sentence of death from a
+revolutionary tribunal.
+
+If this enthusiasm is madness, we might all well wish to be possessed.
+The true line of criticism is different. At the Revolution, as before at
+the Renascence, the leaders of the new movement could not see all their
+debt to the past. Like the Renascence, they idealized certain features
+in classical antiquity, but they had not yet gained the notion of
+historical continuity; above all, they did not realize the value of the
+religious development of the Middle Ages. It was left for the nineteenth
+century and for us, its successors, to attempt the supreme task of
+seeing things steadily and seeing them whole.
+
+For in spite of the capital contributions of the Renascence to progress
+and the idea of progress, especially by its scientific constructions, it
+is undeniable that a bias was then given to the course of Western
+civilization from which it has suffered ever since, and which it is now
+our urgent duty to correct. Two aspects of this may be specified. The
+old international unity which Rome had achieved, at least superficially,
+in the Mediterranean world, and which the Catholic Church had extended
+and deepened, was broken up in favour of a system of sovereign and
+independent states controlling religion and influencing education on
+lines calculated to strengthen the national forces and the national
+forces alone. They even believed that, at any rate in trade and
+commerce, the interests of these independent states were rather rival
+than co-operative. The Revolution struck the note of human association
+clearly enough, but we have not yet learnt to set all our other tunes in
+accord with it. Another, and perhaps even more fundamental, weakness of
+the Renascence tradition was the stress it laid on the material,
+mechanical, external side of progress. On the one hand, the spiritual
+side of life tended to be identified with that system of thought and
+discipline which had been so rudely disrupted. On the other hand, the
+new advance in science brought quickly after it a corresponding growth
+of wealth and mechanical inventions and material comforts. The spirit of
+man was for the time impeded and half suffocated by its own productions.
+
+The present war seems to many of us the supreme struggle of our better
+nature to gain the mastery over these obstructions, and freedom for its
+proper growth.
+
+Now if this analysis be anywhere near the truth, it is clear that our
+task for the future is one of synthesis on the lines of social progress.
+Knowledge, power, wealth, increase of skill, increase of health, we have
+them all in growing measure, and Mr. Clutton Brock will tell us in his
+chapter in this volume that we may be able by an exercise of will to
+achieve even a new renascence in art. But we certainly do not yet
+possess these things fairly distributed or in harmony of mind.
+
+The connexion therefore between progress as we now envisage it, and
+unity, both in ourselves and in society at large, becomes apparent. At
+each of the previous great moments in the history of the West
+development has been secured by emphasis on one side of our nature at
+the expense of the rest. Visions of mankind in common progress have
+flashed on individual thinkers, a Roman Emperor, a Catholic Schoolman, a
+Revolutionary prophet. But the thing achieved has been one-sided, and
+the needed correction has been given by another movement more one-sided
+still. The greatest hope of the present day lies in the fact that in all
+branches of life, in government as well as in philosophy, in science as
+in social reform, in religion and in international politics, men are now
+striving with determination to bind the threads together.
+
+There is no necessary opposition between the rival forces which have so
+often led to conflict. In all our controversies harmony can be reached
+and has often been reached by the application of patience, knowledge,
+and goodwill. And goodwill implies here the readiness to submit the
+particular issue to the arbitration of the general good. The
+international question has been so fully canvassed in these days that it
+would be superfluous to discuss it here. The moral is obvious, and
+abundant cases throughout the world illustrate the truth that
+well-organized nationalities contain in themselves nothing contrary to
+the ideal of international peace.[3] Nor is the still more persistent
+and universal opposition of capital and labour really less amenable to
+reconciliation, because in this case also the two factors in the problem
+are equally necessary to social progress, and we shall not enter on the
+various practical solutions--co-operation, co-partnership, partial
+state-socialism, &c.--which have been proposed for a problem which no
+one believes to be insoluble. The conflict in our own souls between the
+things of matter and sense and the life of the spirit, is more closely
+germane to the present argument, because ultimately this has to be
+resolved, if not in every mind yet in the dominant mind of Europe,
+before the more practical questions can be generally settled. Harmony
+here is at the root of a sound idea of progress.
+
+When the concluding chapters of this volume are reached it will be seen
+how fully the recent developments both in science and philosophy
+corroborate the line which is here suggested for the reconciliation of
+conflicts and the establishment of a stronger and more coherent notion
+of what we may rightly pursue as progress. For both in science and still
+more in philosophy attention is being more and more closely concentrated
+on the meaning of life itself, which science approaches by way of its
+physical concomitants, and philosophy from the point of view of
+consciousness. And while science has been analysing the characteristics
+of a living organism, philosophy finds in our consciousness just that
+element of community with others which an organic conception of progress
+demands. The only progress of which we can be certain, the philosopher
+tells us, is progress in our own consciousness, which becomes constantly
+fuller, more knowing, and more social, as time unfolds. This, he tells
+us, must endure, though the storms of passion and nature may fall upon
+us.
+
+On such a firm basis we would all gladly build our faith. No unity can
+be perfect except that which we achieve in our own souls, and no
+progress can be relied on except that which we can know within, and can
+develop from, our own consciousness and our own powers. But we cannot
+rest in this. We are bound to look outside our own consciousness for
+some objective correspondence to that progress which our own nature
+craves; and history supplies this evidence. It is from history that we
+derive the first idea and the accumulating proofs of the reality of
+progress. Lucretius's first sketch is really his summary of social
+history up to that point. The Catholic thinker had a wider scope. He
+was able to see that the whole course of Greco-Roman civilization was,
+from his point of view, a preparation for the Church which had the care
+of the spiritual life of man while on earth. And in the next stage, that
+in which we now live, we see all the interests of life taken back again
+into the completeness of human progress, and can trace that complete
+being, labouring slowly but unmistakably to a higher state, outside us
+in the world, as well as within our own consciousness, which is ready to
+expand if we will give it range.
+
+On such lines we may sketch the historical aspect of progress on which
+the personal is based; and it is of the utmost importance to keep the
+two aspects before us concurrently, because reliance on the growing
+fullness of the individual life to the neglect of the social evolution
+is likely to empty that life itself of its true content, to leave the
+self-centred visionary absorbed in the contemplation of some ideal
+perfection within himself, while the world outside him from which he
+ultimately derives his notions, is toiling and suffering from the want
+of those very elements which he is best able to supply.
+
+The succeeding chapters of this book will, it is hoped, supply some
+evidence of the concrete reality of progress, as well as of the tendency
+to greater coherence and purity in the ideal itself. It would have been
+easy to accumulate evidence; some sides of life are hardly touched on at
+all. The collective and the intellectual sides are fully dealt with both
+in this and in the volume on _The Unity of Western Civilization_. But if
+we make our survey over a sufficient space, coming down especially to
+our own days, our conclusion as to the advance made in the physical and
+moral well-being of mankind, will be hardly less emphatic. Our average
+lives are longer and continue to lengthen, and they are unquestionably
+spent with far less physical suffering than was generally the case at
+any previous period. We are bound to give full weight to this, however
+much we rightly deplore the deadening effect of monotonous and
+mechanical toil on so large a part of the population. And even for these
+the opportunities for a free and improving life are amazingly enlarged.
+We groan and chafe at what remains to be done because of the unexampled
+size of the modern industrial populations with which we have to deal.
+But we know in some points very definitely what we want, and we are now
+all persuaded with John Stuart Mill that the remedy is in our own hands,
+'that all the great sources of human suffering are in a great degree,
+many of them entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.' This
+conviction is perhaps the greatest step of all that we have gained. In
+morality some pertinent and necessary questions are raised in Chap. VI,
+but the general progress would be doubted by very few who have had the
+opportunity of comparing the evidence as to any previous state of
+morals, say in the Middle Ages or in the Elizabethan age--the crown of
+the Renascence in England--with that of the present day. The capital
+advance in morality, which by itself would be sufficient to justify our
+thesis, is the increase in the consciousness and the obligation of the
+'common weal', that conception of which Government, increasingly better
+organized, is the most striking practical realization. It has its
+drawback in the spread of what we feel as a debasing 'vulgarity', but
+the general balance is overwhelmingly on the side of good. And in all
+such discussions we are apt to allow far too little weight to the change
+which the New World, and especially the United States, has brought
+about. In matters of personal prosperity and a high general standard of
+intellectual and moral competence, what has been achieved there would
+outweigh a good deal of our Old World defects when we come to drawing
+up a world's balance-sheet.
+
+It will be seen therefore that we dismiss altogether any doctrine of an
+'illusion of progress' as a necessary decoy to progressive action.
+Progress is a fact as well as an ideal, and the ideal, though it springs
+from an objective reality, will always be in advance of it. So it is
+with all man's activities when he comes to man's estate. In science he
+has always an ideal of a more perfect knowledge before him though he
+becomes scientific by experience. In art he is always striving to
+idealize fresh things, though he first becomes an artist from the pure
+spontaneous pleasure of expressing what is in him. The deliberate
+projection of the ideal into the future, seeing how far it will take us
+and whether we are journeying in the right direction, is a late stage.
+As to progress, the largest general ideal which can affect man's action,
+it is only recently that mankind as a whole has been brought to grips
+with the conception, also enlarged to the full. He was standing,
+somewhat bewildered, somewhat dazzled, before it, when the war, like an
+eclipse of the sun, came suddenly and darkened the view. But an eclipse
+has been found an invaluable time for studying some of the problems of
+the sun's nature and of light itself.
+
+One of the most acute critics of the mid-Victorian prophets of progress,
+Dr. John Grote, did very well in disentangling the ideal element which
+is inherent in every sound doctrine of progress as a guide to conduct.
+He took the theory of a continuous inevitable progress in human affairs,
+and showed how this by itself might lead to a weakening of the will, on
+which alone in his view progress in the proper sense depends. He took
+the mechanical theory of utilitarianism and subjected it to a similar
+analysis. We cannot evaluate progress as an increase in a sum-total of
+happiness. This is incapable of calculation, and if we aim directly at
+it, we are likely to lose the higher things on which it depends, and
+which are capable of being made the objects of that direct striving
+which is essential to progress. Dr. Grote's analysis has long since
+passed into current philosophical teaching, but he will always be well
+worth reading for his fresh and vigorous reasoning and for the way in
+which he builds up his own position without denying the solid
+contributions of those whom he criticizes. Complete truth in the matter
+seems to us to involve a larger share for the historical element than
+Dr. Grote explicitly allows. We grant fully the paramount necessity for
+an ideal of progress and for constantly revising, purifying, and
+strengthening it. But in its formation we should trace more than he does
+to the collective forces of mankind as expressed in history. These have
+given us the ideal and will carry us on towards it by a force which is
+greater than, and in one sense independent of, any individual will. This
+is the cardinal truth of sociology, and is obvious if we consider how in
+matters of everyday experience we are all compelled by some social force
+not ourselves, as for instance in actions tending to maintain the family
+or in a national crisis such, as the war. This general will is not, of
+course, independent of all the wills concerned, but it acts more or less
+as an outside compelling force in the case of every one. Moreover our
+selves are composite as well as wholes, and parts of us are active in
+forming the general will, parts acquiesce and parts are overborne. Thus
+it is clear that a general tendency to progress in the human race may be
+well established--as we hold it to be--and yet go on in ways capable of
+infinite variation and at very various speed. We are all, let us
+suppose, being carried onward by one mighty and irresistible stream. We
+may combine our strength and skill and make the best use of the
+surrounding forces. This is working and steering to the chosen goal. Or
+we may rest on our oars and let the stream take us where it will. This
+is drifting, and we shall certainly be carried on somewhere; but we may
+be badly bruised or even shipwrecked in the process, and in any case we
+shall have contributed nothing to the advance. Some few may even waste
+their strength in trying to work backwards against the stream. We seem
+to have reached the point in history when for the first time we are
+really conscious of our position, and the problem is now a possible and
+an urgent one to mark the goal clearly and unitedly and bend our common
+efforts to attaining it.
+
+If this be so, the work of synthesis may be thought to have a higher
+practical value for the moment than the analysis which has prevailed in
+European thought for the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part
+of the nineteenth century the great formative ideas which had been
+gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary period, took
+shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth--Kant,
+Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by a period of criticism
+which has left none of them whole, but on the other hand has produced a
+mass of contradictions and specialisms highly confusing and even
+hopeless to the public mind and veiling the more important and profound
+agreements which have been growing all the time beneath. There are now
+abundant signs of a reaction towards unity and construction of a broad
+and solid kind. In no respect is such a knitting up more desirable than
+in this idea of progress itself. Are we to say that there is no such
+thing as all-round continuous progress, but only progress in definite
+branches of thought and activity, progress in science or in particular
+arts, social progress, physical progress, progress in popular education
+and the like, but that any two or more branches only coincide
+occasionally and by accident, and that when working at one we can and
+should have no thought of working at them all? This is no doubt a
+prevalent view and we may hope that some things said in this book may
+modify it. Another school of critical thinkers, approaching the question
+from the point of view of the ultimate object of action, asks what is
+the one thing for which all others are to be pursued as means? Is
+increase of knowledge the absolute good or increase of happiness? Or if
+it is increase of love, is it quite indifferent what we love? A few
+words on this may fitly conclude this chapter.
+
+The task of mankind, and of every one of us so far as he is able to
+enter into it, is to bring together these various aspects of human
+excellence, to see them as parts of one ideal and labour to approach it.
+This approach is progress, and if you say 'progress of what, and to what
+end', the answer can only be, the progress of humanity, and the end
+further progress. Some of the writers in this book will indicate the
+point at which in their view this progress is in contact with the
+infinite, with something not given in history; but, whatever our view of
+the transcendental problem may be, it is of the utmost importance for
+all of us to realize that we have given to us in the actual process of
+time, in concrete history, a development of humanity, a growth from a
+lower to a higher state of being, which may be most perfectly realized
+in the individual consciousness, fully awake and fully socialized, but
+is also clearly traceable in the doings of the human race as a whole.
+Such is in fact the uniting thread of these essays, and when we proceed
+to the converse of this truth and apply this ideal which we have shown
+to be the course of realization, as a governing motive in our lives, it
+is even more imperative to strive constantly to keep the whole
+together, and not to regard either knowledge or power or beauty or even
+love as an ultimate and supreme thing to which all other ends are merely
+means. The end is a more perfect man, developed by the perfecting of all
+mankind.
+
+Such a conception embraces all the separate aspects of our nature each
+in its place, and each from its own angle supreme. Love and knowledge
+inseparable and fundamental, freedom and happiness essential conditions
+of healthy growth, personality developed with the development of the
+greater personality in which we all live and grow. This greater
+personality is at its highest immeasurably above us, and has no
+assignable limits in time or in capacity to know, to love, or to enjoy.
+We cannot fix its origin at any known point in the birth of planets, nor
+does the cooling of our sun nor of all the suns seem to put any limit in
+our imagination to the continuous unfolding of life like our own. While
+thus practically infinite, the ideal of human nature is revealed to us
+concretely in countless types of goodness and truth and beauty which we
+may know and love and imitate. To all it is open to study the lineaments
+of this ideal in the records and figures of the past; to most it is
+revealed in some fellow beings known in life. From these, the human
+spirits which embody the strivings, the hopes, the conquered failings of
+the past, we may form our better selves and build the humanity of the
+future.
+
+There is a famous and magnificent passage in Dante's _Purgatorio_ which
+Catholic commentators interpret in sacramental terms but we may well
+apply in a wider sense to the progress of the human spirit towards the
+ideal. It occurs at that crucial point where the ascending poet leaves
+the circles of sad repentance to reach the higher regions of growing
+light.
+
+     'And when we came there, to the first step, it was of white
+     marble, so polished that I could see myself just as I am.
+
+     'And the second was coloured dark, a rugged stone, cracked
+     lengthwise and across. And the third piled above it was
+     flaming porphyry, red like the blood from a vein.
+
+     'Above this one was the angel of God, sitting on the
+     threshold, bright as a diamond.
+
+     'Up the three steps my master led me with goodwill and then
+     he said, "Beg humbly that he unlock the door."'[4]
+
+Like this, the path man has to tread is not an easy progress. But he is
+rising all the time and he rises on steps of his own past. He sees
+reflected in them the image of himself, and he sees too the deep faults
+in his nature, and the rough surface of his path through time. The last
+step, tinged by his own blood, gives access to a higher dwelling, firm
+and bright and leading higher still. But it is open only after a long
+ascent, and to the human spirit that has worked faithfully, with love
+for his comrades and leaders, and reverence for the laws which bind both
+the world and him.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+John Grote, _Examination of Utilitarian Philosophy_.
+
+Kant, _Principles of Politics_ (translated by Hastie and published by
+Clark) contains his smaller works on Universal History, Perpetual Peace,
+and the Principle of Progress. See also the _Essay on Herder_.
+
+Comte's _Positive Polity_, vols. i. and ii, passim.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[1] 'usus et impigrae simul experientia mentis
+     paulatim docuit pedetemtim progredientes.'
+
+[2] Comte, _Positive Polity_, ii 116.
+
+[3] See Delisle Burns, _Morality of Nations_, and _The Unity of Western
+Civilization_, passim.
+
+[4] _Purgatorio_, ix. 94-108.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+PROGRESS IN PREHISTORIC TIMES
+
+R. R. MARETT
+
+
+If I am unable to deliver this lecture in person, it will be because I
+have to attend in Jersey to the excavation of a cave once occupied by
+men of the Glacial Epoch. Now these men knew how to keep a good fire
+burning within their primitive shelter; their skill in the chase
+provided them with a well-assorted larder; their fine strong teeth were
+such as to make short work of their meals; lastly, they were clever
+artisans and one may even say artists in flint and greenstone, not only
+having the intelligence to make an economic use of the material at their
+disposal, but likewise having enough sense of form to endow their
+implements with more than a touch of symmetry and beauty. All this we
+know from what they have left behind them; and the rest is silence.
+
+And now let us imagine ourselves possessed of one of those time-machines
+of which Mr. H. G. Wells is the inventor. Transported by such means to
+the Europe of that distant past, could we undertake to beat the record
+of those cave-men?
+
+Clearly, all will depend on how many of us, and how much of the
+apparatus of civilization, our time-machine is able to accommodate. If
+it were simply to drop a pair of us, naked and presumably ashamed, into
+the midst of the rigours of the great Ice Age, the chances surely are
+that the unfortunate immigrants must perish within a week. Adam could
+hardly manage to kindle a fire without the help of matches. Eve would
+be no less sorely troubled to make clothes without the help of a needle.
+On the other hand, if the time-machine were as capacious as Noah's Ark,
+the venture would undoubtedly succeed, presenting no greater difficulty
+than, let us say, the planting of a settlement in Labrador or on the
+Yukon. Given numbers, specialized labour, tools, weapons, books,
+domesticated animals and plants, and so forth, the civilized community
+would do more than hold its own with the prehistoric cave-man, devoid of
+all such aids to life. Indeed, it is tolerably certain that, willingly
+or unwillingly, our colonists would soon drive the ancient type of man
+clean out of existence.
+
+On the face of it, then, it would seem that we, as compared with men of
+Glacial times, have decidedly 'progressed'. But it is not so easy to say
+off-hand in what precisely such progress consists.
+
+Are we happier? As well ask whether the wild wolf or the tame dog is the
+happier animal. The truth would seem to be that wolf and dog alike can
+be thoroughly happy each in its own way; whereas each would be as
+thoroughly miserable, if forced to live the life of the other. In one of
+his most brilliant passages Andrew Lang, after contrasting the mental
+condition of one of our most distant ancestors with yours or mine, by no
+means to our disadvantage, concludes with these words: 'And after all he
+was probably as happy as we are; it is not saying much.'[5]
+
+But, if not happier, are we nobler? If I may venture to speak as a
+philosopher, I should reply, confidently, 'Yes.' It comes to this, that
+we have and enjoy more soul. On the intellectual side, we see farther
+afield. On the moral side, our sympathies are correspondingly wider.
+Imaginatively, and even to no small extent practically, we are in touch
+with myriads of men, present and past. We participate in a world-soul;
+and by so doing are advanced in the scale of spiritual worth and dignity
+as members of the human race. Yet this common soul of mankind we know
+largely and even chiefly as something divided against itself. Not only
+do human ideals contradict each other; but the ideal in any and all of
+its forms is contradicted by the actual. So it is the discontent of the
+human world-soul that is mainly borne in upon him who shares in it most
+fully. A possibility of completed good may glimmer at the far end of the
+quest; but the quest itself is experienced as a bitter striving. Bitter
+though it may be, however, it is likewise ennobling. Here, then, I find
+the philosophic, that is, the ultimate and truest, touchstone of human
+progress, namely, in the capacity for that ennobling form of experience
+whereby we become conscious co-workers and co-helpers in an age-long,
+world-wide striving after the good.
+
+But to-day I come before you, not primarily as a philosopher, but rather
+as an anthropologist, a student of prehistoric man. I must therefore
+define progress, not in the philosophic or ultimate way, but simply as
+may serve the strictly limited aims of my special science. As an
+anthropologist, I want a workable definition--one that will set me
+working and keep me working on promising lines. I do not ask ultimate
+truth of my anthropological definition. For my science deals with but a
+single aspect of reality; and the other aspects of the real must
+likewise be considered on their merits before a final account can be
+rendered of it.
+
+Now anthropology is just the scientific history of man; and I suppose
+that there could be a history of man that did without the idea of human
+progress altogether. Progress means, in some sense, change for the
+better. But, strictly, history as such deals with fact; and is not
+concerned with questions of better or worse--in a word, with value.
+Hence, it must always be somewhat arbitrary on the part of an historian
+to identify change in a given direction with a gain or increase in
+value. Nevertheless, the anthropologist may do so, if he be prepared to
+take the risk. He sees that human life has on the whole grown more
+complex. He cannot be sure that it will continue to grow more complex.
+Much less has he a right to lay it down for certain that it ought to
+grow more complex. But so long as he realizes that he is thereby
+committing himself by implication to a prophetic and purposive
+interpretation of the facts, he need not hesitate to style this growth
+of complexity progress so far as man is concerned. For if he is an
+anthropologist, he is also a man, and cannot afford to take a wholly
+external and impartial view of the process whereby the very growth of
+his science is itself explained. Anthropologists though we be, we run
+with the other runners in the race of life, and cannot be indifferent to
+the prize to be won.
+
+Progress, then, according to the anthropologist, is defined as increase
+in complexity, with the tacit assumption that this somehow implies
+betterment, though it is left with the philosopher to justify such an
+assumption finally and fully. Whereas in most cases man would seem to
+have succeeded in the struggle for existence by growing more complex,
+though in some cases survival has been secured by way of simplification,
+anthropology concentrates its attention on the former set of cases as
+the more interesting and instructive even from a theoretical point of
+view. Let biology by all means dispense with the notion of progress, and
+consider man along with the other forms of life as subject to mere
+process. But anthropology, though in a way it is a branch of biology,
+has a right to a special point of view. For it employs special methods
+involving the use of a self-knowledge that in respect to the other forms
+of life is inevitably wanting. Anthropology, in short, like charity,
+begins at home. Because we know in ourselves the will to progress, we go
+on to seek for evidences of progress in the history of mankind. Nor need
+we cease to think of progress as something to be willed, something that
+concerns the inner man, even though for scientific purposes we undertake
+to recognize it by some external sign, as, for instance, by the sign of
+an increasing complexity, that is, such differentiation as likewise
+involves greater cohesion. All history, and more especially the history
+of early man, must deal primarily with externals. Thence it infers the
+inner life; and thereby it controls the tendency known as 'the
+psychologist's fallacy', namely, that of reading one's own mind into
+that of another man without making due allowance for differences of
+innate capacity and of acquired outlook. In what follows, then, let us,
+as anthropologists, be content to judge human progress in prehistoric
+times primarily by its external and objective manifestations; yet let us
+at no point in our inquiries forget that these ancient men, some of whom
+are our actual ancestors, were not only flesh of our flesh, but likewise
+spirit of our spirit.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A rapid sketch such as this must take for granted on the part of the
+audience some general acquaintance with that succession of prehistoric
+epochs which modern research has definitely established. Pre-history, as
+distinguished from proto-history, may, in reference to Europe as a
+whole, be made coextensive with the Stone Age. This divides into the Old
+Stone Age and the New. The Old Stone Age, or Palaeolithic Period, yields
+three well-marked subdivisions, termed Early, Middle, and Late. The New
+Stone Age, or Neolithic Period, includes two sub-periods, the Earlier or
+Transitional, and the Later or Typical. Thus our historical survey will
+fall naturally into five chapters.
+
+There are reasons, however, why it will be more convenient to move over
+the whole ground twice. The material on which our judgements must be
+founded is not all of one kind. Anthropology is the joint work of two
+departments, which are known as Physical Anthropology and Cultural
+Anthropology respectively. The former, we may say, deals with man as an
+organism, the latter with him as an organizer. Here, then, are very
+different standpoints. For, in a broad way of speaking, nature controls
+man through his physical organization, whereas through his cultural
+organization man controls nature. From each of these standpoints in
+turn, then, let us inquire how far prehistoric man can be shown to have
+progressed. First, did the breed improve during the long course of the
+Stone Age in Europe? Secondly, did the arts of life advance, so that by
+their aid man might establish himself more firmly in his kingdom?
+
+Did the breed improve during prehistoric times? I have said that,
+broadly speaking, nature controls man as regards his physical endowment.
+Now in theory one must admit that it might be otherwise. If Eugenics
+were to mature on its purely scientific side, there is no reason why the
+legislator of the future should not try to make a practical application
+of its principles; and the chances are that, of many experiments, some
+would prove successful. But that conscious breeding was practised in
+prehistoric times is out of the question. The men of those days were one
+and all what we are ourselves--nature's mongrels, now broken up into
+varieties by casual isolation, and now by no less casual intermixture
+recompounded in a host of relatively unstable forms. Whatever progress,
+therefore, may have occurred in this respect has been unconscious. Man
+cannot take the credit for it, except in so far as it is indirectly due
+to that increase and spread of the race which have been promoted by his
+achievements in the way of culture.
+
+The barest outline of the facts must suffice. For the Early Pleistocene,
+apart from the Java fossil, _Pithecanthropus erectus_, a veritable
+'missing link', whom we may here disregard as falling altogether outside
+our world of Europe, there are only two individuals that can with
+certainty be referred to this distant period. These are the Piltdown and
+the Heidelberg specimens. The former consists of a fragmentary
+brain-case, thick-boned and narrow-fronted, but typically human in its
+general characters, and of the greater part of a lower jaw, which, as
+regards both its own elongated and curiously flanged structure, and that
+of the teeth it contained, including an enormous pointed canine, is
+conversely more appropriate to an ape-like being than to a man. The
+latter consists only of a lower jaw, of which the teeth, even the
+canines, are altogether human, whereas the jaw itself is hardly less
+simian than that of the Sussex skull. If we add the Java example to the
+list of very primitive forms, it is remarkable to note how, though
+differing widely from each other, all alike converge on the ape.
+Nevertheless, even in Pithecanthropus, the brute is passing into the
+man. We note the erect attitude, to be inferred from his thigh-bone, and
+the considerably enlarged, though even so hardly human, brain. The
+Piltdown individual, on the other hand, has crossed the Rubicon. He has
+a brain-capacity entitling him to rank as a man and an Englishman. Such
+a brain, too, implies a cunning hand, which doubtless helped him greatly
+to procure his food, even if his massive jaw enabled him to dispose of
+the food in question without recourse to the adventitious aids of knife
+and fork. For the matter of that, if our knowledge made it possible to
+correlate these rare finds of bones more exactly with the innumerable
+flint implements ascribable to this period (and, indeed, not without
+analogies among the spoil from the Piltdown gravels), it might turn out
+that even the equivalent of knife and fork was not wanting to the Early
+Pleistocene supper-party, or, at any rate, that the human hand was
+already advanced from the status of labourer to the more dignified
+position of superintendent of the tool.
+
+The Middle Pleistocene Epoch belongs to the men of the Neanderthal type.
+Some thirty specimens, a few of them more or less complete, have come
+down to us, and we can form a pretty clear notion of the physical
+appearance of the race. Speaking generally, we may say that it marks a
+stage of progress as compared with the Piltdown type; though, if the
+jaw, heavy and relatively chinless as it is, has become less simian, the
+protruding brow-ridge lends a monstrous look to the face, while the
+forehead is markedly receding--a feature which turns out, however, to be
+not incompatible with a weight of brain closely approaching our own
+average. Whether this type has disappeared altogether from the earth, or
+survives in certain much modified descendants, is an open question. The
+fact remains that during the last throes of the Glacial Epoch this
+rough-hewn kind of man apparently had Northern Europe as his exclusive
+province; and it is by no means evident what _Homo Sapiens_, the
+supposed highly superior counterpart and rival of _Homo
+Neanderthalensis_, was doing with himself in the meantime. Moreover, not
+only in respect of space does the population of that frozen world show
+remarkable homogeneity; but also in respect of time must we allow it an
+undisputed sway extending over thousands of years, during which the race
+bred true. The rate of progress, whether reckoned in physical terms or
+otherwise, is so slow as to be almost imperceptible. A type suffices for
+an age. Whereas in the life-history of an individual there is rapid
+development during youth, and after maturity a steadying down, it is the
+other way about in the life-history of the race. Man, so to speak, was
+born old and accommodated to a jog-trot. We moderns are the juveniles,
+and it is left for us to go the pace.
+
+Yet Late Pleistocene Period introduces us to more diversity in the way
+of human types. Only one race, however, that named after the
+rock-shelter of Cro-Magnon in the Dordogne, is represented by a fair
+number of specimens, namely, about a dozen. At this point we come
+suddenly and without previous warning on as pretty a kind of man as
+ever walked this earth. In his leading characters he is remarkably
+uniform. Six feet high and long-legged, he likewise possessed a head
+well stocked with brains and a face that, if rather broad and short,
+was furnished by way of compensation with a long and narrow nose. If
+the present world can show nothing quite like him, it at least cannot
+produce anything more shapely in the way of the 'human form divine'.
+Apart from the Cro-Magnons, the remains of an old woman and a youth
+found at the lowest level of the Grotte des Enfants at Mentone are
+usually held to belong to a distinct stock known as the Grimaldi. The
+physical characters of the pair are regarded as negroid, verging on
+the Pygmy; but if we could study an adult male of the same stock, it
+might possibly turn out not to be so very divergent from the
+Cro-Magnon. Again, a single specimen does duty for the so-called
+Chancelade race. The skeleton is of comparatively low stature, and is
+deemed to show close affinities to the type of the modern Eskimo.
+Without being unduly sceptical, one may once more wonder if the
+Cro-Magnon stock may not have produced this somewhat aberrant form.
+Even on such a theory, however--and it is hardly orthodox--diversity
+of physical structure would seem to be on the increase. On the other
+hand, there are reasons of considerable cogency for referring to the
+end of this period skeletons of what Huxley termed the 'River-bed
+type', the peculiarity of which consists in the fact that they are
+more or less indistinguishable from the later Neolithic men and indeed
+from any of those slight-built, shortish, long-headed folk who form
+the majority in the crowded cities of to-day. Some authorities would
+ascribe a far greater antiquity to this type, but, I venture to think,
+on the strength of doubtful evidence. The notorious Galley Hill
+skeleton, for instance, found more or less intact in an Early
+Pleistocene bed in which the truly contemporary animals are
+represented by the merest battered remnants, to my mind reeks of
+modernity. Be these things as they may, however, when we come to
+Neolithic times a race of similar physical characters has Europe to
+itself, though it would seem to display minor variations in a way that
+suggests that the reign of the mongrel has at length begun. And here
+we may close our enumeration of the earliest known branches of our
+family tree, since the coming of the broad-heads pertains to the
+history of the Bronze Age, and hence falls outside the scope of the
+present survey.
+
+Now what is the bearing of these somewhat scanty data on the question of
+progress? It is not easy to extract from them more than the general
+impression that, as time went on, the breed made persistent headway as
+regards both the complexity of its organization and the profusion of its
+forms. After all, we must not expect too much from this department of
+the subject. For one thing, beyond the limits of North-western Europe
+the record is almost blank; and yet we can scarcely hope to discover the
+central breeding-place of man in what is, geographically, little more
+than a blind alley. In the next place, Physical Anthropology, not only
+in respect to human palaeontology, but in general, is as barren of
+explanations as it is fertile in detailed observations. The systematic
+study of heredity as it bears on the history of the human organism has
+hardly begun. Hence, it would not befit one who is no expert in relation
+to such matters to anticipate the verdict of a science that needs only
+public encouragement in order to come into its own. Suffice it to
+suggest here that nature as she presides over organic evolution, that
+is, the unfolding of the germinal powers, may be conceived as a kindly
+but slow-going and cautious liberator. One by one new powers, hitherto
+latent, are set free as an appropriate field of exercise is afforded
+them by the environment. At first divergency is rarely tolerated. A
+given type is extremely uniform. On the other hand, when divergency is
+permitted, it counts for a great deal. The wider variations occur
+nearest the beginning, each for a long time breeding true to itself.
+Later on, such uncompromising plurality gives way to a more diffused
+multiplicity begotten of intermixture. Mongrelization has set in. Not
+but what there may spring up many true-breeding varieties among the
+mongrels; and these, given suitable conditions, will be allowed to
+constitute lesser types possessed of fairly uniform characters. Such at
+least is in barest outline the picture presented by the known facts
+concerning the physical evolution of man, if one observe it from outside
+without attempting to explore the hidden causes of the process. Some
+day, when these causes are better understood, man may take a hand in the
+game, and become, in regard to the infinite possibilities still sleeping
+in the transmitted germ, a self-liberator. Nature is but a figurative
+expression for the chances of life, and the wise man faces no more
+chances than he needs must. Scientific breeding is no mere application
+of the multiplication table to a system of items. We must make
+resolutely for the types that seem healthy and capable, suppressing the
+defectives in a no less thorough, if decidedly more considerate, way
+than nature has been left to do in the past. Here, then, along physical
+lines is one possible path of human progress, none the less real because
+hitherto pursued, not by the aid of eyes that can look and choose, but
+merely in response to painful proddings at the tail-end.
+
+Our remaining task is to take stock of that improvement in the arts of
+life whereby man has come gradually to master an environment that
+formerly mastered him. For the Early Palaeolithic Period our evidence in
+respect of its variety, if not of its gross quantity, is wofully
+disappointing. Not to speak of man's first and rudest experiments in the
+utilization of stone, which are doubtless scattered about the world in
+goodly numbers if only we could recognize them clearly for what they
+are, the Chellean industry by its wide distribution leads one to suppose
+that mankind in those far-off days was only capable of one idea at a
+time--a time, too, that lasted a whole age. Yet the succeeding Acheulean
+style of workmanship in flint testifies to the occurrence of progress in
+one of its typical forms, namely, in the form of what may be termed
+'intensive' progress. The other typical form I might call 'intrusive'
+progress, as happens when a stimulating influence is introduced from
+without. Now it may be that the Acheulean culture came into being as a
+result of contact between an immigrant stock and a previous population
+practising the Chellean method of stone-work. We are at present far too
+ill-informed to rule out such a guess. But, on the face of it, the
+greater refinement of the Acheulean handiwork looks as if it had been
+literally hammered out by steadfastly following up the Chellean pattern
+into its further possibilities. Explain it as we will, this evolution of
+the so-called _coup-de-poing_ affords almost the sole proof that the
+human world of that remote epoch was moving at all. If we could see
+their work in wood, we might discern a more diversified skill or we
+might not. As it is, we can but conclude in the light of our very
+imperfect knowledge that in mind no less than in body mankind of Early
+Palaeolithic times displayed a fixity of type almost amounting to that
+of one of the other animal species.
+
+During Middle Palaeolithic times the Mousterian culture rules without a
+rival. The cave-period has begun; and, thanks to the preservation of
+sundry dwelling-places together with a goodly assortment of their less
+perishable contents, we can frame a fairly adequate notion of the
+home-life of Neanderthal man. I have already alluded to my excavations
+in Jersey, and need not enter into fuller details here. But I should
+like to put on record the opinion borne in upon me by such first-hand
+experience as I have had that cultural advance in Mousterian days was
+almost as portentously slow as ever it had been before. The human
+deposits in the Jersey cave are in some places about ten feet thick, and
+the fact that they fall into two strata separated by a sterile layer
+that appears to consist of the dust of centuries points to a very long
+process of accumulation. Yet though there is one kind of elephant
+occurring amid the bone refuse at the bottom of the bed, and another
+and, it would seem, later kind at the top, one and the same type of
+flint instrument is found at every level alike; and the only development
+one can detect is a certain gain in elegance as regards the Mousterian
+'point', the reigning substitute for the former _coup-de-poing_. Once
+more there is intensive progress only, so far at least as most of the
+Jersey evidence goes. One _coup-de-poing_, however, and that hardly
+Acheulean in conception but exactly what a hand accustomed to the
+fashioning of the Mousterian 'point' would be likely to make by way of
+an imitation of the once fashionable pattern, lay at lowest floor-level;
+as if to remind one that during periods of transition the old is likely
+to survive by the side of the new, and may even survive in it as a
+modifying element. As a matter of fact, the _coup-de-poing_ is frequent
+in the earliest Mousterian sites; so that we cannot but ask ourselves
+how it came to be in the end superseded. Whether the Mousterians were of
+a different race from the Acheuleans is not known. Certain it is, on the
+other hand, that the industry that makes its first appearance in their
+train represents a labour-saving device. The Mousterian had learned how
+to break up his flint-nodule into flakes, which simply needed to be
+trimmed on one face to yield a cutting edge. The Acheulean had been
+content to attain this result more laboriously by pecking a pebble on
+both faces until what remained was sharp enough for his purpose. Here,
+then, we are confronted with that supreme condition of progress, the
+inventor's happy thought. One of those big-brained Neanderthal men, we
+may suppose, had genius; nature, the liberator, having released some
+latent power in the racial constitution. Given such a culture-hero, the
+common herd was capable of carrying on more or less mechanically for an
+aeon or so. And so it must ever be. The world had better make the most
+of its geniuses; for they amount to no more than perhaps a single one in
+a million. Anyway, Neanderthal man never produced a second genius, so
+far as we can tell; and that is why, perhaps, his peculiar type of
+brow-ridge no longer adorns the children of men.
+
+Before we leave the Mousterians, another side of their culture deserves
+brief mention. Not only did they provide their dead with rude graves,
+but they likewise furnished them with implements and food for use in a
+future life. Herein surely we may perceive the dawn of what I do not
+hesitate to term religion. A distinguished scholar and poet did indeed
+once ask me whether the Mousterians, when they performed these rites,
+did not merely show themselves unable to grasp the fact that the dead
+are dead. But I presume that my friend was jesting. A sympathy stronger
+than death, overriding its grisly terror, and converting it into the
+vehicle of a larger hope--that is the work of soul; and to develop soul
+is progress. A religious animal is no brute, but a real man with the
+seed of genuine progress in him. If Neanderthal man belonged to another
+species, as the experts mostly declare and I very humbly beg leave to
+doubt, we must even so allow that God made him also after his own image,
+brow-ridges and all.
+
+The presence of soul in man is even more manifest when we pass on to the
+Late Palaeolithic peoples. They are cave-dwellers; they live by the
+chase; in a word, they are savages still. But they exhibit a taste and a
+talent for the fine arts of drawing and carving that, as it were,
+enlarge human existence by a new dimension. Again a fresh power has been
+released, and one in which many would seem to have participated; for
+good artists are as plentiful during this epoch as ever they were in
+ancient Athens or mediaeval Florence. They must have married-in somewhat
+closely, one would think, for this special aptitude to have blossomed
+forth so luxuriantly. I cannot here dwell at length on the triumphs of
+Aurignacian and Magdalenian artistry. Indeed, what I have seen with my
+own eyes on the walls of certain French caves is almost too wonderful to
+be described. The simplicity of the style does not in the least detract
+from the fullness of the charm. On the contrary, one is tempted to doubt
+whether the criterion of complexity applies here--whether, in fact,
+progress has any meaning in relation to fine art--since, whether
+attained by simple or by complex means, beauty is always beauty, and
+cannot further be perfected. Shall we say, then, with Plato that beauty
+was revealed to man from the first in its absolute nature, so that the
+human soul might be encouraged to seek for the real in its complementary
+forms of truth and goodness, such as are less immediately manifest? For
+the rest, the soul of these transcendently endowed savages was in other
+respects more imperfectly illuminated; as may be gathered from the fact
+that they carved and drew partly from the love of their art, but partly
+also, and, perhaps, even primarily, for luck. It seems that these
+delineations of the animals on which they lived were intended to help
+them towards good hunting. Such is certainly the object of a like custom
+on the part of the Australian aborigines; there being this difference,
+however, that the art of the latter considered as art is wholly
+inferior. Now we know enough about the soul of the Australian native,
+thanks largely to the penetrating interpretations of Sir Baldwin
+Spencer, to greet and honour in him the potential lord of the universe,
+the harbinger of the scientific control of nature. It is more than half
+the battle to have willed the victory; and the picture-charm as a piece
+of moral apparatus is therefore worthy of our deepest respect. The
+chariot of progress, of which the will of man is the driver, is drawn by
+two steeds, namely, Imagination and Reason harnessed together. Of the
+pair, Reason is the more sluggish, though serviceable enough for the
+heavy work. Imagination, full of fire as it is, must always set the
+pace. So the soul of the Late Palaeolithic hunter, having already in
+imagination controlled the useful portion of the animal world, was more
+than half-way on the road to its domestication. But in so far as he
+mistook the will for the accomplished deed, he was not getting the value
+out of his second horse; or, to drop metaphor, the scientific reason as
+yet lay dormant in his soul. But his dream was to come true presently.
+
+The Neolithic Period marks the first appearance of the 'cibi-cultural'
+peoples. The food-seekers have become food-raisers. But the change did
+not come all at once. The earlier Neolithic culture is at best
+transitional. There may even have been one of those set-backs in culture
+which we are apt to ignore when we are narrating the proud tale of human
+advance. Europe had now finally escaped from the last ravages of an
+Arctic climate; but there was cruel demolition to make good, and in the
+meantime there would seem, as regards man, to have been little doing.
+Life among the kitchen-middens of Denmark was sordid; and the Azilians
+who pushed up from Spain as far as Scotland did not exactly step into a
+paradise ready-made. Somewhere, however, in the far south-east a higher
+culture was brewing. By steps that have not yet been accurately traced
+legions of herdsmen and farmer-folk overspread our world, either
+absorbing or driving before them the roving hunters of the older
+dispensation. We term this, the earliest of true civilizations,
+'neolithic', as if it mattered in the least whether your stone implement
+be chipped or polished to an edge. The real source of increased power
+and prosperity lay in the domestication of food-animals and food-plants.
+The man certainly had genius and pluck into the bargain who first
+trusted himself to the back of an unbroken horse. It needed hardly less
+genius to discover that it is no use singing charms over the
+seed-bearing grass in order to make it grow, unless some of the seed is
+saved to be sowed in due season. Society possibly brained the
+inventor--such is the way of the crowd; but, as it duly pocketed the
+invention, we have perhaps no special cause to complain.
+
+By way of appreciating the conditions prevailing in the Later Neolithic
+Age, let us consider in turn the Lake-dwellers of Switzerland and the
+Dolmen-builders of our Western coast-lands. I was privileged to assist,
+on the shore of the Lake of Neuchatel, in the excavation of a site where
+one Neolithic village of pile-dwellings had evidently been destroyed by
+fire, and at some later date, just falling within the Stone Age, had
+been replaced by another. Here we had lighted on a crucial instance of
+the march of cultural progress. The very piles testified to it, those of
+the older settlement being ill-assorted and slight, whereas the later
+structure was regularly built and heavily timbered. It was clear, too,
+that the first set of inhabitants had lived narrow lives. All their
+worldly goods were derived from strictly local sources. On the other
+hand, their successors wore shells from the Mediterranean and amber
+beads from the Baltic among their numerous decorations; while for their
+flint they actually went as far afield as Grand Pressigny in
+West-Central France, the mines of which provided the butter-like nodules
+that represented the _ne plus ultra_ of Neolithic luxury. Commerce must
+have been decidedly flourishing in those days. No longer was it a case
+of the so-called 'silent trade', which the furtive savage prosecutes
+with fear and trembling, placing, let us say, a lump of venison on a
+rock in the stream dividing his haunts from those of his dangerous
+neighbours, and stealing back later on to see if the red ochre for which
+he pines has been deposited in return on the primitive counter. The
+Neolithic trader, on the other side, must have pushed the science of
+barter to the uttermost limits short of the invention of a circulating
+medium, if indeed some crude form of currency was not already in vogue.
+
+When we turn to the Dolmen-builders, and contemplate their hoary
+sanctuaries, we are back among the problems raised by the philosophic
+conception of progress as an advance in soul-power. Is any religion
+better than none? Does it make for soul-power to be preoccupied with the
+cult of the dead? Does the imagination, which in alliance with the
+scientific reason achieves such conquests over nature, give way at times
+to morbid aberration, causing the chill and foggy loom of an after-life
+to obscure the honest face of the day? I can only say for myself that
+the deepening of the human consciousnesses due to the effort to close
+with the mystery of evil and death, and to extort therefrom a message of
+hope and comfort, seems to me to have been worth the achievement at
+almost any cost of crimes and follies perpetrated by the way. I do not
+think that progress in religion is progress towards its ultimate
+abolition. Rather, religion, if regarded in the light of its earlier
+history, must be treated as the parent source of all the more spiritual
+activities of man; and on these his material activities must depend.
+Else the machine will surely grind the man to death; and his body will
+finally stop the wheels that his soul originally set in motion.
+
+The panorama is over. It has not been easy, at the rate of about a
+millennium to a minute, to present a coherent account of the prehistoric
+record, which at best is like a jig-saw puzzle that has lost most of the
+pieces needed to reconstitute the design. But, even on this hasty
+showing, it looks as if the progressive nature of man were beyond
+question. There is manifest gain in complexity of organization, both
+physical and cultural; and only less manifest, in the sense that the
+inwardness of the process cannot make appeal to the eye, is the
+corresponding gain in realized power of soul. In short, the men of the
+Stone Age assuredly bore their full share in the work of
+race-improvement; and the only point on which there may seem to be doubt
+is whether we of the age of metal are as ready and able to bear our
+share. But let us be optimistic about ourselves. As long as we do not
+allow our material achievements to blind us to the need of an education
+that keeps the spiritual well to the fore, then progress is assured so
+far as it depends on culture.
+
+Yet if we could likewise breed for spirituality, humanity's chances, I
+believe, would be bettered by as much again or more. But how is this to
+be done? Science must somehow find out. To leave it to nature is treason
+to the mind. Man may be an ass on the whole, but nature is even more of
+an ass, especially when it stands for human nature minus its saving
+grace of imaginative, will-directed intelligence. So let us hope that
+one day people will marry intelligently, and that the best marriages
+will be the richest in offspring. I believe that the spiritual is not
+born of the sickly; and at any rate should be prepared to make trial of
+such a working principle in my New Republic.
+
+So much for the practical corollaries suggested by our flying visit to
+Prehistoric Europe. But, even if any detailed lessons to be drawn from
+such fragmentary facts have to be received with caution, you need not
+hesitate to pursue this branch of study for its own sake as part of the
+general training of the mind. Accustom yourselves to a long perspective.
+Cultivate the eagle's faculty of spacious vision. It is only thus that
+one can get the values right--see right and wrong, truth and error,
+beauty and ugliness in their broad and cumulative effects. Analytic
+studies, as they are termed, involving the exploration of the meaning of
+received ideas, must come first in any scheme of genuine education. We
+must learn to affirm before we can go on to learn how to criticize. But
+historical studies are a necessary sequel. Other people's received ideas
+turn out in the light of history to have sometimes worked well, and
+sometimes not so well; and we are thereupon led to revise our own
+opinions accordingly. Now the history of man has hitherto stood almost
+exclusively for the history of European civilization. Being so limited,
+it loses most of its value as an instrument of criticism. For how can a
+single phase of culture criticize itself? How can it step out of the
+scales and assess its own weight? Anthropology, however, will never
+acquiesce in this parochial view of the province of history. History
+worthy of the name must deal with man universal. So I would have you all
+become anthropologists. Let your survey of human progress be age-long
+and world-wide. You come of a large family and an ancient one. Learn to
+be proud of it, and then you will seek likewise to be worthy of it.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+W. J. Sollas, _Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives_, 2nd
+edition, 1915.
+
+E. A. Parkyn, _Introduction to the study of Prehistoric Art_.
+
+R. R. Marett, _Anthropology_ (Home University Library).
+
+J. L. Myres, _Dawn of History_ (Home University).
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[5] Presidential Address to the International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891,
+p. 9.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+PROGRESS AND HELLENISM
+
+F. MELIAN STAWELL
+
+
+To speak the truth about national characteristics it is often necessary
+to speak in paradoxes, for of all unities on earth nothing contains so
+many contradictions as a nation. So it is here: it may be said quite
+truly that the Greeks had at once the most profound conceptions about
+Progress and no faith in it: that they were at once the most hopeful and
+the most despairing of peoples. Let me try to explain. When we speak of
+a faith in Progress, whatever else we mean, we must mean, I take it,
+that there is a real advance in human welfare throughout time from the
+Past to the Future, that 'the best is yet to be', and that the good wine
+is kept to the last. But if we are to have a philosophy underlying that
+faith we must be able to say something more. What, in the first place,
+do we mean by 'a real advance'? Or by 'human welfare'? Progress, yes,
+but progress towards what? What is the standard? And if we cannot
+indicate a standard, what right have we to say that one life is any
+better than another? The life of the scientific man any better than the
+life of the South Sea Islander--content if only he has enough bananas to
+eat? Or than the life of a triumphant conqueror, a Zenghis Khan or a
+Tamberlaine--exultant if he has enough human heads before him? Or,
+indeed, any of these rather than the blank of Nirvana or the life of a
+vegetable?
+
+Our first need, then, is the need of a standard for good over and above
+the conflicting opinions of men, and some idea as to what that standard
+implies.
+
+And the next question is, why we should hold that any of this good is
+going to be realized in human life at all? If it is, there must be some
+connexion of cause and effect between goodness and human existence. What
+is the nature of that connexion? Finally, why should we hope that this
+goodness is realized more and more fully as time goes on?
+
+The Greeks faced these questions, as they faced so many, with
+extraordinary daring and penetration and with an intimate mixture of
+sadness and hope.
+
+They themselves, of all nations known to us in history, had made the
+greatest progress in the shortest space of time. A long course of
+preparation, it is true, underlay that marvellous growth. The classical
+Greeks,--and when I speak of Hellenism I mean the flower of classical
+Greek culture,--the classical Greeks entered into the labours of the
+island peoples, who, whether kindred to them or not, had built up from
+neolithic times a great civilization, the major part of which they
+could, and did, assimilate. They found the soil already worked. None the
+less it is to their own original genius that we owe those great
+discoveries of the spirit which, to quote a recent writer, 'created a
+new world of science and art, established an ideal of the sane mind in
+the sane body and the perfect man in the perfect society, cut out a new
+line of progress between anarchy and despotism, and made moral ends
+supreme over national in the State.'[6]
+
+But these practical achievements of theirs have been already summed up
+by Professor J. A. Smith in his lecture[7] at this school last year, and
+it is to that lecture that I would refer you. I will take it as a basis
+and proceed for my own purposes to discuss the Greek conceptions about
+progress. Those conceptions were complex, and, speaking roughly, we may
+say this: if belief in real progress implies belief in three things,
+namely, (1) an absolute standard apprehended, however dimly, by man, (2)
+a causal connexion between existence and perfection, and (3) a
+persistent advance through time, then the Greeks held to the first two
+and doubted, or even denied, the third. Their two great thinkers, Plato
+and Aristotle, worked out systems based on the conviction that there
+really was an absolute standard of perfection, that man could really
+apprehend something of this perfection, and that the effort towards it
+was essential to the very existence of the world, part of the stuff, as
+it were, that made the universe. These systems have had an effect not to
+be exaggerated on the whole movement of thought since their day.
+Moreover, many of their fundamental conceptions are being revived in
+modern science and metaphysics. And the convictions that underlie them
+are calculated, one would say, to lead at once to a buoyant faith in
+progress. But with Plato, and Aristotle, and the Greeks generally, they
+did not so lead. The Greeks could not feel sure that this effort towards
+perfection, though it is part of existence, is strong enough to deliver
+man in this world from the web of evil in which also he is involved, nor
+even that he makes any approach on the whole towards the loosening of
+the toils. The spectre of world-destruction, as Whitman says of Carlyle,
+was always before them. And I wish to ask later on if we may not surmise
+definite reasons in their own history for this recurring note of
+discouragement. But let us first look at the positive side, and first in
+Plato. Plato came to his system by several lines of thought, and to
+understand it we ought to take account of all.
+
+1. In the first place no thinker, I suppose, ever felt more keenly than
+he felt the desire for an absolute standard of truth, especially in
+matters of right and wrong, if only to decide between the disputes of
+men. And, in Greece men disputed so boldly and so incessantly that there
+was no possibility of forgetting the clash of opinion in any 'dogmatic
+slumber'. Thus Plato is always asking, like Robert Browning in 'Rabbi
+Ben Ezra',--
+
+      Now, who shall arbitrate?
+      Ten men love what I hate,
+    Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;
+      Ten who in ears and eyes
+      Match me: we all surmise,
+    They this thing, and I that; whom shall my soul believe?
+
+In one of his very earliest dialogues, the 'Euthyphro', Plato puts the
+question almost in so many words. What is it, he asks (7 A-E), that men
+quarrel over most passionately when they dispute? Is it not over the
+great questions of justice and injustice, of beauty, goodness, and the
+like? They do not quarrel thus over a question of physical size, simply
+because they can settle such a dispute by reference to an unquestioned
+standard, a standard measure, let us say.
+
+If there is no corresponding standard for right and wrong, if each man
+is really the judge and the measure for himself, then there is no sense,
+Plato feels, in claiming that one man is wiser than another in conduct,
+or indeed any man wiser than a dog-faced baboon (_Theaet._ 161 C-E).
+
+2. Again, Plato feels most poignantly the inadequacy of all the goodness
+and beauty we have ever actually seen in this world of space and time,
+compared with the ideal we have of them in their perfection. How can we
+have this sense of deficiency, he asks, unless somehow we apprehend
+something supreme, over and above all the approaches to it that have as
+yet appeared? (_Phaedo_, 74 E).
+
+This vision of an absolute perfection, as yet unrealized on earth, so
+dominates all his thinking, and has such peculiar features of its own,
+that even familiar quotations must be quoted here. You will find an
+exquisite translation of a typical passage in our Poet Laureate's
+Anthology, _The Spirit of Man_ (No. 37). Specially to be noted here is
+the stress on the unchanging character of this eternal perfection and
+the suggestion that it cannot be fully realized in the world. At the
+same time, Plato is equally sure that it is only through the study of
+this world that our apprehension of that perfection is awakened at
+all:--
+
+     'He who has thus been instructed in the science of Love, and
+     has been led to see beautiful things in their due order and
+     rank, when he comes toward the end of his discipline, will
+     suddenly catch sight of a wondrous thing, beautiful with the
+     absolute Beauty ... he will see a Beauty eternal, not
+     growing or decaying, not waxing or waning, nor will it be
+     fair here and foul there ... as if fair to some and foul to
+     others ... but Beauty absolute, separate, simple, and
+     everlasting; which lending of its virtue to all beautiful
+     things that we see born to decay, itself suffers neither
+     increase nor diminution, nor any other change' (_Symp._
+     211).
+
+All beautiful things remind man, Plato tells us in his mythological
+fashion, of this perfect Beauty, because we had seen it once before in
+another life, before our souls were born into this world, 'that blissful
+sight and spectacle' (_Phaedrus_, 250 B) when we followed Zeus in his
+winged car and all the company of the gods, and went out into the realm
+beyond the sky, a realm 'of which no mortal poet has ever sung or ever
+will sing worthily'.
+
+3. But, beside this passion for the ideal, Plato was intensely
+interested in our knowledge of the actual world of appearances around
+us. And one of the prime questions with which he was then concerned was
+the question, what we mean when we talk about the nature or character
+of the things we see, a plant, say, or an animal, or a man. We must mean
+something definite, otherwise we could not recognize, for example, that
+a plant _is_ a plant through all its varieties and all the different
+stages of its growth. Plato's answer was, that in all natural things
+there is a definite principle that copies, as it were, a definite Type
+or Form, and this Type he calls an Idea. Thus in some sense it is this
+Type, this Idea, this Form, that brings the particular thing into being.
+
+4. But it was not enough for Plato to say that every natural thing had
+in some sense a certain type for its basis, unless he could believe that
+this type was good, and that all the types were harmonious with each
+other. He could only be satisfied with the world, in short, if he could
+feel that it came about through a movement towards perfection. He makes
+his Socrates say that in asking about 'the causes of things, what it is
+that makes each thing come into being', it was not enough for him if he
+could only see that the thing was there because something had put it
+there: he also wanted to see that it was good for it to be there.
+Socrates tells us that what he needed he thought he had found in a book
+by Anaxagoras, which announced 'that Mind was the disposer and cause of
+all' because, 'I said to myself, If this be so--if Mind is the orderer,
+it will have all in order, and put every single thing in the place that
+is best for it'.[8]
+
+It is the same feeling as that which underlies the words of Genesis
+about the Creation, 'And God saw that it was good'. And there is no
+doubt that such a view of the world would be supremely satisfying if we
+could count it true. There may be considerable intellectual
+satisfaction, no doubt, in merely solving a puzzle as to how things come
+about, but it is as nothing compared to the joy there would be in
+contemplating their goodness.
+
+5. But is it true? Can we possibly say so in view of the hideous
+imperfection round us? The writers of Genesis spoke of a Fall. Plato, in
+his own way, speaks of a Fall himself. He never gives up the belief in
+an Absolute Perfection, a system of Perfect Types somehow--he does not
+say exactly how--influencing the structure of things in this world. But
+he holds that on earth this perfection is always thwarted by a medium
+which prevents its full manifestation. This medium is the medium of
+Space and Time, and therefore the medium of history--and therefore
+history is always and inevitably a record of failure. 'While we are in
+the body,' Plato writes, 'and while the soul is contaminated with its
+evils, our desire will never be thoroughly satisfied.'[9] 'The body is a
+tomb,' he writes elsewhere, quoting a current phrase.
+
+This is sad enough: yet if we put against it Plato's vision of what Man
+might be, we get as inspiring words as ever were written:
+
+'We have spoken of Man', he says at the end of the _Republic_, 'as he
+appears to us now, but now he looks as Glaucus looked after he had been
+cast into the sea, and his original nature was scarcely to be discerned,
+for his limbs were broken and crushed and defaced by the waters, and
+strange things had grown round him, shells and seaweed and stones, so
+that he was more like a beast than a man. That is how the soul looks to
+us now encompassed by all her evils. It is elsewhere, my friend, that we
+ought to look.' Where? asks Plato's friend, and Plato answers, 'We
+should look to her love of wisdom and realize what she clings to, what
+company she desires, for she is akin to the Divine and Immortal and
+Eternal, and we should understand what she would become if she followed
+after it, with all her strength, and were lifted by that effort out of
+the sea where she now lies.... Then we should understand her real
+nature.' (_Republic_, 611.)
+
+Somewhere, Plato believes, this true nature of man may be realized. The
+Principle of Good is something active, not a dead helpless thing, with
+no effect on the rest of the universe (_Sophist_, 248, 249); it is a
+living power, which desires that everything everywhere should be as
+glorious as possible (_Tim._ 29 D). There is no envy, Plato says, in the
+Divine, that grudging spirit has no part in the heavenly company. Only
+it is not on earth that the glory can be realized. It is towards the
+life after death that Plato's real hopes are directed.
+
+None the less, and this is important, this world does not cease to be
+significant for him. He does not turn aside,--as some souls, intoxicated
+with the Divine, have done,--from this world altogether.
+
+Because he holds that man can only advance by struggling to make this
+world better. Man's ordinary life may be like the life in a cave, as he
+says in his famous myth, but the true philosopher who has once risen out
+of the cave must go back into it again and teach the prisoners there
+what the universe really is (_Republic_, Book vi, _fin._; vii, _init._).
+The very passage that I quoted about man's real nature comes at the end
+of the _Republic_. Now the _Republic_ is a Utopia, and no one writes a
+Utopia unless he believes that the effort to reach it is of prime
+importance to man and helps him to advance.
+
+Only, for Plato, the advance is not marked in the successive stages of
+history, as the modern faith in progress asserts. The life on earth, for
+Plato, is like a school through which men pass and in which they may
+learn and grow, but the school itself does not go on growing. It is not
+that he does not envisage change in history, but what he seems to hope
+for at the best is nothing more hopeful than recurring cycles of better
+and worse. He tells a fable, in his dialogue 'The Statesman', of how at
+one time the world is set spinning in the right direction by God and
+then all goes well, and again how God ceases to control it, and then it
+gradually forgets the divine teaching and slips from good to bad and
+from bad to worse, until at last God takes pity on it once more to save
+it from utter destruction (_Polit._ 269 ff.). No doubt in this idea of
+cycles Plato is influenced by the popular thought of his time: this
+feeling that there had been a lost Golden Age in the past was deeply
+rooted in Greek mythology. We get it long before Plato, in Hesiod, and
+there are similar touches in Homer, and once men believe that they have
+sunk from glory, there is always the dread that if ever they recover it
+they will lose it again. And with Plato this dread is reinforced by his
+sense of something incurable in the world, the thwarting influence of
+spatial and temporal matter (_Theaet._ 176 A).
+
+It is strange that, though he is always thinking of the individual soul
+as learning through experience in its passage from one life to another,
+Plato does not seem to have the idea of mankind learning by the lessons
+of history, of knowledge being handed down from one age to another, and
+growing in the process. That is one of the most inspiring ideas in
+modern thought: a German writer has spoken of history as the long
+Odyssey of the human spirit, the common mind of Man coming at last
+through its wanderings to find out what it really wants, and where its
+true home lies.
+
+And here, significantly enough, we find we are brought back in our
+modern way to something very like Plato's own conception of an eternal
+unchanging Reality. There are endless problems in the whole conception
+of the Eternal that I am quite unable even to attempt; but this much at
+least seems clear to me, that the whole idea of mankind learning by the
+experience of History, implies something of permanent value running
+through that experience. The very thought of continued progress implies
+that man can look back at the successive stages of the Past and say of
+each: In that lay values which I, to-day and always, can recognize as
+good, although I believe we have more good now. Seeley speaks in a noble
+passage of how religion might conceive a progressive revelation which
+was, in a sense, the same through all its stages, and yet was a growing
+thing:--'each new revelation asserts its own superiority to those which
+went before,' but the superiority is 'not of one thing to another
+thing--but of the developed thing to the undeveloped'. 'It is thus', he
+writes, 'that the ages should behave to one another.' This is the true
+'understanding and concert with time'.[10] And though Plato does not
+live in the thought of historic progress, yet such a conception of
+progress which recognizes at different stages different expressions,
+more or less adequate, of one eternal value, such a way of thinking is
+entirely Platonic. When we look back at history in this mood we think
+not only of grasping the right principles for the Future, but of
+rejoicing in the definite achievements of the Past, and we feel this
+most poignantly, I think, of the achievements won by the spirit of
+Beauty. Great works of Art we are accustomed actually to call immortal,
+and we mean by this not merely that we think they will always be famous,
+but that there is something in them that makes it impossible for them
+ever to be superseded. In themselves they are inexhaustible: if they
+cease to interest us, it is our fault and not theirs. We may want more,
+we do want more, where they came from, but we never want to lose them,
+any more than we could bear to lose our old friends, though we may
+desire to make new ones. Of all the divine Ideas, said Plato, Beauty is
+the one that shows itself most plainly in the world of sense and speaks
+to us most plainly of the eternal realities.
+
+This, however, is perhaps trenching on the subject of Progress in Art,
+and I should like to return to the general Greek conception of the
+tendency in all nature towards the Good, the perfect realization of
+perfect types.
+
+Plato does not expressly insist that this tendency is of the nature of
+effort, though I think that is involved in his view. But Aristotle does.
+Following Plato in essentials, he makes bold to say outright that every
+natural thing in its own way longs for the divine and desires to share
+in the divine life, so far as it can.[11] Every such thing in this world
+of space and time has to cope with difficulties and is imperfect, but
+everything struggles towards the good. That good is in the life of God,
+a thinking life, an activity of thought, existing in some sense beyond
+this imperfect world; and this life is so supremely desirable that it
+makes everything else struggle to reach it. It moves the whole world,
+Aristotle says, in a famous passage, because it is loved. It is the
+world's desire.[12]
+
+Now this idea of effort--or of something analogous to
+effort--constituting the inner nature of every natural thing reappears,
+with pregnant consequences, in modern thought, though seldom with these
+vast theological consequences. The idea of an upward effort through
+nature lies at the base of our most hopeful theories of evolution, and
+forms the true support of our modern faith in progress. Broadly
+speaking, our evolutionists are now divided into two schools: the
+adherents of the one believe that variations are purely accidental, and
+may occur in any direction whatsoever, the useful ones being preserved
+only because they happen to be useful for the life of the species, while
+the adherents of the other--the school that I would call the school of
+hope--believe that accident, even with natural selection to aid it, is
+utterly inadequate to account for the ordered beauty and harmony that we
+do see in natural things. They admit, as Plato and Aristotle admit,
+imperfection and difficulty in the world, but they insist on a movement
+towards value: in short, they conceive an order emerging that is brought
+about, to quote a modern writer, both in nature and in society, by 'a
+principle of movement and progress conflicting with a principle of
+inertia.'[13]
+
+Aristotle, in words that are strikingly modern, raises the very question
+at issue here.[14] He asks whether we can suppose that nature does not
+aim at the good at all, but that variations arise by chance and are
+preserved just because they are useful, and he scouts the idea that
+chance could do more, as Zeller says, than 'bring about isolated and
+abnormal results'. He chooses instead the conception of purpose and
+effort, and this in spite of the difficulties in conceiving a purpose
+and an effort that are not definitely conscious. The sort of thing that
+is in Aristotle's mind when he speaks of nature aiming at the good,
+comes out in a passage by Edward Carpenter in his little book _The Art
+of Creation_. Carpenter plunges boldly and compares the principle that
+makes a tree grow and propagate its kind with the impulse that makes a
+man express himself. Man, he says,
+
+     has a Will and Purpose, a Character, which, do what you
+     will, tends to push outwards towards expression. You put
+     George Fox in prison, you flog and persecute him, but the
+     moment he has a chance he goes and preaches just the same as
+     before.... But take a Tree and you notice exactly the same
+     thing. A dominant Idea informs the life of the Tree;
+     persisting, it forms the tree. You may snip the leaves as
+     much as you like to a certain pattern, but they will only
+     grow in their own shape. Finally, you may cut the tree down
+     root and branch and burn it, but, if there is left a single
+     seed, within that seed ... lurks the formative ideal, which
+     under proper conditions will again spring into life and
+     expression.[15]
+
+Aristotle would have endorsed almost every word of this. In his pithy
+way, speaking of the distinction between natural and artificial objects,
+he says himself that if you planted a wooden bed and the wood could
+still grow, it would grow up, not a bed, but a tree.[16]
+
+He would not have gone so far as to talk about the _Will_ of a tree, but
+he would have admitted that what made the tree grow was the same sort of
+thing as Will. And in one respect he goes farther than Edward Carpenter
+does. For he considers that not only growth but even the movement of
+natural things through space is somehow an expression of a tendency
+towards the good and the divine, a tendency which, when consciousness
+supervenes, we can call effort, an activity, even though, at its best,
+only an imperfect activity. He looks up at the splendour of the circling
+stars and asks if it is possible that so glorious an order can be
+anything but a manifestation of something akin to the divine. Here
+indeed he is speaking of movements made by existences he reckoned among
+the highest in the world, for he thought the stars were living beings
+higher than man. But he recognized a rudimentary form of such activity
+even in what we now call inanimate matter. Here we come to a leading
+conception of Aristotle's, and one most important for our purpose: the
+conception of a hierarchy of natural existences, all of them with some
+value, less or more. When Aristotle is truest to himself, he will tell
+us not to be afraid of studying the meanest forms of natural existence,
+because in everything there is something marvellous and divine. He
+quotes with much satisfaction the story of Heracleitus, who welcomed
+his friends into the bakehouse with the saying that 'there were gods in
+the bakehouse too'.[17]
+
+Thus, at the lowest end of the scale, we have what we call inanimate
+matter, which Aristotle thinks of much as we do, namely, as something
+occupying space, the different parts of it being endowed with different
+powers of movement, and with different properties, such as warmth or
+coldness, wetness or dryness. A natural thing, he says, is a thing that
+has a principle of activity in itself, something that makes it act in a
+definite way, whenever it is not interfered with by anything else.[18]
+Aristotle speaks, for example, of fire having a natural tendency to
+mount up, much as we might speak of solids having a natural tendency to
+gravitate towards one another. Go back as far as we like, and, Aristotle
+thinks, we still find certain primitive differences which constitute
+what we call the primitive elements. This, I imagine, is much the point
+of view of modern science.
+
+And these primitive elements in Aristotle's view influence each other,
+unite with each other, or change into each other. As a rule, however,
+they exhibit no new powers. But given a happy concurrence of qualities,
+say a certain union of heat and cold, and a new power does become
+manifest: the power of life. Thus, in a sense, Aristotle does envisage
+the spontaneous generation of life; and he knows, roughly, what he means
+by life. The living thing can go through far more changes than the
+non-living, while yet remaining recognizably the same thing. For
+example, it shows in itself a greater advance to richness and also a
+decline, it uses other things to foster this advance, and it sends out
+fresh things, like itself, but independent of itself: in short, it
+grows, decays, feeds itself, and propagates its kind.[19]
+
+As I understand Aristotle, for him there is not an entire and absolute
+difference between ordinary matter and living things, and yet there is a
+real difference, and one not to be explained away, for there is a new
+manifestation of active energy. And if we consider life of more value
+than mere motion, then we are right in saying there is a higher energy.
+The quality of growth is a quality which could not be deduced from the
+quality of warmth or from the quality of mere movement in space, and yet
+all three qualities are alike in this, that they are all manifestations
+of an energy which is somehow inherent in things, and not merely imposed
+on them from without. The manifestations of life are started, in a
+sense, by the different movements, 'mechanical', if you like to call
+them so, in the rudimentary forms of matter, the elements meeting each
+other in space. The process of life could not have begun without such
+movements. But neither could it have begun if the elements, just as they
+appear, had been all there was. There had to be latent, that is, the
+possibility of a different and higher mode of action. This higher mode
+of action Aristotle calls a higher Form, a higher Idea. And I think it
+is true to him to say that he believes the lower Forms, the lower Ideas,
+do their most perfect work when they bring about the conditions under
+which the higher ones can operate. For when he speaks of that
+concurrence of elements that conditions life he speaks of the 'warmth
+and cold' as 'having mastered the matter'.[20]
+
+In any case he conceives a whole series of higher and lower Forms, the
+higher coming nearer and nearer to that full and glorious activity which
+he conceives to be the life of God. Above the power of the thing to grow
+as a plant grows appears the power of sensation as it is present in
+animals, and above that again the power, first seen in man, of living
+the life of thought, perceiving what is beautiful and true in the
+'forms', the characters, of all the things around him, and with this
+that further power of setting consciously before himself what he really
+wants to be and to do, the power of moral action strictly so-called.
+
+Throughout this series, in every higher stage the lower is present as a
+kind of basis. In the man who thinks there is active not only the power
+of thought, but also the power of sensation, the faculty of growth, and
+the physical properties of the body. It would seem that Aristotle has
+only to take one step, and he would be a thoroughgoing evolutionist. He
+has only to say that the different stages are successive in time, the
+lower regularly preceding the higher. But this step he hesitates to
+take.
+
+He often comes very near it. He speaks of nature passing gradually from
+inanimate things through living things to living animals. He speaks of
+what is first in itself, first inherently, 'prior' in the logical sense
+because it is the goal and the completion of the thing, as appearing
+later in time. For instance, he believes that man can only find his real
+happiness and develop his real nature in the State, but the State
+appears later in time than the primitive associations of the household
+and the family.[21] What came earlier in history were barbarous
+communities such as those of the Cyclopes, where 'each man laid down the
+law for his wife and children and obeyed no other law'.
+
+But Aristotle does not go on from this belief to the belief in a
+universal upward process throughout all history. The developed State, it
+is true, may always have been preceded by a lower form, but that lower
+form may itself have been preceded by a higher.
+
+Aristotle, in short, is haunted, like Plato, by the idea of cycles,
+alternations, decline and progress, progress and decline. He feels this
+both in the life of States and in the whole life of the world. He speaks
+of the same discoveries being made over and over again, an infinite
+number of times, in the history of civilization. And his words recall
+the sad passage in Plato's _Laws_ (676) referring to the numberless
+nations and states, ten thousand times ten thousand, that had risen and
+fallen all over the world, passing from worse to better and from better
+to worse. Similarly Aristotle will speak of degraded animal forms, and
+sometimes write as though the animal world could sink back into the
+vegetable altogether.
+
+Admitting, however, something like progress within the different cycles,
+we must ask a little more about the kind of progress which Aristotle
+would have desired. (I take Aristotle again as a typical Greek.) Man at
+his best, he clearly holds, in trying to realize his true nature should
+aim at a happiness which involves a harmony of all his faculties, a
+harmony inspired and led by the highest faculty of all, the Reason which
+rejoices in the contemplation of what is at once true and good and
+beautiful.
+
+Now in this aim, we must ask, does a man need other men and other
+creatures, and in what sense does he need them? Here, I think, we come
+on two inconsistent tendencies in Aristotle's thought, connected with
+two different ways of regarding the hierarchy of existences. We say that
+one existence is higher than another. Does this mean that what we call
+the lower are only so many blundering attempts to reach the higher? That
+every creature, for example, which is not a thinking man is, on the
+whole, a mistake? Aristotle often does speak like that. Woman, he says
+in one passage, is only a mutilated male.[22] The principle which ought
+to develop into the active power of thought could not, he explains, in
+women master the recalcitrant element which is always thwarting
+perfection, and thus woman is man _manque_. On these lines of thought it
+is easy to slip into looking on all other forms of existence as merely
+valuable in so far as they serve the direct purposes of men, and indeed
+only of a few men, those namely who are able to think as philosophers.
+This is the kind of view according to which, as the satirist suggests,
+cork-trees only grow in order to make corks for champagne-bottles, and
+the inferior races of mankind only exist to furnish slaves for the
+higher. And Aristotle does, on occasion, lend himself to such a view: he
+justifies a slavery in which, as he says, some men are to be treated
+merely as living tools. And yet on his own principles every man ought to
+aim at realizing his own end, and not merely the ends of others.
+
+But there is a widely different view, also present in Aristotle, and
+truer to the essence of his thought. It is a view instinct with that
+reverence for all existence of which I spoke at first, and it holds that
+all the different natural types, high or low, could all be united in one
+harmony, like an ordered army, as Aristotle himself would say, in which
+the divine spirit was present even as the spirit of a general is present
+in his men. The greatest thing in man, Aristotle thinks, is the godlike
+power of apprehending the different characters of all the things around
+him, and this of itself suggests the belief that all these characters
+have a value of their own, unique and indispensable, each aiming at a
+distinct aspect of the Divine, each, if it fulfilled its inner nature,
+finding, as Plato might have said, the place where it was best for it to
+be. Again, it is clear from Aristotle's whole treatment of the State,
+that when he wrote his famous phrase, 'Man is by nature a political
+animal', he meant that man, as we should say, is essentially social. It
+is part of man's goal to live with others; it is not merely a means to
+the goal. His highest happiness lies in the contemplation of the good,
+and the good, Aristotle says, can be contemplated far better in others
+than in ourselves. This is a profound saying, and from this thought
+springs the deep significance of friendship in Aristotle's system. The
+crown of the civic life he takes to be the community of friends who
+recognize the good in each other, and enjoy each other through this. The
+wider this community, then, we must surely say, the better.
+
+For Aristotle then, man's perfection ought to mean the perfection of
+every individual, and progress, so far as he conceives it, involve
+progress towards this end. This should lead on to belief in the supreme
+importance of the individual soul, and to Kant's great principle that we
+should always treat each man as an end in himself.
+
+Thus, if we concentrate on the hopeful elements in Plato and Aristotle,
+we may fairly say, I think, that we can see outlined in their
+philosophies something like the following belief: every natural thing in
+this world, and every natural creature, so far as it is good,--and all
+are more or less good,--tends to express some distinct aspect of a
+perfect harmony: we human beings are the first on earth to be definitely
+conscious of such a tendency, the first to be able definitely to direct
+it to its true goal, and our business in life is therefore threefold: to
+make actual our own function in this harmony, to help other creatures to
+actualize theirs, and to contemplate every such manifestation, in men or
+in things, with reverence and rejoicing.
+
+The harmony, if complete, would be a manifestation of a divine reality,
+and thus the love of God, the love of our neighbour, the love of nature,
+self-development, political life, scientific study, poetic
+contemplation, and philosophic speculation, would all unite in one
+comprehensive and glorious task.
+
+This, surely, is hopeful enough. But the Greek hope faltered and sank.
+Could this harmony ever be realized? Would not the thwarting element in
+the world always drag it down again and again, and drag some men down
+always, so that after all progress was impossible, and for some men
+should not even be attempted? As a matter of fact, Plato and Aristotle
+do limit their exhortations to a narrow circle of cultured Greeks, and
+even with them they doubt of success.
+
+Now this despondency came partly, I think, through the very
+sensitiveness of the Hellenic nature. The spectacle of the ever-baffled
+struggle in Nature and Man they felt at times almost intolerable.
+Aristotle saw that this perpetual failure in the heart of glorious good
+made the very essence of tragedy. The tragic hero is the man of innate
+nobleness who yet has some one defect that lays him open to ruin. Man is
+set in a world full of difficulties, a world much of which is dark and
+strange to him: his action and those of others have results which he did
+not, and in his ignorance could not, foresee; he is not strong enough
+for his great task.
+
+All the Greek poets have this deep sadness. Homer has it, in and through
+his intense feeling for the beauty and energy of life. There has never
+been such war-poetry as Homer's, and yet there has never been any which
+felt more poignantly the senselessness in war. 'And I must come here',
+Achilles says to his noble enemy at the close, 'to torture you and your
+children.'
+
+In the next place, the sadness of the world could not be lightened for
+the Greeks by the vision that the modern theory of evolution has opened
+up to us of the long advance in the history of life on the planet. Even
+their knowledge of history in the strict sense was scanty, and it is
+only a long view of history that is likely to be comforting. What
+history they did know could bring them little comfort. In the first
+place it showed them a series of great civilizations, rising and
+falling, and those that had fallen seemed at least as good as those that
+followed them. A Greek like Plato knew of the Homeric civilization,
+simpler indeed, but fresher and purer than his own. And he believed,
+what we now know to be the fact, that even before the Homeric there had
+been a wonderful island-culture, what we call the Minoan, flourishing
+before the Homeric. 'There had been kings before Agamemnon.'
+
+And behind Minos and Agamemnon lay the great, and by that time the
+ossifying, kingdom of Egypt, compared to which the Greeks were, and felt
+themselves to be, but children. Plato had seen, finally, the
+degeneration of the Persian Empire--once so magnificent and mighty.
+
+This fact of recurrent decay is one of the heaviest that the human
+spirit can shoulder. Any theory of progress must come to terms with it,
+for Progress through history is certainly not an uninterrupted ascent; a
+spiral is the better image. And the weight must lie most heavily on a
+generation which feels its own self to be in peril of decay. Now Plato
+and Aristotle lived at such a period. Greece had gone through the bitter
+experiences of the Peloponnesian War, and the shadow of it lay on them,
+as on its historian Thucydides. In that fratricidal conflict Greece tore
+herself to pieces. It was a struggle between the two leaders of the then
+civilized world, and it has a terrible likeness to the struggle that is
+going on now. From its devastating influence Greece never recovered.
+Historians still dispute, and always will, as to the exact proportion of
+praise and blame between the two. But Thucydides himself, a true-hearted
+Athenian, brings out the tyrannical side in the Athenian temper. Not
+indeed towards her own people, but towards all who were not of her own
+immediate stock. Because Athens thought herself the fairest city in the
+world, as indeed she was, because she thought herself menaced by Sparta,
+and menaced she was, she allowed herself to tyrannize and lightly took
+up the burden of war between brethren. There are few passages in history
+more stately than the Funeral Oration of Pericles in which he calls
+Athens the School of Hellas, but even in it there is a certain deadly
+coldness of heart. And few things are more terrible than the coarsening
+of temper which Thucydides depicts as the war goes on and Pericles is
+succeeded by his caricature Cleon, the man who means to prosecute the
+war vigorously, and by vigour means ruthlessness. Nor was there ever a
+sterner indictment of aggression than that given in the dialogue between
+the spokesmen of Melos, the little island that desired to stand out of
+the conflict, and the Athenian representatives who were determined to
+force her into their policy. And after that dialogue comes, in
+Thucydides' great drama, the fall of Athens.
+
+The city recovered in some measure from her fall, but only to face
+another disaster. If she sinned in the Peloponnesian War through the
+spirit of aggression, she sinned in the struggle with Macedon through
+slackness and cowardice. In the one struggle she lost comradeship; in
+the other she lost liberty. And with the loss of the two she lost
+buoyancy. In a deeper sense than Pericles used the phrase, 'the
+springtime went out of her year'. Ultimately, perhaps, we cannot explain
+why this should be so. Other nations have had as disheartening
+experiences and yet risen above them. Some of the most inspired
+prophecies in the Hebrew writings came after the tiny state of Judaea
+had been torn in pieces by the insensate conflict between North and
+South, and after the whole people had been swept into captivity. But
+whatever the ultimate reason, Athens did not recover. We must not end,
+however, on a note of despair. Far from it. The work of Aristotle and
+Plato and of the Greeks generally, was cramped for lack of sympathy and
+lack of hope, and, strangely enough, it was after they had passed and
+their glory with them that sympathy grew in the world, and after
+sympathy grew, hope returned.
+
+For it is exactly in those failing years, when the Hellenic gave way to
+the Hellenistic, that men first grasped, and grasped so firmly that it
+could hardly be lost again, one of the fundamental principles on which
+the whole fabric of our later civilization has rested, or ought to rest,
+the great principle of personal equality, the claim of every individual
+to transcendent value, irrespective of race and creed and endowment. The
+conquering rule of Alexander, whatever else it did, broke down the
+barriers of the little city-states and made men of different races feel
+themselves members of mankind. There rose among the Stoics the
+conviction that all men do belong together and are all made for each
+other. And with the advent of Christianity came the belief that every
+man, however mean and unworthy, can receive a power that will make him
+all he ought to be. The highest is within his reach. There is no reason
+now why the glorious life that Hellenism conceived for a few should not
+lie open to all men.
+
+Finally, we might say, and truly, that the vast political organization
+built up by Rome gave us Europeans, once and for all, the vision of a
+united Europe.
+
+That dream has never left it. Even to-day, here and now, in spite of our
+disasters, our blunders, and our crimes, let us not forget it, that
+dream which is 'not all a dream', the dream of once again constructing a
+system in which we might, all of us, all nations and all men and women,
+make progress together in the common task.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+G. L. Dickinson, _The Greek View of Life_.
+
+Zeller, _Aristotle and the Earlier Peripatetics_.
+
+Edited by Evelyn Abbott, _Hellenica_.
+
+Bury, _History of Greece_.
+
+Davies and Vaughan, _Plato's Republic_.
+
+Welldon, _Aristotle's Politics_.
+
+Peters, _Aristotle's Ethics_.
+
+Bridges, _The Spirit of Man_.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[6] G. H. Perris, _History of War and Peace_, p. 54.
+
+[7] 'The Unity of Western Civilization,' c. III.
+
+[8] _The Spirit of Man_, 40; _Phaedo_, 96.
+
+[9] _The Spirit of Man_, 16; _Phaedo_, 66.
+
+[10] _Natural Religion_, part ii, c. 5.
+
+[11] _De An._ ii. 4, 415, p. 35.
+
+[12] _The Spirit of Man_, 39; Aristotle, _Met._ 10.
+
+[13] T. W. Rolleston, _Parallel Paths_.
+
+[14] _Phys._ ii. 8, 198 16-34.
+
+[15] Pp. 28-9.
+
+[16] _Phys._ ii, c. I.
+
+[17] _De Part. An._, Bk. i, c. 5.
+
+[18] _Phys._ ii. I, _init._
+
+[19] _De Anima_, _init._
+
+[20] _Meteor_, iv. 1. 378. See Zeller's _Aristotle_, vol. i, _fin._
+
+[21] _Polit._ 1253 a; _Eth._ 1162 a.
+
+[22] _Gen. An._ ii. 3. 737.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+PROGRESS IN THE MIDDLE AGES
+
+A. J. CARLYLE
+
+
+There still survives, not indeed among students of history, but among
+some literary persons, the notion that the civilization of the Middle
+Ages was fixed and unprogressive; that the conditions of these centuries
+were wholly different from those of the ancient world and of modern
+time; that there was little continuity with the ancient world, and
+little connexion with the characteristic aspects of progress in the
+modern world.
+
+The truth is very different. It may be doubted whether at any other
+time, except perhaps in those two marvellous centuries of the flower of
+Greek civilization, there has been a more rapid development of the most
+important elements of civilization than in the period from the end of
+the tenth to the end of the thirteenth centuries. While it is true that
+much was lost in the ruin of the ancient world, much also survived, and
+there was a real continuity of civilization; indeed some of the greatest
+conceptions of the later centuries of the ancient world are exactly
+those upon which mediaeval civilization was built. And again, it was in
+the Middle Ages that the foundations were laid upon which the most
+characteristic institutions of the modern world have grown.
+
+Indeed this notion that the civilization of the Middle Ages was fixed
+and unprogressive is a mere literary superstition, and its origin is to
+be found in the ignorance and perversity of the men of the Renaissance;
+and hardly less, it must be added, in the foolishness of many of the
+conceptions of the Romantic revival.
+
+There are, indeed, excuses for these mistakes and confusions. The
+Renaissance represents, among other things, a great and necessary
+movement of revolt against a religious and intellectual civilization
+which had once been living and moving, but had tended from the latter
+years of the thirteenth century to grow stiff and rigid. It was probably
+a real misfortune that the great thinkers and scholars of the thirteenth
+century, like Alexander of Hales and Thomas Aquinas, had embarked upon
+what was a premature attempt at the systematization of all knowledge;
+they made the same mistake as the Encyclopaedists of the eighteenth
+century or Herbert Spencer in the nineteenth, but with more disastrous
+results. For this work unhappily encouraged the mediaeval Church in its
+most fatal mistake, its tendency to suspect and oppose the apprehensions
+of new aspects of truth.
+
+The men of the Renaissance had to break the forms under which the
+schoolmen had thought to express all truth, they had to carry forward
+the great enterprise and adventure of the discovery of truth, and they
+had to do this in the teeth of a violent resistance on the part of those
+who thought themselves the representatives of the mediaeval
+civilization. There are, therefore, excuses for them in their contempt
+for the intellectual life of the past; but there is no real excuse for
+them in their contempt for mediaeval art and literature. When they
+turned their back upon the immediate past, and endeavoured pedantically
+to reproduce the ancient world, they were guilty of an outrageous
+ignorance and stupidity, a stupidity which is expressed in that unhappy
+phrase of Pope, the 'Gothic night'. Happily neither the great artists of
+the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries nor the great poets of England
+and Spain were much affected by the classical pedantry of which
+unhappily Petrarch was the begetter.
+
+It is this foolishness of the Renaissance which is the best excuse for
+the foolishness of the Romantic revival; the new classical movement had
+in such a degree interrupted the continuity of European art that it was
+very difficult for men in the eighteenth century to recover the past,
+and we must make allowance for the often ludicrous terms and forms of
+the new mediaevalism. Indeed it is a strange and often absurd art--the
+half-serious, half-parodying imitations of Thomson and Walpole and
+Wieland, this ludicrous caricature Gothic of Strawberry Hill and All
+Souls, the notion of Gothic architecture as a mass of crockets,
+battlements, crypts, and dungeons--and all in ruins. Indeed, the
+Romantic conception of the Middle Ages was often as absurd as that of
+the Renaissance, and if we are to get at the truth, if we are to make
+any serious attempt to understand the Middle Ages, we must clear our
+minds of two superstitions; the one, which we derive from the
+Renaissance, that mediaeval civilization was sterile, ignorant, and
+content to be ignorant; the other, which survives from the Romantic
+movement, that it was essentially religious, chivalrous and adventurous,
+that men spent their time in saying their prayers, making reverent love
+to their ladies, or carving the heads of the infidel.
+
+What I should desire to do is to persuade you that the more you study
+the Middle Ages the more you will see that these men and women were
+really very much like ourselves, ignorant, no doubt, of much which is to
+us really or superficially important, gifted on the other hand with some
+qualities which for the time we seem to have in a large measure lost,
+but substantially very like ourselves, neither very much better nor very
+much worse. Let me illustrate this by considering for a moment the
+figure which to us is typical of the Middle Ages. What was the
+mediaeval knight? We think of him as a courteous, chivalrous person of a
+romantic and adventurous temper, whose business it was to fight for his
+lady or in the service of religion against the infidel. In reality he
+was usually a small landowner, who held his land on condition of
+military service to some lord; the title 'knight' means in its Latin
+form (_miles_), simply a soldier, in its Germanic form a servant, and
+distinguishes him from the older type of landowner who held his land in
+absolute ownership and free of all service except of a national kind. In
+virtue of his holding a certain amount of land he had to present himself
+for military service on those occasions and for those periods for which
+he could be legally summoned. But even this description implies a wholly
+wrong emphasis, for he was not primarily a soldier, but a small
+landowner and cultivator, very much what we should call a squireen. He
+was normally much more concerned about his crops, his cattle and pigs,
+than about his lord's affairs and his lord's quarrels. He was ignorant,
+often rather brutal, and turbulent, very ready for a quarrel with his
+neighbour, but with no taste for national wars, and the prolonged
+absence from his home which they might involve, unless indeed there was
+a reasonable prospect of plunder. Indeed, he was a very matter-of-fact
+person, with very little sense of romance, and little taste for
+adventure unless there was something to be got out of it. We must
+dismiss from our minds the pretty superstitions of romance from Chaucer
+and Spenser to the time of the Romantic revival, and we must understand
+that the people of the Middle Ages were very much like ourselves; the
+times were rougher, more disorderly, there was much less security, but
+on the whole the character of human life was not very different.
+
+What was it, then, that happened with the end of the ancient world?
+Well, the civilization of the Roman Empire was overthrown by our
+barbarous ancestors, the old order, and tranquillity, and comfort
+disappeared, and the world fell back into discomfort and turbulence, and
+disorder; the roads fell into disrepair and were not mended, the drains
+were neglected, and the towns dwindled and shrank. We must remember,
+however, that this great civilization was dying out, was failing by some
+internal weakness, and that the barbarians only hastened the process.
+
+Much of the achievement of Greece and Rome was lost, much both material
+and intellectual, but not all, and the new civilization which began
+rapidly to grow up on the ruins of the old was in many respects
+continuous with it. In order, however, that we may understand this we
+must remember that the form of civilization with which the Middle Ages
+were continuous was the Graeco-Roman civilization of the later Empire,
+and not the great Hellenic civilization itself. What the Middle Ages
+knew was primarily that which the Christian Fathers like St. Augustine
+and St. Gregory the Great, St. Basil and St. Gregory of Nazianzus
+learned at their schools and universities. Some of these Fathers were
+educated at the great universities, like Athens, others at comparatively
+humble provincial institutions; some of them were men of powerful
+intellect, while others were more commonplace. What they learned was the
+general intellectual system of the late Empire, and what they learned
+they handed on to the Middle Ages; but it was not the great intellectual
+culture of Greece. We have still too strong an inclination to think of
+the ancient world as one and homogeneous; we have not yet sufficiently
+apprehended the great changes both in the form and in the temper of that
+world. And yet the varieties, the changes, are very diverse, the
+outlook, the artistic methods of the Homeric poetry are very different
+from the emotional and intellectual modernity of Euripides. The
+philosophy of Plato and Aristotle is very different from that of the
+Stoics and Neoplatonists. In that picturesque but perhaps not very
+felicitous phrase which Mr. Murray has borrowed from Mr. Cornford, there
+was a 'failure of nerve' which separates the earlier from the later
+stages of the moral and intellectual culture of the ancient world.
+However this may be, and we shall have more to say about this presently,
+the civilization of the Middle Ages was made up on the one hand of
+elements drawn from the later Empire, and on the other of
+characteristics and principles which seem to have belonged to the
+Barbarian races themselves.
+
+With the end of the sixth century the ancient world had passed away and
+the mediaeval world had begun, and we have to consider the nature and
+movement of the new order, or rather we have to consider some of its
+elements, and their development, especially during the period from the
+end of the tenth century to the end of the thirteenth, during which it
+reached its highest level. We have to pass over the great attempt of the
+ninth century, for we can only deal with a small part of a large
+subject, and we shall only deal with a few aspects of it, and chiefly
+with the development of the spiritual conception of life which we call
+religion, with the reconstruction of the political order of society,
+with the beginning of a new intellectual life and the pursuit of truth,
+and with the development under new forms of the passion for beauty.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I have been compelled to warn you against the romantic superstition that
+the Middle Ages were specifically religious, and yet it is quite true
+that the first aspect of mediaeval life which compels our attention is
+exactly the development of the sense of the significance of the
+spiritual quality of life. This was the first great task of the men of
+the Middle Ages, and this was in a real sense their achievement; but not
+as contradicting the characteristic developments of the Hellenic
+civilization, but rather as completing and fulfilling it. It is indeed a
+singular superstition that the Hellenic world was lacking in spiritual
+insight, but I need only refer you to Miss Stawell's lecture, as serving
+to show you how great and how real this was. It really was not a mistake
+when an honest but rather stupid man like Justin Martyr, and the more
+acute and penetrating minds of the Alexandrian Fathers like Clement and
+Origen, thought that they heard the authentic accents of the 'Word' of
+God in the great philosophers of Greece, and especially in Plato.
+
+The apprehension of the spiritual element in human experience was not
+wanting in Hellenic civilization, but it needed a further development
+and especially in relation to those new apprehensions of personality and
+individuality, whose appearance we can trace both in the
+post-Aristotelian philosophy, and in the later Hebrew prophets and
+poets, which Christianity found in the world, and to which in its
+conception of the human in the Divine, and the Divine in the human, it
+gave a new force and breath. It is easy for us to smile at what may well
+be the over-rhetorical phrases of Seneca when he speaks of the
+self-sufficingness ([Greek: autarkeia]) of the wise man, or when he says
+that the wise man is, but for his mortality, like God himself; and yet
+these rhetorical phrases are, after all, the forms of an apprehension
+which has changed and is changing the world. And, it must be remembered
+that to understand the full significance of these phrases, we must bear
+in mind that the men of the Graeco-Roman civilization had put aside once
+and for all the 'natural' distinction between the 'Greek' and the
+'Barbarian', had recognized that men were equal and alike, not different
+and unequal, that all men were possessed of reason, and all were
+capable of virtue,[23] or, in the Christian terms, all men are the
+children of God and capable of communion with Him.
+
+It is this new apprehension of life for which the Middle Ages found a
+new form in the great organization of the Church, and it is this which
+justifies our sense of the great and permanent significance of the
+tremendous conflict of the Papacy and the Empire. It is true that at
+times some of the representatives of the Church seem to have fallen into
+the mistake of aiming at a tyranny of the Church over the State, which
+would have been in the end as disastrous to the Church itself as to the
+State. But the normal principle of the Church was that which was first
+fully stated by Pope Gelasius I in the fifth century, that the two great
+authorities, the spiritual and the temporal, are each divine, each draws
+its authority ultimately from God himself, each is supreme and
+independent in its own sphere, while each recognizes the authority of
+the other within its proper sphere.
+
+It is, indeed, the freedom of the spiritual life which the mediaeval
+Church was endeavouring to defend; it was the apprehension that there
+was some ultimate quality in human nature which stands and must stand
+outside of the direct or coercive control of society, which lies behind
+all the confused clamour of the conflicts of Church and State.
+
+It is true that in this great and generous effort to secure the freedom
+of the human soul men in some measure lost their way. They demanded and
+in a measure they succeeded in asserting the freedom of the religious
+organization, as against the temporal organization, but in doing this
+they went perilously near to denying the freedom of the individual
+spiritual experience. They went perilously near to denying it, but they
+never wholly forgot it. The Church claimed and exercised an immense
+authority in religion, so immense an authority that it might easily seem
+as though there were no place left for the freedom of the individual
+judgement and conscience. And yet that was not the case. The theory of
+excommunication that is set out in the canonical literature of the
+Middle Ages has generally been carelessly studied and imperfectly
+understood. It was the greatest and most masterful of the Popes,
+Innocent III, who laid down in memorable phrases which are embodied in
+the great collection of the Decretals, that if a Christian man or woman
+is convinced in his own mind and conscience that it would be a mortal
+sin to do or to leave undone some action, he must follow his own
+conscience even against the command of the authorities of the Church,
+and must submit patiently to Church censures and even excommunication;
+for it may well happen that the Church may condemn him whom God
+approves, or approve him whom God condemns.[24] This is no isolated or
+exceptional opinion, but is the doctrine which is constantly laid down
+in the canonical literature.[25] It is, I think, profoundly true to say
+that when men at last revolted against what seemed to them the
+exaggerated claims of the Church, when they slowly fought their way
+towards toleration and religious freedom, they were only asserting and
+carrying out its one most vital principle, the principle of the
+independence or autonomy of the spiritual life; the modern world is only
+fulfilling the Middle Ages.
+
+I do not continue to develop this aspect of the progress of western
+civilization, not because it is unimportant, for indeed it is perhaps
+the greatest and most significant aspect of mediaeval life, but because
+it is well known to you, and indeed, it has generally been insisted on
+to such a degree as to obscure the other aspects of progress in the
+Middle Ages, with which we must deal.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And first I would ask you to observe that it was in these centuries that
+there were laid over again the foundations of the social and political
+order of civilization, and that there were devised those forms of the
+political order upon which the structure of modern society is founded.
+
+We are familiar with the conception of the divine nature of political
+authority, the normal and fundamental mediaeval view of the State. If we
+translate this into more general terms we shall find that its meaning is
+that the State has an ethical or moral purpose or function; the State
+exists to secure and to maintain justice. You must not, indeed, confuse
+this great conception with that foolish perversion of it which was
+suggested, I think, by some characteristically reckless phrases of St.
+Augustine, stated in set terms by St. Gregory the Great, almost
+forgotten in the Middle Ages, and unhappily revived by the perversity of
+some Anglicans and Gallicans in the seventeenth century. This foolish
+perversion, which we know as the theory of the 'Divine Right of Kings',
+is indeed the opposite of the great Pauline and mediaeval conception of
+the divine nature of political authority, for to St. Paul, to the more
+normal Fathers like St. Ambrose, and to the political theory of the
+Middle Ages authority is divine just because, and only in so far as, its
+aim and purpose is the attainment and maintenance of justice. Indeed, it
+is not only the notion of the 'Divine Right' which was inconsistent with
+the mediaeval conception of the State, but the notion of an absolute
+sovereignty inherent in the State, that notion with which some eccentric
+or ignorant modern political theorists, ignorant of Rousseau as well as
+of Aristotle, have played, to the great danger of society; we have,
+indeed, got beyond the theory of the sovereignty of the king, but we are
+in some danger of being hag-ridden by the imposture of the sovereignty
+of the majority. Whatever mistakes the people of the Middle Ages may
+have made, they were, with rare exceptions, clear that there was no
+legitimate authority which was not just, and which did not make for
+justice.
+
+It is here that we find the real meaning of the second great political
+principle of the Middle Ages, that is the supremacy of law; that it is
+the law which is the supreme authority in the State, the law which is
+over every person in the State. When John of Salisbury, the secretary of
+Thomas a Becket, wishes to distinguish between the prince and the
+tyrant, he insists that the prince is one who rules according to law,
+while the tyrant is one who ignores and violates the law.[26] And in a
+memorable phrase, Bracton, the great English jurist of the latter part
+of the thirteenth century, lays it down dogmatically that the king has
+two superiors, God and the law.[27] There is an absurd notion still
+current among more ignorant persons--I have even heard some theologians
+fall into the mistake--that men in the Middle Ages thought of authority
+as something arbitrary and unintelligible, while the truth is that such
+a conception was wholly foreign to the temper of that time. It is quite
+true that the political life of the Middle Ages seems constantly to
+oscillate between anarchy and despotism, but this is not because the men
+of those days did not understand the meaning of law and of freedom, but
+because they were only slowly working out the organization through which
+these can be secured. The supreme authority in the mediaeval state was
+the law, and it was supreme because it was taken by them to be the
+embodiment of justice.
+
+It is again out of this principle that there arose another great
+conception which is still often thought to be modern, but which is
+really mediaeval, the conception that the authority of the ruler rests
+upon and is conditioned by an agreement or contract between him and the
+people. For this agreement was not an abstract conception, but was based
+upon the mutual oaths of the mediaeval coronation ceremony, the oath of
+the king to maintain the law, and to administer justice, and the oath of
+the people to serve and obey the king whom they had recognized or
+elected. The people do, indeed, owe the king honour and loyal service,
+but only on the condition that he holds inviolable his oath. The ruler
+who breaks this is a tyrant, and for him there was no place in mediaeval
+political theory. This conception was expressed in very plain and even
+crude terms by Manegold in the eleventh century when he said that the
+king was in the same relation to the community as the man who is hired
+to keep the pigs to his master. If the swineherd fails to do his work
+the master turns him off and finds another. And if the king or prince
+refuses to fulfil the conditions on which he holds his power he must be
+deposed.[28] John of Salisbury in the twelfth century expressed this in
+even stronger terms when he said that if the prince became a tyrant and
+violated the laws, he had no rights, and should be removed, and if there
+were no other way to do it, it was lawful for any citizen to slay
+him.[29]
+
+These are, no doubt, extreme forms of the mediaeval conception, but the
+principle that the authority of the ruler was conditioned by his
+faithful discharge of his obligations is the normal doctrine of the
+Middle Ages, is maintained by the compilers of the feudal law-books of
+the Kingdom of Jerusalem, by the great English jurist Bracton, by St.
+Thomas Aquinas, and even by some of the most representative of the Roman
+jurists of Bologna, like Azo.
+
+These were the fundamental principles of the conception of the nature of
+political authority whose development we can trace in the Middle Ages,
+and it is out of these conceptions that there grew the system of the
+control of the common affairs of the community by means of the
+representation of the community. For it should be more clearly
+understood than it is, that the representative system was the creation
+of the mediaeval political genius, it was these men--to whom even yet
+the more ignorant would deny the true political instinct--it was these
+men who devised that method upon which the structure of modern civilized
+government has been built up.
+
+There is, however, yet another aspect of the development of political
+civilization which deserves our attention if we are to understand the
+nature of political progress in the Middle Ages. It was in these
+centuries that there were created the elementary forms of the
+administrative system of government. And indeed, there is perhaps no
+clearer distinction between a barbarian and a civilized government than
+this, that while the barbarian government hangs precariously on the life
+of the capable king, the civilized government is carried on continuously
+by an organized civil service. It would be impossible here to discuss
+the earlier forms of this in the organization of government by Charles
+the Great, or the very interesting developments of the royal or imperial
+chapel as the nucleus of a civil service in Germany, it is enough here
+to remind ourselves that it is the creation of this organized
+administration by Henry I and Henry II of England which laid the
+foundations of our national order. Enough has, I think, been said to
+illustrate the reality and significance of the progressive
+reconstruction of the political order of Western society in the Middle
+Ages.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It may, however, be said that this may all be true, but that in all this
+we have after all only an example of the preoccupation of the Middle
+Ages with conduct and religion. I must, therefore, ask you to consider
+the character and development of the intellectual movement of the Middle
+Ages. And here, fortunately, we can find the best of guidance in Dr.
+Rashdall's great work on _The Universities of Europe in the Middle
+Ages_, and in Dr. R. L. Poole's _Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought_.
+Indeed I could wish that a little more attention was given to the
+history and character of the intellectual movement which the
+Universities represent, and perhaps a little less to reading and
+discussing the great scholastic works of the thirteenth century, which
+are almost impossible to understand except in relation to the
+intellectual movements of the twelfth century.
+
+The new intellectual movement came very suddenly in the last years of
+the eleventh century; why it should have come then is hard to determine,
+but it seems reasonable to say that it represents the reawakening of the
+desire for knowledge which had been in abeyance during the stormy
+centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, when men had
+little leisure for anything but the constant labour to secure a little
+decent order and peace. For a few years, indeed, in the ninth century
+the genius of Charlemagne had almost restored the order of civilization,
+and even in those few years the human mind reasserted itself, and for a
+moment the learning and culture which had been preserved mainly by the
+Irish and their pupils in Britain, and in Central Europe, flowered and
+bore fruit; but with his death Western Europe plunged again into anarchy
+and misery, and it was only slowly that the genius of the great German
+emperors in Central Europe, and of the Norman settlers in France and
+England, rebuilt the commonwealth of European civilization. By the end
+of the eleventh century the work was not indeed done, but was being
+done, and men had again a little leisure, and the desire for knowledge
+reawakened, but indeed it was no mere gentle desire, but a veritable
+passion which possessed the men of the twelfth century, and it was this
+spontaneous passion which produced the universities.
+
+The first thing, indeed, which we must observe about the oldest
+universities of Europe, especially Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, is just
+this, that they were not made by any external authority, that they did
+not derive their being from Church or State, from pope or king, but that
+they were formed by the enthusiasm and passion which drew men from every
+quarter of Europe to sit at the feet of some man or another who could
+give them the knowledge which they desired, and, in their turn, to
+become teachers. It is quite true that as time went on, and they found
+that popes and kings were friendly and interested, these groups of
+students procured for themselves bulls and charters of recognition and
+protection, but while later universities may trace their foundation to
+these respectable patrons, the older universities recognize them indeed
+as benefactors and friends, but not as founders, but rather claim that
+they grew out of men's desire for knowledge, and that they were
+recognized by the general consent of the civilized world.
+
+In the second place it is important, and especially I think in these
+days, to understand that the men who thus created the universities in
+their eagerness to learn, were of every class and condition, rich and
+poor, noble and simple, and they lived as they could, in comfortable
+quarters if they were wealthy men, or in the garrets and cellars of the
+citizens if they were poor, and for the most part they were poor; but
+neither poverty nor riches could destroy their noble thirst for
+knowledge. The life of the universities was indeed turbulent and
+disorderly, the students were always at war with the citizens, and, when
+they were not breaking the heads of the citizens or having their heads
+broken by them, they were at war with each other, the men of the north
+with the southerners, the western with the eastern; for the universities
+were not local or national institutions, but were made up of a
+cosmopolitan crowd of men of every nation in Europe, intelligible to
+each other, as unhappily we are not, by the universal knowledge and use
+of that mediaeval Latin, which might distress the Ciceronian ears of a
+pedant of the Renaissance, but was a good, useful, and adaptable
+language. It was a turbulent, disorderly, brutal, profligate, and
+drunken world, for the students were as hard drinkers as the citizens,
+but it was animated, it was made alive by a true passion for knowledge,
+by an unwearied and never satisfied intellectual curiosity.
+
+But it will be asked, what did they learn? Well, the only answer that
+one can give is that they learned whatever there was to learn. Our
+literary friends have often still the impression that in the Middle Ages
+men spent their whole time in learning theology, and were afraid of
+other forms of knowledge, but this is a singular delusion. As the
+universities developed a system, their studies were arranged in the main
+under four heads, the general studies of what came to be called the
+Faculty of Arts, and the professional studies of the three superior
+Faculties of Law, Medicine, and Theology, but the student was not
+normally allowed to study in the three superior Faculties until he had
+spent some years in the studies of the Faculty of Arts. It is therefore
+with this latter that we are primarily occupied. The studies in the
+Faculty of Arts consisted, to use our modern terminology, of literature,
+philosophy, and science, and the accomplished mediaeval student was
+expected to know whatever there was to know.
+
+And this means--what is strangely often forgotten--that the studies of
+the mediaeval universities were primarily based upon the literature
+which had survived from the ancient world. The Latin poets and orators
+were their models of literary art, the surviving treatises of the
+ancients their text-books in medicine, and the Greek philosophers in
+Latin translations, or in Latin works founded on them, their masters in
+thought. To understand the extent of the influence and the knowledge of
+antiquity of a twelfth-century scholar we need only turn again to John
+of Salisbury, and we shall find him as familiar as any Renaissance
+scholar with Latin literature, and possessing a very considerable
+acquaintance with Greek literature so far as it could be obtained
+through the Latin.[30] Indeed, so much is he possessed by the literature
+of antiquity that in works like the _Policraticus_ he can hardly write
+two lines together without a quotation from some classical author. This
+type of literary scholarship has been too much overlooked, and, as I
+said before, too exclusive an attention has been given to the
+thirteenth-century schoolmen, who are neither from a literary nor from a
+philosophical point of view as representative of mediaeval scholars, and
+philosophically they are often really unmediaeval, for the general
+quality of mediaeval thought is its Platonism: the Aristotelian logic
+was indeed known to the Middle Ages through Boethius, but the other
+Aristotelian works were not known till towards the middle of the
+thirteenth century.
+
+It would be impossible here, even if I were competent, which I am not,
+to discuss the character of mediaeval thought, but one thing we can
+observe, one aspect of the intellectual method which may serve to clear
+away some confusion. The great intellectual master of the Middle Ages
+was Abelard, and the method which he elaborated in his _Sic et Non_ is
+the method which imposed itself upon all aspects of mediaeval thought.
+
+It has often been supposed that mediaeval thinkers were in such a sense
+the creatures of authority that it was impossible for them to exercise
+any independent judgement; how far this may have been true of the
+decadent scholasticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries I do
+not pretend to say, but such a judgement is a ludicrous caricature of
+the living and active thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
+and a little consideration of the critical method which Abelard
+developed is sufficient to correct this. This is as follows: first some
+general principle is enunciated for consideration, then all the
+authorities which may seem to support it are cited, then all the
+authorities against, and finally the writer delivers his own judgement,
+criticizing and explaining the opinions which may seem contrary to it.
+The method has its defects and its limitations, but its characteristic
+is rather that of scepticism than of credulity. And it is on this method
+that the most important systems of knowledge of the Middle Ages are
+constructed. It was applied by Gratian in his _Decretum_, the first
+great reasoned treatise on Church law, and leads there often to somewhat
+unexpected conclusions, such as that even the legislative authority of
+the Pope is limited by the consenting custom of the Christian
+people;[31] and it is this method upon which the great systematic
+treatises, like the _Suma Theologica_ of St. Thomas Aquinas, were
+constructed in the thirteenth century. Whatever its defects may be the
+method cannot fairly be accused of ignoring difficulties and of a
+submission to authority which leaves no place for the critical reason.
+
+I have, I hope, said enough to make it clear that there was a real and
+living intellectual movement in the Middle Ages, and that even in those
+days men had resumed the great adventure of the pursuit of truth.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We can only for a moment consider the significance and the character of
+mediaeval civilization as it expresses itself in Art, and we must begin
+by noticing a distinction between mediaeval art and mediaeval learning,
+which is of the first importance.
+
+The intellectual movement of the Middle Ages was related to the ancient
+world, both in virtue of that continuity which was mediated by the
+Christian Fathers, whose education was that of the later Empire, and
+also in virtue of the intense and eager care with which mediaeval
+scholars studied all that they possessed of ancient literature. The
+relation of the art of the Middle Ages to the ancient world was quite
+different. There was no continuity between the vernacular poetry of the
+Middle Ages and that of the ancient world, and while there was a certain
+continuity in architecture and in mosaic painting, this amounted to
+little more than that the mediaeval artists took the formal structure or
+method as the starting-point of their own independent and original work.
+For the western art of the third and fourth centuries was conventional
+and decadent, and had apparently lost its power of recovery, while the
+art of the centuries which followed was at first rude and imperfect, but
+was full of new life, determined in its reality and dominated by some
+intimate sense of beauty; it was in no sense imitative of ancient art,
+but grew and changed under the terms of its own inherent life and power.
+
+Mediaeval art, whatever else is to be said about it, was new and
+independent, and it had all the variety, the audacious experiments,
+characteristic of a living art. Nothing is so foolish as to imagine that
+it was uniform and unchanging. Indeed, from the historical point of
+view, the interest of the study of it is curiously contrasted with that
+of the art of the ancient world. There we have only an imperfect and
+fragmentary knowledge of the earlier and ruder form; its history, as we
+know it, might almost be said to begin with the perfection of the sixth
+and fifth centuries, and what we know after that is the history of a
+long decadence, not indeed without new developments of importance, as
+for instance in the architectural structure of Roman building, and
+perhaps in the sculpture of the Early Empire on one side, and in certain
+aspects of Latin literature on another. The history of mediaeval art is
+the history of the long development from what are generally rude forms
+to the highly developed art of the thirteenth century, a development
+full of incidents and experiments and variety. I have called the early
+form rude, but the phrase is not very happy, as those who know either
+the early mosaic or the early epic will understand.
+
+There are still some people, I suppose, who think that mediaeval poetry
+was all of one kind, cast in one mould, but the truth is that it is of
+every form and character. It ranges from the bold imaginative realism of
+the Epic of England, Iceland, Germany, and France, to the exquisite and
+gracious but somewhat artificial allegory of the _Romance of the Rose_.
+It includes the first great emotional poetry of the modern world--the
+sense of the greatness and tragedy of human passion has perhaps never
+been expressed in more moving terms than in the _Tristan and Iseult_ of
+Thomas or Beroul--but it also includes the mordant satire of the Renard
+poetry and of Jean de Meun, and the gross realistic humour of the
+Fabliaux. The mediaeval drama, in whose complex development we have to
+trace many strands, probably represents in its oldest forms the coarse
+farcical buffoonery which may be related to the last fashions of the
+ancient world; it received a new impulse from the dramatization of
+scripture history in the twelfth century; but in the thirteenth and
+fourteenth centuries, at least in France, it had already become
+substantially a drama of romantic or contemporary life, as we can see in
+Jean Bodel's _Jeu de St. Nicholas_, in Adam de la Halle's _Jeu de la
+Feuillee_ and _Robin et Marion_, and in dramas like the _Empress of
+Rome_ or the _Otho_. Whatever criticism we might want to make on
+mediaeval literature, at least we cannot say that it was of one type and
+of one mood.
+
+It is hardly necessary to point out the movement and changes in the
+other forms of art in the Middle Ages; it is only necessary to remind
+ourselves that, while we can see that the artists were often hampered by
+inadequate technical knowledge, they were not conventional or merely
+imitative.
+
+It would be impossible here to consider the history of mosaic painting,
+and its development from the decadent Graeco-Roman work of Santa
+Pudenziana in Rome, to the magnificent and living decorations of St.
+Mark's in Venice, or of the cathedral of Monreale. It is enough to
+remind ourselves of the immense interval which lies between the rude but
+living sculpture of the ninth century, and the exquisite grace of
+Chester or Wells, and of that development of architecture which
+culminates in the majesty of Durham, and in the beauty of Chartres and
+Westminster Abbey.
+
+It is doubtful if we have yet at all fully or correctly appreciated the
+nature of mediaeval art; there has been a good deal of foolish talk
+about 'primitives', which usually goes with a singular ignorance of
+mediaeval civilization; the one thing which is already clear, and which
+grows clearer, is that the men of those ages had an instinct and a
+passion for beauty which expressed itself in almost every thing that
+they touched; and, whatever we have gained, we have in a large measure
+lost this.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The mediaeval world was then a living growing world, neither cut off
+from the past, nor unrelated to the future. It was a rough and turbulent
+world, our ancestors were dogged, quarrelsome, and self-assertive, and
+the first task of civilization was to produce some sort of decent order.
+The world was a long way off from the firm urbanity of the English
+policeman. And yet the men of the Middle Ages never fell into that
+delusion which, as it would seem, has ruined other civilizations; the
+great effort for order was not in their mind to be fulfilled by any mere
+mechanical discipline, by any system imposed from outside, the only
+system of order which they were prepared to accept was one which should
+express the character, the tradition, and finally the will of the whole
+community. The great phrase of Edward I's summons to Parliament, 'Quod
+omnes tangit, ab omnibus approbetur' (That which concerns all, must be
+approved by all), was not a mere tag, as some foolish people have
+thought, but expressed the character and the genius of a living
+political civilization.
+
+And this rough turbulent world was inspired by a great breath of
+spiritual and intellectual and artistic life and freedom.
+
+It might well seem as though the Church and religion were merely a new
+bondage, and in part that is true, but it is not the whole truth. With
+all its mistakes the religion of the Middle Ages meant the growing
+apprehension of the reality of that 'love which moves the sun and other
+stars', it meant the growth of reverence for that which is beyond and
+above humanity and which is also within it. For it is the last truth of
+the Christian faith that we know God only under the terms of human life
+and nature. And with all the cruelty and brutality of the Middle Ages
+they taught men love as well as obedience.
+
+Again, it was in these ages, as soon as the confusion of the outer world
+was a little reduced, that the passion for knowledge awoke again in
+men's hearts. It is true that some were afraid lest the eager inquiry of
+men's minds should destroy the foundations of that order which men were
+slowly achieving, but still the passionate pursuit of knowledge has
+rarely been more determined. And once again the world was rough, but
+these men had an instinct, a passion for beauty which expressed itself
+in almost everything which they touched. They had not, indeed, the
+almost miraculous sense and mastery of the great artists of Greece, that
+did not come again till the time of the great Italian artists of the
+fifteenth century. But they were free from pedantry, from formalism,
+they left the dying art of the ancient world and made their own way.
+Their sense of colour was almost infallible, as those who have seen the
+mosaics of the older Roman basilicas and of St. Mark's in Venice will
+know; but, indeed, we have only to look at the illuminated manuscripts
+which are to be found in all our libraries. And in that great art in
+which, above all perhaps, they expressed themselves, in their great
+architecture, we see the growth of a constructive genius which is only
+overshadowed by the superb beauty of its form.
+
+A rough, disorderly, turbulent, greedy, cruel world, but it knew the
+human soul, and it knew the human heart. The ancient world had ended in
+a great destruction, but the sadness and emptiness of its last days
+compel us to feel that it was well that it should end. And the new world
+was a world of life, of crude force and restless energy, and from it we
+have received the principles and the forms of a great civilization, and
+the temper which is never satisfied, for there is no end to life.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+H. W. C. Davis, _Mediaeval Europe_ (Home University Library).
+
+Lord Bryce, _History of Roman Empire_.
+
+Rashdall, _Universities of Empire in the Middle Ages_.
+
+R. L. Poole, _Illustrations of Mediaeval Thought_.
+
+Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_.
+
+W. P. Ker, _Epic and Romance_.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[23] Cf. Cicero, _De Legibus_, i. 10-12; and Seneca, _De Beneficiis_,
+iii. 18.
+
+[24] Cf. Decretals, v. 39. 44, 28.
+
+[25] Cf. Carlyle, _Mediaeval Political Theory_, vol. ii. pp. 244-9.
+
+[26] Cf. John of Salisbury, _Policraticus_, iv. 1.
+
+[27] Cf. Bracton, _De Legibus et Consuetudinibus_, i. 8, 5.
+
+[28] Cf. Manegold, _Ad Gebehardum_, c. XXX.
+
+[29] Cf. John of Salisbury, _Policraticus_, iii. 15, viii. 17, 18, 20.
+
+[30] Cf. C. C. J. Webb's edition of John of Salisbury's _Policraticus_,
+introduction.
+
+[31] Cf. Gratian, _Decretum_, D. iv. c. 3.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+PROGRESS IN RELIGION
+
+BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUeGEL
+
+
+The difficulties are deep and delicate which confront any man at all
+well acquainted with the fuller significance of Religion and of
+Progress, who attempts clearly and shortly to describe or define the
+ultimate relations between these two sets of fact and conviction. It is
+plain that Religion is the deeper and richer of the two terms; and that
+we have here, above all, to attempt to fathom the chief elements and
+forces of Religion as such, and then to see whether Progress is really
+traceable in Religion at all. And again it is clear that strongly
+religious souls will, as such, hold that Religion answers to, and is
+occasioned by, the action, within our human life and needs, of great,
+abiding, living non-human Realities; and yet, if such souls are at all
+experienced and sincere, they will also admit--as possibly the most
+baffling of facts--that the human individuals, families, races, are
+relatively rare in whom this sense and need of Religion is strongly,
+sensitively active. Thus the religion of most men will either all but
+completely wither or vanish before the invasion of other great facts and
+interests of human life--Economics or Politics or Ethics, or again,
+Science, Art, Philosophy; or it will, more frequently, become largely
+assimilated, in its conception, valuation, and practice, to the quite
+distinct, and often subtly different, conceptions, valuations, and
+practices pertaining to such of these other ranges and levels of human
+life as happen here to be vigorously active. And such assimilations
+are, of course, effected with a particular Philosophy or Ethic, mostly
+some passing fashion of the day, which does not reach the deepest laws
+and standards even of its own domain, and which, if taken as Religion,
+will gravely numb and mar the power and character of such religious
+perception as may still remain in this particular soul.
+
+I will, then, first attempt some discriminations in certain fundamental
+questions concerning the functioning of our minds, feelings, wills. I
+will next attempt short, vivid descriptions of the chief stages in the
+Jewish and Christian Religions, with a view to tracing here what may
+concern their progress; and will very shortly illustrate the main
+results attained by the corresponding main peculiarities of
+Confucianism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism. And I will finally strive to
+elucidate and to estimate, as clearly as possible, the main facts in
+past and present Religion which concern the question of religious
+'Progressiveness'.
+
+
+I
+
+I begin with insisting upon some seven discriminations which, even only
+forty years ago, would have appeared largely preposterous to the then
+fashionable philosophy.
+
+First, then, our Knowledge is always wider and deeper than is our
+Science. I know my mother, I know my dog, I know my favourite rose-tree;
+and this, although I am quite ignorant of the anatomical differences
+between woman and man; of the psychological limits between dog and human
+being; or of the natural or artificial botanical order to which my
+rose-plant belongs. Any kind or degree of consciousness on my part as to
+these three realities is a knowledge of their content. 'Knowledge is not
+simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their resolution into
+abstract elements; since thus the unknowable would be found well within
+the facts of experience itself, in so far as these possess a concrete
+character which refuses translation into abstract relations.' So
+Professor Aliotta urges with unanswerable truth.[32]
+
+And next, this spontaneous awareness of other realities by myself, the
+reality Man, contains always, from the first, both matter and form, and
+sense, reason, feeling, volition, all more or less in action. Sir Henry
+Jones insists finely: 'The difference between the primary and elementary
+data of thought on the one hand, and the highest forms of systematized
+knowledge on the other, is no difference in kind, analogous to a mere
+particular and a mere universal; but it is a difference of
+articulation.'[33]
+
+Thirdly, direct, unchallengeable Experience is always only experience of
+a particular moment; only by means of Thought, and trust in Thought, can
+such Experience be extended, communicated, utilized. The sceptic, to be
+at all effective, practises this trust as really as does his opponent.
+Thought, taken apart from Experience, is indeed artificial and arid; but
+Experience without Thought, is largely an orderless flux. Philosophers
+as different as the Neo-Positivist Mach and the Intuitionist Bergson, do
+indeed attempt to construct systems composed solely of direct Experience
+and pure Intuition; and, at the same time, almost ceaselessly insist
+upon the sheer novelty, the utter unexpectedness of all direct
+Experience, and the entire artificiality of the constructions of
+Thought--constructions which alone adulterate our perceptions of reality
+with the non-realities repetition, uniformity, foreseeableness. Yet the
+amazing success of the application of such constructions to actual
+Nature stares us all in the face. 'It is, indeed, strange,' if that
+contention be right, 'that facts behave as if they too had a turn for
+mathematics.' Assuredly 'if thought, with its durable and coherent
+structure, were not the reflection of some order of stable relations in
+the nature of things, it would be worthless as an organ of life'.[34]
+
+Fourthly, both Space and Time are indeed essential constituents of all
+our perceptions, thoughts, actions, at least in this life. Yet Time is
+perhaps the more real, and assuredly the richer, constituent of the two.
+But this rich reality applies only to Concrete or Filled Time, Duration,
+in which our experiences, although always more or less successive,
+interpenetrate each other in various degrees and ways, and are thus more
+or less simultaneous. An absolutely even flow of equal, mutually
+exclusive moments, on the contrary, exists only for our theoretical
+thinking, in Abstract, Empty, or Clock time. Already, in 1886, Professor
+James Ward wrote: 'In time, conceived as physical, there is no trace of
+intensity; in time, as psychically experienced, duration is primarily an
+intensive magnitude.'[35] And in 1889 Professor Bergson, in his _Essai
+sur les Donnees Immediates de la Conscience_, gave us exquisite
+descriptions of time as we really experience it, of 'duration strictly
+speaking', which 'does not possess moments that are identical or
+exterior to each other'.[36] Thus all our real soul life, in proportion
+to its depth, moves in Partial Simultaneity; and it apprehends, requires
+and rests, at its deepest, in an overflowingly rich Pure Simultaneity.
+
+Fifthly, Man is Body as well as Soul, and the two are closely
+interrelated. The sensible perception of objects, however humble, is
+always necessary for the beginning, and (in the long run) for the
+persistence and growth, of the more spiritual apprehensions of man.
+Hence Historical Persons and Happenings, Institutions, affording
+Sensible Acts and Contacts, and Social Corporations, each different
+according to the different ranges and levels of life, can hardly fail to
+be of importance for man's full awakening--even ethical and spiritual.
+Professor Ernst Troeltsch, so free from natural prejudice in favour of
+such a Sense-and-Spirit position, has become perhaps the most adequate
+exponent of this great fact of life, which is ever in such danger of
+evaporation amidst the intellectual and leading minority of men.
+
+Sixthly, the cultivated modern man is still largely arrested and stunted
+by the spell of Descartes, with his insistence upon immediate unity of
+outlook and perfect clearness of idea as the sole, universal tests,
+indeed constituents, of truth. 'I judged that I could take for my
+general rule that the things which we conceive very clearly and very
+distinctly are all true'--these and these alone.[37] Thus thenceforth
+Mathematics and Mechanics have generally been held to be the only full
+and typical sciences, and human knowledge to be co-extensive with such
+sciences alone. Yet Biology and Psychology now rightly claim to be
+sciences, each with its own special methods and tests distinct from
+those of Mathematics and Mechanics. Indeed, the wisest and most fruitful
+philosophy is now coming to see that 'Reality generally eludes our
+thought, when thought is reduced to mathematical formulas'.[38] Concrete
+thought, contrariwise, finds full room also for History, Philosophy,
+Religion, for each as furnishing rich subject-matters for Knowledge or
+Science, of a special but true kind.
+
+Seventhly. Already Mathematics and Mechanics absolutely depend, for the
+success of their applications to actual Nature, upon a spontaneous
+correspondence between the human reason and the Rationality of Nature.
+The immensity of this success is an unanswerable proof that this
+rationality is not imposed, but found there, by man. But Thought without
+a Thinker is an absurd proposition. Thus faith in Science is faith in
+God. Perhaps the most impressive declaration of this necessary connexion
+between Knowledge and Theism stands at the end of that great work,
+Christoph Sigwart's _Logik_. 'As soon as we raise the question as to the
+real _right_', the adequate reason, 'of our demands for a
+correspondence, within our several sciences, between the principles and
+the objects of the researches special to each, there emerges the need
+for the Last and Unconditional Reason. And the actual situation is not
+that this Reason appears only on the horizon of our finite knowledge,'
+as Kant would have it. 'Not in thus merely extending our knowledge lies
+the significance of the situation, but in the fact that this
+Unconditional Reason constitutes the presupposition without which no
+desire for Knowledge (in the proper and strict sense of the word) is
+truly thinkable.'[39]
+
+And lastly, all this and more points to philosophical Agnosticism as an
+artificial system, and one hopelessly inadequate to the depths of human
+experience. Assuredly Bossuet is right: 'man knows not the whole of
+anything'; and mystery, in this sense, is also of the essence of all
+higher religion. But what man knows of anything is that thing
+manifested, not essentially travestied, in that same thing's
+appearances. We men are most assuredly realities forming part of a real
+world-whole of various realities; those other realities continuously
+affect our own reality; we cannot help thinking certain things about
+these other realities; and these things, when accepted and pressed home
+by us in action or in science, turn out, by our success in this their
+utilization, to be rightly apprehended by us, as parts of
+interconnected, objective Nature. Thus our knowledge of Reality is real
+as far as it goes, and philosophical Agnosticism is a _doctrinaire_
+position. We can say with Herbert Spencer, in spite of his predominant
+Agnosticism, that 'the error' committed by philosophers intent upon
+demonstrating the limits and conditions of consciousness 'consists in
+assuming that consciousness contains _nothing but_ limits and
+conditions, to the entire neglect of that which is limited and
+conditioned'. In reality 'there is some thing which alike forms the raw
+material of definite thought and remains after the definiteness, which
+thinking gave to it, has been destroyed'.[40]
+
+
+II
+
+Let us next consider five of the most ancient and extensively developed
+amongst the still living Religions: the Israelitish-Jewish and the
+Christian religions shall, as by far the best known to us and as the
+most fully articulated, form the great bulk of this short account; the
+Confucian, Buddhist, and Mohammedan religions will be taken quite
+briefly, only as contrasts to, or elucidations of, the characteristics
+found in the Jewish and Christian faiths. All this in view of the
+question concerning the relations between Religion and Progress.
+
+1. We can roughly divide the Israelitish-Jewish religion into three long
+periods; in each the points that specially concern us will greatly vary
+in clearness, importance, and richness of content.
+
+The first period, from the time of the founder Moses and the Jewish
+exodus out of Egypt to the appearance of the first great prophet Elijah
+(say 1300 B.C. to about 860 B.C.) is indeed but little known to us; yet
+it gives us the great historical figure of the initial lawgiver, the
+recipient and transmitter of deep ethical and religious experiences and
+convictions. True, the code of King Hammurabi of Babylon (in 1958 to
+1916 B.C.; or, according to others, in about 1650) anticipates many of
+the laws of the _Book of the Covenant_ (Exod. xx, 22-xxiii. 33), the
+oldest amongst the at all lengthy bodies of laws in the Pentateuch; and,
+again, this covenant appears to presuppose the Jewish settlement in
+Canaan (say in 1250 B.C.) as an accomplished fact. And, indeed, the Law
+and the books of Moses generally have undoubtedly passed through a long,
+deep, wide, and elaborate development, of which three chief stages, all
+considerably subsequent to the Covenant-Book, have, by now, been
+established with substantial certainty and precision. The record of
+directly Mosaic sayings and writings is thus certainly very small. Yet
+it is assuredly a gross excess to deny the historical reality of Moses,
+as even distinguished scholars such as Edward Meyer and Bernhard Stade
+have done. Far wiser here is Wellhausen, who finds, in the very
+greatness and fixity of orientation of the development in the Law and in
+the figure of the Lawgiver, a conclusive proof of the rich reality and
+greatness of the Man of God, Moses. Yet it is Hermann Gunkel, I think,
+who has reached the best balanced judgement in this matter. With Gunkel
+we can securely hold that Moses called God Yahweh, and proclaimed Him as
+the national God of Israel; that Moses invoked Him as 'Yahweh is my
+banner'--the divine leader of the Israelites in battle (Exod. xvii. 15);
+and that Yahweh is for Moses a God of righteousness--of the right and
+the law which he, Moses, brought down from Mount Sinai and published at
+its foot. Fierce as may now appear to us the figure of Yahweh, thus
+proclaimed, yet the soul's attitude towards Him is already here, from
+the first, a religion of the will: an absolute trust in God ('Yahweh
+shall fight for you, and ye shall hold your peace,' Exod. xiv. 14), and
+a terrible relentlessness in the execution of His commands--as when
+Moses orders the sons of Levi to go to and fro in the camp, slaying all
+who, as worshippers of the Golden Calf, had not been 'on Yahweh's side'
+(Exod. xxxii. 25-29); and when the chiefs, who had joined in the worship
+of Baal-Peor, are 'hung up unto Yahweh before the sun' (Num. xxv. 1-5).
+Long after Moses the Jews still believed in the real existence of the
+gods of the heathen; and the religion of Moses was presumably, in the
+first instance, 'Monolatry' (the adoration of One God among many); but
+already accompanied by the conviction that Yahweh was mightier than any
+other god--certainly Micah, 'Who is like Yahweh?,' is a very ancient
+Israelitish name. And if Yahweh is worshipped by Moses on a mountain
+(Sinai) and His law is proclaimed at a spring, if Moses perhaps himself
+really fashioned the brazen serpent as a sensible symbol of Yahweh,
+Yahweh nevertheless remains without visible representation in or on the
+Ark; He is never conceived as the sheer equivalent of natural forces;
+and all mythology is absent here--the vehement rejection of the
+calf-worship shows this strikingly. Michael Angelo, himself a soul of
+fire, understood Moses well, Gunkel thinks.[41]
+
+The second period, from Elijah's first public appearance (about 860
+B.C.) to the Dedication of the Second Temple (516 B.C.), and on to the
+public subscription to the Law of Moses, under Ezra (in 444 B.C.), is
+surpassed, in spiritual richness and importance, only by the classical
+times of Christianity itself. Its beginning, its middle, and its end
+each possess distinctive characters.
+
+The whole opens with Elijah, 'the grandest heroic figure in all the
+Bible,' as it still breathes and burns in the First Book of Kings. 'For
+Elijah there existed not, in different regions, forces possessed of
+equal rights and equal claims to adoration, but everywhere only one Holy
+Power that revealed Itself, not like Baal, in the life of Nature, but
+like Yahweh, in the moral demands of the Spirit' (Wellhausen).
+
+And then (in about 750 B.C.) appears Amos, the first of the noble
+'storm-birds' who herald the coming national destructions and divine
+survivals. 'Yahweh was for these prophets above all the god of justice,
+and God of Israel only in so far as Israel satisfied His demands of
+justice. And yet the special relation of Yahweh to Israel is still
+recognized as real; the ethical truth, which now stood high above
+Israel, had, after all, arisen within Israel and could still only be
+found within it.' The two oldest lengthy narrative documents of the
+Pentateuch--the Yahwist (J) and the Ephraemite (E)--appear to have been
+composed, the first in Judah in the time of Elijah, the second in Israel
+in the time of Amos. J gives us the immortal stories of Paradise and the
+Fall, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood; E, Abraham's sacrifice of
+Isaac; and the documents conjointly furnish the more naive and
+picturesque parts of the grand accounts of the Patriarchs generally--the
+first great narrative stage of the Pentateuch. God here gives us some of
+His most exquisite self-revelations through the Israelitish
+peasant-soul. And Isaiah of Jerusalem, successful statesman as well as
+deep seer, still vividly lives for us in some thirty-six chapters of
+that great collection the 'Book of Isaiah' (i-xii, xv-xx, xxii-xxxix).
+There is his majestic vocation in about 740 B.C., described by himself,
+without ambiguity, as a precise, objective revelation (chap. vi); and
+there is the divinely impressive close of his long and great activity,
+when he nerves King Hezekiah to refuse the surrender of the Holy City to
+the all-powerful Sennacherib, King of Assyria: that Yahweh would not
+allow a single arrow to be shot against it, and would turn back the
+Assyrian by the way by which he came--all which actually happens as thus
+predicted (chap. xxxvii).
+
+The middle of this rich second period is filled by a great
+prophet-priest's figure, and a great prophetical priestly reform.
+Jeremiah is called in 628 B.C., and dies obscurely in Egypt in about 585
+B.C.; and the Deuteronomic Law and Book is found in the Temple, and is
+solemnly proclaimed to, and accepted by, the people, under the
+leadership of the High Priest Hilkiah and King Josiah, 'the Constantine
+of the Jewish Church,' in 628 B.C. Jeremiah and Deuteronomy (D) are
+strikingly cognate in style, temper, and injunctions; and especially D
+contrasts remarkably in all this with the documents J and E. We thus
+have here the second great development of the Mosaic Law. Both Jeremiah
+and Deuteronomy possess a deeply interior, tenderly spiritual, kernel
+and a fiercely polemical husk--they both are full of the contrast
+between the one All-Holy God to be worshipped in the one Holy Place,
+Jerusalem, and the many impure heathen gods worshipped in so many places
+by the Jewish crowd. Thus in Jeremiah Yahweh declares: 'This shall be my
+covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: I will write my law
+in their hearts: and they shall all know me, from the least to the
+greatest: for I will remember their sin no more' (xxxi. 33, 34). And
+Yahweh exclaims: 'My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken
+me, the fountain of living waters, and have hewn out cisterns that can
+hold no water.' 'Lift up thine eyes unto the high places ... thou hast
+polluted the land with thy wickedness.' 'Wilt thou not from this time
+cry unto me: My Father, thou art the guide of my youth?' (ii. 13, iii.
+2, 4). And Deuteronomy teaches magnificently: 'This commandment which I
+command you this day, is not too hard for thee, neither is it far off.
+It is not in heaven, neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldest
+say: Who shall go up for us to heaven or over the sea, and bring it unto
+us? But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart,
+that thou mayest do it' (xxx. 11-14). And there are here exquisite
+injunctions--to bring back stray cattle to their owners; to spare the
+sitting bird, where eggs or fledglings are found; to leave over, at the
+harvest, some of the grain, olives, grapes, for the stranger, the
+orphan, the widow; and not to muzzle the ox when treading out the corn
+(xxii. 1, 6, 7; xxiv. 19; xxv. 4). Yet the same Deuteronomy ordains: 'If
+thine own brother, son, daughter, wife, or bosom friend entice thee
+secretly, saying, let us go and serve other gods, thine hand shall be
+first upon him to put him to death.' Also 'There shall not be found with
+thee any consulter with a familiar spirit ... or a necromancer. Yahweh
+thy God doth drive them out before thee.' And, finally, amongst the laws
+of war, 'of the cities of these people (Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite,
+Perizzite, Hivite, Jebusite) thou shalt save alive nothing that
+breatheth, as Yahweh thy God hath commanded thee' (xii. 2-5; xiii. 6, 9;
+xviii. 10-13; xx. 16, 17). Here we must remember that the immorality of
+these Canaanitish tribes and cults was of the grossest, indeed largely
+unnatural, kind; that it had copiously proved its terrible fascination
+for their kinsmen, the Jews; that these ancient Easterns, e.g. the
+Assyrians, were ruthlessly cruel at the storming of enemy cities; and
+especially that the morality and spirituality, thus saved for humanity
+from out of a putrid flood, was (in very deed) immensely precious. One
+point here is particularly far-sighted--the severe watchfulness against
+all animism, spiritualism, worship of the dead, things in which the
+environing world of the Jews' fellow Semites was steeped. The
+Israelitish-Jewish prophetic movement did not first attain belief in a
+Future Life, and then, through this, belief in God; but the belief in
+God, strongly hostile to all those spiritualisms, only very slowly, and
+not until the danger of any infusion of those naturalisms had become
+remote, led on the Jews to a realization of the soul's survival with a
+consciousness at least equal to its earthly aliveness. The Second Book
+of Kings (chaps. xxii, xxiii) gives a graphic account of King Josiah's
+rigorous execution of the Deuteronomic law.
+
+The end of this most full second period is marked by the now rapid
+predominance of a largely technical priestly legislation and a
+corresponding conception of past history; by the inception of the
+Synagogue and the religion of the Book; but also by writings the most
+profound of any in the Old Testament, all presumably occasioned by the
+probing experiences of the Exile. In 597 and 586 B.C. Jerusalem is
+destroyed and the majority of the Jews are taken captives to Babylon;
+and in between (in 593) occurs the vocation of the prophet-priest
+Ezekiel, and his book is practically complete by 573 B.C. Here the
+prophecies as to the restoration are strangely detailed and
+schematic--already somewhat like the apocalyptic writers. Yet Ezekiel
+reveals to us deathless truths--the responsibility of the individual
+soul for its good and its evil, and God Himself as the Good Shepherd of
+the lost and the sick (xviii. 20-32; xxxiv. 1-6); he gives us the grand
+pictures of the resurrection unto life of the dead bones of Israel
+(chap. xxxvii), and of the waters of healing and of life which flow
+forth, ever deeper and wider, from beneath the Temple, and by their
+sweetness transform all sour waters and arid lands that they touch
+(xlvii. 1-12). A spirit and doctrine closely akin to those of Ezekiel
+produced the third, last, and most extensive development of the
+Pentateuchal legislation and doctrinal history--in about 560 B.C., the
+Law of Holiness (Lev., chaps. xvii-xxvi); and in about 500 B.C., the
+Priestly Code. As with Ezekiel's look forward, so here with these
+Priests' look backward, we have to recognize much schematic precision of
+dates, genealogies, and explanations instinct with technical interests.
+The unity of sanctuary and the removal from the feasts and the worship
+of all traces of naturalism, which in Jeremiah, Deuteronomy, and the
+Second Book of Kings appear still as the subject-matters of intensest
+effort and conflict, are here assumed as operative even back to
+patriarchal times. Yet it can reasonably be pleaded that the life-work
+of Moses truly involved all this development; and even that Monotheism
+(at least, for the times and peoples here concerned) required some such
+rules as are assumed by P throughout.
+
+And P gives us the great six days' Creation Story with its splendid
+sense of rational order pervasive of the Universe, the work of the
+all-reasonable God--its single parts good, its totality very good; and
+man and woman springing together from the Creator's will. But the writer
+nowhere indicates that he means long periods by the 'days'; each
+creation appears as effected in an instant, and these instants as
+separated from each other by but twenty-four hours.
+
+In between Deuteronomy and the Priestly Code, or a little later still,
+lies probably the composition of three religious works full,
+respectively, of exultant thanksgiving, of the noblest insight into the
+fruitfulness of suffering, and of the deepest questionings issuing in
+childlike trust in God. For an anonymous writer composes (say, in 550
+B.C.) the great bulk of the magnificent chapters forty to fifty-five of
+our Book of Isaiah--a paean of spiritual exultation over the Jews'
+proximate deliverance from exile by the Persian King Cyrus. In 538 B.C.
+Cyrus issues the edict for the restoration to Judaea, and in 516 the
+Second Temple is dedicated. Within this great Consolation stand (xlii.
+1-4; xlix. 1-6; l. 4-9; lii. 13-liii. 12) the four poems on the
+Suffering Servant of Yahweh--the tenderest revelation of the Old
+Testament--apparently written previously in the Exile, say in 570-560
+B.C. The Old Law here reaches to the very feet of the New Law--to the
+Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world. And the Book of Job,
+in its chief constituents (chaps. i-xxxi, xxxviii-xlii), was probably
+composed when Greek influences began--say in about 480 B.C., the year of
+the battle of Thermopylae. The canonization of this daringly speculative
+book indicates finely how sensitive even the deepest faith and holiness
+can remain to the apparently unjust distribution of man's earthly lot.
+
+Our second period ends in 444 B.C., when the priest and scribe Ezra
+solemnly proclaims, and receives the public subscription to, the Book of
+the Law of Moses--the Priestly Code, brought by him from Babylon.
+
+The Jewish last period, from Ezra's Proclamation 444 B.C. to the
+completion of the Fourth Book of Ezra, about A.D. 95, is (upon the
+whole) derivative. Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah were absorbed in the realities
+of their own epoch-making times, and of God's universal governance of
+the world past and future; Daniel now, with practically all the other
+Apocalyptic writers in his train, is absorbed in those earlier
+prophecies, and in ingenious speculations and precise computations as to
+the how and the when of the world's ending. The Exile had given rise to
+the Synagogue, and had favoured the final development and codifying of
+the Mosaic law; the seventy years intermission of the Temple sacrifices
+and symbolic acts had turned the worship, which had been so largely
+visible, dramatic, social, into the praying, singing, reading, preaching
+of extant texts, taken as direct and final rules for all thought and
+action, and as incapable of additions or interpretations equal in value
+to themselves. Yet thus priceless treasures of spiritual truth and light
+were handed down to times again aglow with great--the greatest religious
+gifts and growths; and indeed this literature itself introduced various
+conceptions or images destined to form a largely fitting, and in the
+circumstances attractive, garment for the profound further realities
+brought by Christianity.
+
+In the Book of Daniel (written somewhere between 163 and 165 B.C.) all
+earthly events appear as already inscribed in the heavenly books (vii.
+10), and the events which have still really to come consist in the
+complete and speedy triumph of the Church-State Israel against King
+Antiochus Epiphanes. But here we get the earliest clear proclamation of
+a heightened life beyond death--though not yet for all (xii. 2). The
+noble vision of the four great beasts that came up from the sea, and of
+one like unto a Son of Man that came with the clouds of heaven (chap.
+vii), doubtless here figures the earthly kingdoms, Babel, Media, Persia,
+Greece (Alexander), and God's kingdom Israel. The Psalter appears to
+have been closed as late as 140 B.C.; some Psalms doubtless date back to
+701--a few perhaps to David himself, about 1000 B.C. The comminatory
+Psalms, even if spoken as by representatives of God's Church and people,
+we cannot now echo within our own spiritual life; any heightened
+consciousness after death is frequently denied (e.g. vi. 5: 'in the
+grave who shall give thee thanks?' and cxv. 17: 'the dead praise not the
+Lord')--we have seen the impressive reason of this; and perhaps a
+quarter of the Psalms are doubles, or pale imitations of others. But,
+for the rest, the Psalter remains as magnificently fresh and powerful as
+ever: culminating in the glorious self-commitment (Ps. lxxiii), 'I was
+as a beast before Thee. Nevertheless I am continually with Thee. Whom
+have I in heaven but Thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire
+beside Thee.' The keen sense, present throughout this amazingly rich
+collection, of the reality, prevenience, presence, protection--of the
+central importance for man, of God, the All-Abiding, finds thus its
+full, deathless articulation.
+
+Religiously slighter, yet interesting as a preparation for Christian
+theology, are the writings of Philo, a devout, Greek-trained Jew of
+Alexandria, who in A.D. 40 appeared before the Emperor Caligula in Rome.
+Philo does not feel his daringly allegorical sublimations as any
+departures from the devoutest Biblical faith. Thus 'God never ceases
+from action; as to burn is special to fire, so is action to God'--this
+in spite of God's rest on the seventh day (Gen. ii. 2). 'There exist two
+kinds of men: the heavenly man and the earthly man.'[42] The long Life
+of Moses[43] represents him as the King, Lawgiver, High Priest, Prophet,
+Mediator. The Word, the Logos (which here everywhere hovers near, but
+never reaches, personality) is 'the firstborn son of God', 'the image of
+God'[44]; its types are 'the Rock', the Manna, the High Priest's Coat;
+it is 'the Wine Pourer and Master of the Drinking Feast of God'.[45] The
+majority of the Jews, who did not accept Jesus as the Christ, soon felt
+they had no need for so much allegory, and dropped it, with advantage
+upon the whole, to the Jewish faith. But already St. Paul and the Fourth
+Gospel find here noble mental raiment for the great new facts revealed
+by Jesus Christ.
+
+2. The Christian Religion we will take, as to our points, at four stages
+of its development--Synoptic, Johannine, Augustinian, Thomistic.
+
+The Synoptic material here specially concerned we shall find especially
+in Mark i. 1 to xv. 47; but also in Matt. iii. 1 to xxvii. 56, and in
+Luke iii. 1 to xxiii. 56. Within the material thus marked off, there is
+no greater or lesser authenticity conferred by treble, or double, or
+only single attestation; for this material springs from two original
+sources--a collection primarily of doings and sufferings, which our Mark
+incorporates with some expansions; and a collection primarily of
+discourses, utilized especially by Matthew and Luke in addition to the
+original Mark. Both these sources contain the records of eyewitnesses,
+probably Saints Peter and Matthew.
+
+The chronological order and the special occasions of the growths in our
+Lord's self-manifestation, or in the self-consciousness of His human
+soul, are most carefully given by Mark and next by Luke. Matthew largely
+ignores the stages and occasions of both these growths, and assumes, as
+fully explicit from the beginning of the Ministry, what was manifested
+only later on or at the last; and he already introduces ecclesiastical
+and Christological terms and discriminations which, however really
+implicit as to their substance in Jesus's teaching, or inevitable (as to
+their particular form) for the maintenance and propagation of
+Christianity in the near future, are nevertheless still absent from the
+accounts of Mark and Luke.
+
+The chief rules for the understanding of the specific character of our
+Lord's revelation appear to be the following. The life and teaching must
+be taken entire; and, within this entirety, each stage must be
+apprehended in its own special peculiarities. The thirty years in the
+home, the school, the synagogue, the workshop at Nazareth, form a
+profoundly important constituent of His life and teaching--impressively
+contrasted, as they are, with the probably not full year of the Public
+Ministry, even though we are almost completely bereft of all details for
+those years of silent preparation.
+
+The Public Ministry, again, consists of two strongly contrasted stages,
+divided by the great scene of Jesus with the Apostles alone at Caesarea
+Philippi (Mark viii. 27-33; Luke ix. 18-22; Matt. xvi. 13-23). The stage
+before is predominantly expansive, hopeful, peacefully growing; the
+stage after, is concentrated, sad, in conflict, and in storm. To the
+first stage belong the plant parables, full of exquisite sympathy with
+the unfolding of natural beauty and of slow fruitfulness; to the second
+stage belong the parables of keen watchfulness and of the proximate,
+sudden second coming. Both movements are essential to the physiognomy of
+our Lord. And they are not simply differences in self-manifestation;
+they represent a growth, a relatively new element, in His human soul's
+experience and outlook.
+
+The central doctrine in the teaching is throughout the Kingdom of God.
+But in the first stage this central doctrine appears as especially
+upheld by Jesus's fundamental experience--the Fatherhood of God. In the
+second stage the central doctrine appears as especially coloured by
+Jesus's other great experience--of Himself as the Son of Man. In the
+earlier stage the Kingdom is presented more in the spirit of the ancient
+prophets, as predominantly ethical, as already come in its beginnings,
+and as subject to laws analogous to those obtaining in the natural
+world. In the second stage the coming of the Kingdom is presented more
+with the form of the apocalyptic writers, in a purely religious,
+intensely transcendent, and dualistic outlook--especially this also in
+the Parables of Immediate Expectation--as not present but future (Matt.
+xix. 28); not distant but imminent (Matt. xvi. 28; xxiv. 33; xxvi. 64);
+not gradual but sudden (Matt. xxiv. 27, 39, 43); not at all achieved by
+man but purely given by God (so still in Rev. xxi. 10).
+
+To the earlier stage belongs the great Rejoicing of Jesus (Matt. xi.
+25-30; Luke x. 21, 22). The splendid opening, 'I thank Thee, Father--for
+so it hath seemed good in Thy sight', and the exquisite close, special
+to Matthew, 'Come unto Me--and my burthen is light', raise no grave
+difficulty. But the intermediate majestic declaration, 'All things are
+delivered unto Me by the Father--neither knoweth any man the Father save
+the Son and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him', causes critical
+perplexities.
+
+I take this declaration to be modelled upon actual words of Jesus, which
+genuinely implied rather than clearly proclaimed a unique relation
+between the Father and Himself. Numerous other words and acts involve
+such a relation and Jesus's full consciousness of it. His first public
+act, His baptism, is clearly described by Mark as a personal experience,
+'He saw the heavens opened' and heard a heavenly voice 'Thou art my
+beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased' (i. 10, 11). Already in the
+first stage Jesus declares the Baptist to be 'more than a prophet'
+(Matt. xi. 9), yet claims superiority over him and over Solomon (xi. 11;
+xii. 42). His doctrine is new wine requiring new bottles (Mark ii. 22);
+indeed His whole attitude towards the law is that of a superior, who
+most really exhorts all, 'Learn of Me'. And soon after Caesarea Philippi
+He insists to the people: 'Whosoever shall be ashamed of Me in this
+generation, of him also shall the Son of Man be ashamed, when He cometh
+in the glory of the Father' (Mark viii. 38). The most numerous cures,
+physical, psychical, moral, certainly performed by Him, appear as the
+spontaneous effect of a unique degree and kind of spiritual authority;
+and the sinlessness attributed to Him throughout by the apostolic
+community (2 Cor. v. 21; Heb. iv. 15; John viii. 46; 1 John ii. 29)
+entirely corresponds to the absence, in the records of Him, of all
+traits indicating troubles of conscience and the corresponding fear of
+God. And this His unique Sonship is conjoined, in the earliest picture
+of Him, with an endless variety and combination of all the joys,
+admirations, affections, disappointments, desolations, temptations
+possible to such a stainless human soul and will. We thus find here a
+comprehensiveness unlike the attitude of the Baptist or St. Paul, and
+like, although far exceeding, the joy in nature and the peace in
+suffering of St. Francis of Assisi.
+
+The Second Stage opens with the great scene at Caesarea Philippi and its
+sequel (given with specially marked successiveness in Mark viii. 27-x.
+45), when, for the first time in a manner beyond all dispute, Mark
+represents Jesus as adopting the designation 'the Son of Man' in a
+Messianic and eschatological sense. For our Lord here promptly corrects
+Peter's conception of 'Messiah' by repeated insistence upon 'the Son of
+Man'--His glory yet also His sufferings. Thus Jesus adopts the term of
+Daniel vii. 13 (which already the Apocalypse of Enoch had understood of
+a personal Messiah) as a succinct description of His specific
+vocation--its heavenly origin and difference from all earthly
+Messianism; its combination of the depths of human weakness,
+dereliction, sufferings with the highest elevation in joy, power and
+glory; and its connexion of that pain with this triumph as strictly
+interrelated--only with and through the Cross, was there here the offer
+and acceptance of the Crown.
+
+As to the Passion and Death, and the Risen Life, four points appear to
+be central and secured. Neither the Old Testament nor Jewish Theology
+really knew of a Suffering Messiah. Jesus Himself clearly perceived,
+accepted, and carried out this profound new revelation. This suffering
+and death were conceived by Him as the final act and crown of His
+service--so in Mark x. 44, 45 and Luke xxii. 24-7. (All this remains
+previous to, and independent of, St. Paul's elaborated doctrine as to
+the strictly vicarious and juridical character of the whole.) And the
+Risen Life is an objectively real, profoundly operative life--the
+visions of the Risen One were effects of the truly living Jesus, the
+Christ.
+
+The Second Christian Stage, the Johannine writings, are fully
+understandable only as posterior to St. Paul--the most enthusiastic and
+influential, indeed, of all our Lord's early disciples, but a convert,
+from the activity of a strict persecuting Pharisee, not to the earthly
+Jesus, of soul and body, whom he never knew, but to the heavenly
+Spirit-Christ, whom he had so suddenly experienced. Saul, the man of
+violent passions and acute interior conflicts, thus abruptly changed in
+a substantially _pneumatic_ manner, is henceforth absorbed, not in the
+past Jewish Messiah, but in the present universal Christ; not in the
+Kingdom of God, but in Pneuma, the Spirit. Christ, the second Adam, is
+here a life-giving Spirit, an element that surrounds and penetrates the
+human spirit; we are baptized, dipped, into Christ, Spirit; we can drink
+Christ, the Spirit. And this Christ-Spirit effects and maintains the
+universal brotherhood of mankind, and articulates in particular posts
+and functions the several human spirits, as variously necessary members
+of the one Christian society and Church.
+
+Now the Johannine Gospel indeed utilizes considerable Synoptic
+materials, and does not, as St. Paul, restrict itself to the Passion and
+Resurrection. Yet it gives us, substantially, the Spirit-Christ, the
+Heavenly Man; and the growth, prayer, temptation, appeal for sympathy,
+dereliction, agony, which, in the Synoptists, are still so real for the
+human soul of Jesus Himself, appear here as sheer condescensions, in
+time and space, of Him who, as all things good, descends from the
+Eternal Above, so that we men here below may ascend thither with Him.
+On the other hand, the Church and the Sacraments, still predominantly
+implicit in the Synoptists, and the subjects of costly conflict and
+organization in the Pauline writings, here underlie, as already fully
+operative facts, practically the entire profound work. The great
+dialogue with Nicodemus concerns Baptism; the great discourse in the
+synagogue at Capernaum, the Holy Eucharist--in both cases, the strict
+need of these Sacraments. And from the side of the dead Jesus flow blood
+and water, as those two great Sacraments flow from the everliving
+Christ; whilst at the Cross's foot He leaves His seamless coat, symbol
+of the Church's indivisible unity. The Universalism of this Gospel is
+not merely apparent: 'God so loved the world' (iii. 16), 'the Saviour of
+the world' (iv. 42)--this glorious teaching is traceable in many a
+passage. Yet Christ here condemns the Jews--in the Synoptists only the
+Pharisees; He is from above, they are from below; all those that came
+before Him were thieves and robbers; He will not pray for the world--'ye
+shall die in your sins' (xvii. 9; viii. 24); and the commandment,
+designated here by Jesus as His own and as new, to 'love one another',
+is for and within the community to which He gives His 'example' (xv. 12;
+xiii. 34)--in contrast with the great double commandment of love
+proclaimed by Him, in the Synoptists, as already formulated in the
+Mosaic Law (Mark xii. 28-34), and as directly applicable to every
+fellow-man--indeed, a schismatic Samaritan is given as the pattern of
+such perfect love (Luke x. 25-37).
+
+Deuteronomy gained its full articulation in conflict with Canaanite
+impurity; the Johannine writings take shape during the earlier battles
+of the long war with Gnosticism--the most terrible foe ever, so far,
+encountered by the Catholic Church, and conquered by her in open and
+fair fight. Also these writings lay much stress upon Knowing and the
+Truth: 'this is life eternal, to know Thee, the only true God and Jesus
+Christ whom Thou hast sent' (xvii. 3); symbolism and mysticism prevail
+very largely; and, in so far as they are not absorbed in an Eternal
+Present, the reception of truth and experience is not limited to
+Christ's earthly sojourn--'the Father will give you another Helper, the
+spirit of truth who will abide with you forever' (xiv. 16). Yet here the
+knowing and the truth are also deeply ethical and social: 'he who doeth
+the truth cometh to the light' (iii. 21); and Christ has a fold, and
+other sheep not of this fold--them also He must bring, there will be one
+fold, one Shepherd; indeed, ministerial gradations exist in this one
+Church (so in xiii. 5-10; xx. 3-8; xxi. 7-19). And the Mysticism here is
+but an emotional intuitive apprehension of the great historical figure
+of Jesus, and of the most specifically religious of all facts--of the
+already overflowing operative existence, previous to all our action, of
+God, the Prevenient Love. 'Not we loved God (first), but He (first)
+loved us,' 'let us love Him, because He first loved us,' 'no man can
+come to Me, unless the Father draw him'--a drawing which awakens a
+hunger and thirst for Christ and God (1 John iv. 10, 19; John vi. 44;
+iv. 14; vi. 35).
+
+The Third Stage we can find in St. Augustine, who, born a North African
+Roman (A.D. 354) and a convert from an impure life and Manichaeism, with
+its spatially extended God (A.D. 386), wrote his _Confessions_ in 397,
+lived to experience the capture and sack of Rome by Alaric the Goth,
+410, composed his great work, _The City of God_, amidst the clear
+dissolution of a mighty past and the dim presage of a problematical
+future, and died at Hippo, his episcopal city, in 430, whilst the
+Vandals were besieging it. St. Augustine is more largely a convert and a
+rigorist even than St. Paul when St. Paul is most incisive. But here he
+shall testify only to the natures of Eternity and of real time, a matter
+in which he remains unequalled in the delicate vividness and balance of
+his psychological analysis and religious perception. 'Thou, O God,
+precedest all past times by the height of Thine ever-present Eternity;
+and Thou exceedest all future times, since they _are_ future, and, once
+they have come, will be past times. All thy years abide together,
+because they abide; but these our years will all be, only when they all
+will have ceased to be. Thy years are but One Day--not every day, but
+To-Day. This Thy To-Day is Eternity'.[46] The human soul, even in this
+life, has moments of a vivid apprehension of Eternity, as in the great
+scene of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia.[47] And this our
+sense of Eternity, Beatitude, God, proceeds at bottom from Himself,
+immediately present in our lives; the succession, duration of man is
+sustained by the Simultaneity, the Eternity of God: 'this day of ours
+_does_ pass within Thee, since all these things' of our deeper
+experience 'have no means of passing unless, somehow, Thou dost contain
+them all'. 'Behold, Thou wast within, and I was without ... Thou wast
+with me, but I was not with Thee.' 'Is not the blessed life precisely
+_that_ life which all men desire? Even those who only hope to be blessed
+would not, unless they in some manner already possessed the blessed
+life, desire to be blessed, as, in reality, it is most certain that they
+desire to be.'[48] Especially satisfactory is the insistence upon the
+futility of the question as to what God was doing in Time before He
+created. Time is only a quality inherent in all creatures; it never
+existed of itself.[49]
+
+And our fourth, last Christian Stage shall be represented by St. Thomas
+Aquinas (A.D. 1225-74), in the one great question where this
+Norman-Italian Friar Noble, a soul apparently so largely derivative and
+abstractive, is more complete and balanced, and penetrates to the
+specific genius of Christianity more deeply, than Saints Paul and
+Augustine with all their greater directness and intensity. We saw how
+the deepest originality of our Lord's teaching and temper consisted in
+His non-rigoristic earnestness, in His non-Gnostic detachment from
+things temporal and spatial. The absorbing expectation of the Second
+Coming, indeed the old, largely effete Graeco-Roman world, had first to
+go, the great Germanic migrations had to be fully completed, the first
+Crusades had to pass, before--some twelve centuries after Nazareth and
+Calvary--Christianity attained in Aquinas a systematic and promptly
+authoritative expression of this its root-peculiarity and power. No one
+has put the point better than Professor E. Troeltsch: 'The decisive
+point here is the conception, peculiar to the Middle Ages, of what is
+Christian as Supernatural, or rather the full elaboration of the
+consequences involved in the conception of the Supernatural. The
+Supernatural is now recognized not only in the great complicated miracle
+of man's redemption from out of the world corrupted by original sin. But
+the Supernatural now unfolds itself as an autonomous principle of a
+logical, religious and ethical kind. The creature, even the perfect
+creature, is only Natural--is possessed of only natural laws and ends;
+God alone is Supernatural. Hence the essence of Christian
+Supernaturalism consists in the elevation of the creature, above this
+creature's co-natural limitations, to God's own Supernature'. The
+distinction is no longer, as in the Ancient Church, between two kinds
+(respectively perfect and relative) of the one sole Natural Law; the
+distinction here is between Natural Law in general and Supernature
+generally. 'The Decalogue, in strictness, is not yet the Christian
+Ethic. "Biblical" now means revealed, but not necessarily Christian; for
+the Bible represents, according to Aquinas, a process of development
+which moves through universal history and possesses various stages. The
+Decalogue is indeed present in the legislation of Christ, but as a stage
+preliminary to the specifically Christian Ethic. The formula, on the
+contrary, for the specifically Christian Moral Law is here the
+Augustinian definition of the love of God as the highest and absolute,
+the entirely simple, Moral end--an end which contains the demand of the
+love of God in the stricter sense (self-sanctification, self-denial,
+contemplation) and the demand of the love of our neighbour (the active
+relating of all to God, the active interrelating of all in God, and the
+most penetrating, mutual self-sacrifice for God). This Ethic, a mystical
+interpretation of the Evangelical Preaching, forms indeed a strong
+contrast to the This-World Ethic of the Natural Law, Aristotle, the
+Decalogue and Natural Prosperity; but then this cannot fail to be the
+case, given the entire fundamental character of the Christian
+Ethic'.[50]
+
+Thus the widest and most primitive contrasts here are, not Sin and
+Redemption (though these, of course, remain) but Nature (however good in
+its kind) and Supernature. The State becomes the complex of that
+essentially good thing, Nature; the Church the complex of that
+different, higher good, Supernature; roughly speaking, where the State
+leaves off, the Church begins.
+
+It lasted not long, before the Canonists and certain ruling Churchmen
+helped to break up, in the consciousness of men at large, this noble
+perception of the two-step ladder from God to man and from man to God.
+And the Protestant Reformers, as a whole, went even beyond Saints Paul
+and Augustine in exclusive preoccupation with Sin and Redemption.
+Henceforth the single-step character of man's call now more than ever
+predominates. The Protestant Reformation, like the French Revolution,
+marks the existence of grave abuses, the need of large reforms, and,
+especially on this point, the all but inevitable excessiveness of man
+once he is aroused to such 'reforming' action. Certainly, to this hour,
+Protestantism as such has produced, within and for religion
+specifically, nothing that can seriously compare, in massive, balanced
+completeness, with the work of the short-lived golden Middle Ages of
+Aquinas and Dante. Hence, for our precise present purpose, we can
+conclude our Jewish and Christian survey here.
+
+3. Only a few words about Confucianism, Buddhism, Mohammedanism, as
+these, in some of their main outlines, illustrate the points especially
+brought out by the Jewish Christian development.
+
+Confucianism admittedly consists, at least as we have it, in a greatly
+complicated system of the direct worship of Nature (Sun, Moon, Stars
+especially) and of Ancestors, and of a finely simple system of ethical
+rules for man's ordinary social intercourse. That Nature-worship closely
+resembles what the Deuteronomic reform fought so fiercely in Israel; and
+the immemorial antiquity and still vigorous life of such a worship in
+China indicates impressively how little such Nature-worship tends, of
+itself, to its own supersession by a definite Theism. And the Ethical
+Rules, and their very large observance, illustrate well how real can be
+the existence, and the goodness in its own kind, of Natural, This-World
+morality, even where it stands all but entirely unpenetrated or
+supplemented by any clear and strong supernatural attraction or
+conviction.
+
+Buddhism, in its original form, consisted neither in the Wheel of
+Reincarnation alone, nor in _Nirvana_ alone, but precisely in the
+combination of the two; for that ceaseless flux of reincarnation was
+there felt with such horror, that the _Nirvana_--the condition in which
+that flux is abolished--was hailed as a blessed release. The judgement
+as to the facts--that all human experience is of sheer, boundless
+change--was doubtless excessive; but the value-judgement--that if life
+be such pure shiftingness, then the cessation of life is the one end for
+man to work and pray for--was assuredly the authentic cry of the human
+soul when fully normal and awake. This position thus strikingly confirms
+the whole Jewish and Christian persistent search for permanence in
+change--for a Simultaneity, the support of our succession.
+
+And Mohammedanism, both in its striking achievements and in its marked
+limitations, indeed also in the presentations of it by its own
+spokesmen, appears as a religion primarily not of a special pervasive
+spirit and of large, variously applicable maxims, but as one of precise,
+entirely immutable rules. Thus we find here something not all unlike,
+but mostly still more rigid than, the post-Exilic Jewish
+religion--something doubtless useful for certain times and races, but
+which could not expand and adapt itself to indefinite varieties of
+growths and peoples without losing that interior unity and self-identity
+so essential to all living and powerful religion.
+
+
+III
+
+Let us now attempt, in a somewhat loose and elastic order, a short
+allocation and estimate of the facts in past and present religion which
+mainly concern the question of Religion and Progress.
+
+We West Europeans have apparently again reached the fruitful stage when
+man is not simply alive to this or that physical or psychic need, nor
+even to the practical interest and advantage of this or that Art,
+Science, Sociology, Politics, Ethics; but when he awakens further to the
+question as to why and how these several activities, all so costly where
+at all effectual, can deserve all this sacrifice--can be based in
+anything sufficiently abiding and objective. The history of all the past
+efforts, and indeed all really adequate richness of immediate outlook,
+combine, I think, to answer that only the experience and the conviction
+of an Objective Reality distinct from, and more than, man, or indeed
+than the whole of the world apprehended by man as less than, or as equal
+to, man himself, can furnish sufficiently deep and tenacious roots for
+our sense and need of an objective supreme Beauty, Truth, and
+Goodness--of a living Reality already overflowing that which, in lesser
+degrees and ways, we small realities cannot altogether cease from
+desiring to become. It is Religion which, from first to last, but with
+increasing purity and power, brings with it this evidence and
+conviction. Its sense of the Objective, Full Reality of God, and its
+need of Adoration are quite essential to Religion, although considerable
+systems, which are largely satisfactory in the more immediate questions
+raised by Aesthetics and even by Ethics, and which are sincerely anxious
+to do justice also to the religious sense, are fully at work to explain
+away these essential characteristics of all wideawake Religion. Paul
+Natorp, the distinguished Plato-scholar in Germany, the short-lived
+pathetically eloquent M. Guyau in France, and, above all, Benedetto
+Croce, the large encyclopaedic mind in Italy, have influenced or led
+much of this movement, which, in questions of Religion, has assuredly
+not reached the deepest and most tenacious teachings of life.
+
+The intimations as to this deepest Reality certainly arise within my own
+mind, emotion, will; and these my faculties cannot, upon the whole, be
+constrained by my fellow mortals; indeed, as men grow more manysidedly
+awake, all attempts at any such constraint only arrest or deflect the
+growth of these intimations. Yet the dispositions necessary for the
+sufficient apprehension of these religious intimations--sincerity,
+conscientiousness, docility--are not, even collectively, already
+Religion, any more than they are Science or Philosophy. With these
+dispositions on our part, objective facts and living Reality can reach
+us--and, even so, these facts reach us practically always, at first,
+through human teachers already experienced in these things. The need of
+such facts and such persons to teach them are, in the first years of
+every man, and for long ages in the history of mankind, far more
+pressing than any question of toleration. Even vigorous persecution or
+keen exclusiveness of feeling have--_pace_ Lord Acton--saved for
+mankind, at certain crises of its difficult development, convictions of
+priceless worth--as in the Deuteronomic Reform and the Johannine
+Writings. In proportion as men become more manysidedly awake, they
+acquire at least the capacity for greater sensitiveness concerning the
+laws and forces intrinsic to the various ranges and levels of life; and,
+where such sensitiveness is really at work, it can advantageously
+replace, by means of the spontaneous acceptance of such objective
+realities, the constraints of past ages--constraints which now, in any
+case, have become directly mischievous for such minds. None the less
+will men, after this change as before, require the corporate experience
+and manifestation of religion as, in varying degrees and ways, a
+permanent necessity for the vigorous life of religion. Indeed, such
+corporate tradition operates strongly even where men's spiritual sense
+seems most individual, or where, with the retention of some ethical
+nobility of outlook, they most keenly combat all and every religious
+institution. So with George Fox's doctrine of the Divine Enlightenment
+of every soul separately and without mediation of any kind, a doctrine
+derived by him from that highly ecclesiastical document, the Gospel of
+St. John; and with many a Jacobin's fierce proclamation of the rights of
+Man, never far away from reminiscences of St. Paul.
+
+This permanent necessity of Religious Institutions is primarily a need
+for men to teach and exemplify, not simply Natural, This-World Morality,
+but a Supernatural, Other-World Ethic; and not simply that abstraction,
+Religion in General or a Religious Hypothesis, but that rich concretion,
+this or that Historical Religion. In proportion as such an Historical
+Religion is deep and delicate, it will doubtless contain affinities with
+all that is wholesome and real within the other extant historical
+religions. Nevertheless, all religions are effectual through their
+special developments, where these developments remain true at all. As
+well deprive a flower of its 'mere details' of pistil, stamen, pollen,
+or an insect of its 'superfluous' antennae, as simplify any Historical
+Religion down to the sorry stump labelled 'the religion of every honest
+man'. We shall escape all bigotry, without lapsing into such most unjust
+indifferentism, if we vigorously hold and unceasingly apply the doctrine
+of such a Church theologian as Juan de Lugo. De Lugo (A.D. 1583-1660),
+Spaniard, post-Reformation Roman Catholic, Jesuit, Theological
+Professor, and a Cardinal writing in Rome under the eyes of Pope Urban
+VIII, teaches that the members of the various Christian sects, of the
+Jewish and Mohammedan communions, and of the heathen religions and
+philosophical schools, who achieve their salvation, do so, ordinarily,
+simply through the aid afforded by God's grace to their good faith in
+its instinctive concentration upon, and in its practice of, those
+elements in their respective community's worship and teaching, which are
+true and good and originally revealed by God.[51] Thus we escape all
+undue individualism and all unjust equalization of the (very variously
+valuable) religious and philosophical bodies; and yet we clearly hold
+the profound importance of the single soul's good faith and religious
+instinct, and of the worship or school, be they ever so elementary and
+imperfect, which environ such a soul.
+
+A man's religion, in proportion to its depth, will move in a Concrete
+Time which becomes more and more a Partial Simultaneity. And these his
+depths then more and more testify to, and contrast with, the Fully
+Simultaneous, God. Because man thus lives, not in an ever-equal chain of
+mutually exclusive moments, in Clock Time, but in Duration, with its
+variously close interpenetrations of the successive parts; and because
+these interpenetrations are close in proportion to the richness and
+fruitfulness of the durations he lives through; he can, indeed he must,
+conceive absolutely perfect life as absolutely simultaneous. God is thus
+not Unending, but Eternal; the very fullness of His life leaves no room
+or reason for succession and our poor need of it. Dr. F. C. S. Schiller
+has admirably drawn out this grand doctrine, with the aid of Aristotle's
+Unmoving Action, in _Humanism_, 1903, pp. 204-27. We need only
+persistently apprehend this Simultaneity as essential to God, and
+Succession as varyingly essential to all creatures, and there remains no
+difficulty--at least as regards the Time-element--in the doctrine of
+Creation. For only with the existence of creatures does Time thus arise
+at all--it exists only in and through them. And assuredly all finite
+things, that we know at all, bear traces of a history involving a
+beginning and an end. Professor Bernardino Varisco, in his great _Know
+Thyself_, has noble pages on this large theme.[52] In any case we must
+beware of all more or less Pantheistic conceptions of the simultaneous
+life of God and the successive life of creatures as but essential and
+necessary elements of one single Divine-Creaturely existence, in the
+manner, e.g., of Professor Josiah Royce, in his powerful work _The World
+and the Individual_, 2nd series, 1901. All such schemes break down under
+an adequate realization of those dread facts error and evil. A certain
+real independence must have been left by God to reasonable creatures.
+And let it be noted carefully: the great difficulty against all Theism
+lies in the terrible reality of Evil; and the deepest adequacy of this
+same Theism, especially of Christianity, consists in its practical
+attitude towards, and success against, this most real Evil. But
+Pantheism increases, whilst seeming to surmount, the theoretical
+difficulty, since the world as it stands, and not an Ultimate Reality
+behind it, is held to be perfect; and it entirely fails really to
+transmute Evil in practice. Theism, no more than any other outlook,
+really explains Evil; but it alone, in its fullest, Jewish-Christian
+forms, has done more, and better, than explain Evil: it has fully faced,
+it has indeed greatly intensified, the problem, by its noble insistence
+upon the reality and heinousness of Sin; and it has then overcome all
+this Evil, not indeed in theory, but in practice, by actually producing
+in the midst of deep suffering, through a still deeper faith and love,
+souls the living expression of the deepest beatitude and peace.
+
+The fully Simultaneous Reality awakens and satisfies man's deepest, most
+nearly simultaneous life, by a certain adaptation of its own intrinsic
+life to these human spirits. In such varyingly 'incarnational' acts or
+action the non-successive God Himself condescends to a certain
+successiveness; but this, in order to help His creatures to achieve as
+much simultaneity as is compatible with their several ranks and calls.
+We must not wonder if, in the religious literature, these condescensions
+of God largely appear as though they themselves were more or less
+non-successive; nor, again, if the deepest religious consciousness tends
+usually to conceive God's outward action, if future, then as proximate,
+and, if present, then as strictly instantaneous. For God in Himself is
+indeed Simultaneous; and if we try to picture Simultaneity by means of
+temporal images at all, then the instant, and not any period long or
+short, is certainly nearest to the truth--as regards the form and
+vehicle of the experience.
+
+The greater acts of Divine Condescension and Self-Revelation, our
+Religious _Accessions_, have mostly occurred at considerable intervals,
+each from the other, in our human history. After they have actually
+occurred, these several acts can be compared and arranged, according to
+their chief characteristics, and even in a series of (upon the whole)
+growing content and worth--hence the Science of Religion. Yet such
+Science gives us no power to produce, or even to foresee, any further
+acts. These great Accessions of Spiritual Knowledge and Experience are
+not the simple result of the conditions obtaining previously in the
+other levels of life, or even in that of religion itself; they often
+much anticipate, they sometimes greatly lag behind, the rise or decline
+of the other kinds of life. And where (as with the great Jewish
+Prophets, and, in some degree, with John the Baptist and Our Lord) these
+Accessions do occur at times of national stress, these several crises
+are, at most, the occasion for the demand, not the cause of the supply.
+
+The mostly long gaps between these Accessions have been more or less
+filled up, amongst the peoples concerned, by varyingly vigorous and
+valuable attempts to articulate and systematize, to apply in practice,
+and rightly to place (within the other ranges of man's total life) these
+great, closely-packed masses of spiritual fact; or to elude, to deflect,
+or directly to combat them, or some of their interpretations or
+applications. Now fairly steady improvement is possible, desirable, and
+largely actual, in the critical sifting and appraisement, as to the
+dates and the actual reality, of the historical documents and details of
+these Accessions; in the philosophical articulation of their doctrinal
+and evidential content; in the finer understanding and wider application
+of their ethical demands; and in the greater adequacy (both as to
+firmness and comprehensiveness) of the institutional organs and
+incorporations special to these same Accessions. All this can and does
+progress, but mostly slowly, intermittently, with short violent
+paroxysms of excess and long sleepy reactions of defect, with
+one-sidedness, travesties, and--worst of all--with worldly indifference
+and self-seeking. The grace and aid of the Simultaneous Richness are
+here also always necessary; nor can these things ever really progress
+except through a deep religious sense--all mere scepticism and all
+levelling down are simply so much waste. Still, we can speak of progress
+in the Science of Religion more appropriately than we can of progress in
+the Knowledge of Religion.
+
+The Crusades, the Renaissance, the Revolution, no doubt exercised, in
+the long run, so potent a secularizing influence, because men's minds
+had become too largely other-worldly--had lost a sufficient interest in
+this wonderful world; and hence all those new, apparently boundless
+outlooks and problems were taken up largely as a revolt and escape from
+what looked like a prison-house--religion. Yet through all these violent
+oscillations there persisted, in human life, the supernatural need and
+call. In this God is the great central interest, love and care of the
+soul. We must look to it that both these interests and Ethics are kept
+awake, strong and distinct within a costingly rich totality of life: the
+Ethic of the honourable citizen, merchant, lawyer--of Confucius and
+Socrates; and the Ethic of the Jewish Prophets at their deepest, of the
+Suffering Servant, of our Lord's Beatitudes, of St. Paul's great eulogy
+of love, of Augustine and Monica at the window in Ostia, of Father
+Damian's voluntarily dying a leper amidst the lepers. The Church is the
+born incorporation of this pole, as the State is of the other. The
+Church indeed should, at its lower limit, also encourage the This-world
+Stage; the State, at its higher limit, can, more or less consciously,
+prepare us for the Other-World Stage. Both spring from the same God, at
+two levels of His action; both concern the same men, at two stages of
+their response and need. Yet the primary duty of the State is turned to
+this life; the primary care of the Church, to that life--to life in its
+deepest depths.
+
+Will men, after this great war, more largely again apprehend, love, and
+practise this double polarity of their lives? Only thus will the truest
+progress be possible in the understanding, the application, and the
+fruitfulness of Religion, with its great central origin and object, God,
+the beginning and end of all our true progress, precisely because He
+Himself already possesses immeasurably more than all He helps us to
+become,--He Who, even now already, is our Peace in Action, our Joy even
+in the Cross.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+I.   1. Oswold Kuelpe, _The Philosophy of the Present in Germany_,
+     English translation. London: George Allen, 1913, _3s. 6d._
+     net.
+
+     2. J. McKeller Stewart, _A Critical Exposition of Bergon's
+     Philosophy_. London: Macmillan, 1913, _6s._ net.
+
+II.  1. R. H. Charles, _A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future
+     Life_. London: A. & C. Black, 1899, _10s. 6d._ net.
+
+     2. Ernest T. Scott, _The Fourth Gospel_. Edinburgh: T. & T.
+     Clark, 1906, _6s._ net.
+
+III. 1. Aliotta, _The Idealistic Reaction against Science_. English
+     translation. Macmillan, 1914, _12s._ net.
+
+     2. F. C. Schiller, _Humanism_, Macmillan, 1903, _7s. 6d._ net.
+
+     3. C. C. J. Webb, _Group Theories of Religion and the Individual_,
+     Allen and Unwin, 1916, _5s._ net.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[32] _The Idealistic Reaction against Science_, Engl. tr. 1914, pp. 6,
+7.
+
+[33] _A Critical Account of the Philosophy of Lotze_, 1895, p. 104.
+
+[34] Aliotta, op. cit., pp. 89, 187.
+
+[35] _Encyl. Brit._, 'Psychology,' 11th ed., p. 577.
+
+[36] Ed. 1898, p. 90.
+
+[37] _Discours sur la Methode_, 1637, IVe Partie.
+
+[38] Aliotta, op. cit., p. 408.
+
+[39] Ed. 1893, vol. ii, p. 759.
+
+[40] _First Principles_, 6th ed., 1900, vol. i, p. 67.
+
+[41] Article, 'Moses,' in _Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart_,
+1913.
+
+[42] Ed. Mangey, vol. i, pp. 44, 49.
+
+[43] Ibid., pp. 80-179.
+
+[44] Ibid., pp. 308, 427.
+
+[45] Ibid., pp. 213, 121, 562, 691.
+
+[46] _Conf._ x, 13, 2.
+
+[47] Autumn, 387.
+
+[48] _Conf._ 1, 6, 3; x, 27; x, 20.
+
+[49] _Conf._ xi, 13.
+
+[50] _Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen_, 1912, pp.
+263-5.
+
+[51] _De Fide_, Disp. xix, 7, 10; xx, 107, 194.
+
+[52] _Cognosci Te Stesso_, 1912, pp. 144-7.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+MORAL PROGRESS
+
+L. P. JACKS
+
+
+From the syllabus of all the lectures in this course I gather that every
+lecturer on the programme is dealing with the question of moral
+progress. This is inevitable. Each lecturer must show that the
+particular sort of progress he is dealing with is real or genuine
+progress, and this it cannot be unless it is moral. That is itself a
+significant fact and throws a valuable light on our subject. It shows
+that progress, as it is studied throughout the course, is not progress
+in the abstract, whatever that may mean, but progress _for us_
+constituted as we are; and since our constitution is essentially moral
+all progress that we can recognize as such must be moral also. Science,
+Industry, Government, might all claim progress on their own ground and
+in their own nature, but this would not prove progress as we understand
+the word, unless it could be shown further that these things contribute
+to human betterment in the highest sense of the word. _Their_ progress
+might conceivably involve _our_ regress.
+
+To believe in moral progress as an historical fact, as a process that
+has begun, and is going on, and will be continued--that is one thing,
+and it is my own position. To believe that this progress is far advanced
+is another thing, and is not my position. While believing in Moral
+Progress as a fact, I also believe that we are much nearer to the
+beginnings of it than the end. We should do well to accustom ourselves
+to this thought. Many of our despairs, lamentations, and pessimisms are
+disappointments which arise from our extravagant notions of the degree
+of progress already attained. There has been a great deal of what I have
+called philosophic pharisaism. Perhaps it would be better called aeonic
+pharisaism. I mean the spirit in the present age which seems to say 'I
+thank thee, O God, that I am not as former ages: ignorant, barbaric,
+cruel, unsocial; I read books, ride in aeroplanes, eat my dinner with a
+knife and fork, and cheerfully pay my taxes to the State; I study human
+science, talk freely about humanity, and spend much of my time in making
+speeches on social questions'. Now there is truth in all this, but not
+the kind of truth which should lead us to self-flattery. A good rule for
+optimists would be this: 'Believe in moral progress, but do not believe
+in too much of it.' I think there would be more optimists in the world,
+more cheerfulness, more belief in moral progress, if we candidly faced
+the fact that morally considered we are still in a neolithic age, not
+brutes indeed any longer, and yet not so far outgrown the brutish stage
+as to justify these trumpetings. One of the beneficent lessons of the
+present war has been to moderate our claims in this respect. It has
+revealed us to ourselves as nothing else in history has ever done, and
+it has revealed, among other things, that moral progress is not nearly
+so advanced as we thought it was. It has been a terrible blow to the
+pharisaism of which I have just spoken. It has not discredited science,
+nor philosophy, nor government, nor anything else that we value, but it
+has shown that these things have not brought us as far as we thought.
+That very knowledge, when you come to think of it, is itself a very
+distinct step in moral progress. Before the war we were growing morally
+conceited; we thought ourselves much better, more advanced in morality,
+than we really were, and this conceit was acting as a real barrier to
+our farther advance. A sharp lesson was needed to take this conceit out
+of us--to remind us that as yet we are only at the bare beginnings of
+moral advance--and not, as some of us fondly imagined, next door to the
+goal. This sudden awakening to the truth is full of promise for the
+future.
+
+And now what is the cause of these exaggerated notions which so many of
+us have entertained? I think they arise from our habit of letting
+ourselves be guided by words rather than by realities, by what men are
+_saying_ rather than by what they are _doing_, by what teachers are
+teaching than by what learners are learning. If you take your stand in
+the realm of words, of doctrines, of theories, of philosophies, of
+books, preachings, and uttered ideals, you might make out a strong case
+for a high degree of moral progress actually attained. But if you ask
+how much of this has been learnt by mankind at large, and learnt in such
+a way as to issue in practice, you get a different story. We have
+attached too much importance to the first story and too little to the
+second. There has been a great deal of false emphasis in consequence.
+This false emphasis is especially prominent in the education controversy
+which is now going on--and the question of moral progress, by the way,
+is the question of education in the widest and highest sense of the
+term. People seem quite content so long as they can get the right thing
+taught. They don't always see that unless the right thing is taught by
+the right people and in the right way it will not be _learnt_. Now
+education is ultimately a question of what is being _learnt_, not of
+what is being _taught_. The process of learning is a very curious and
+complicated one, and it often happens that what goes in at the teacher's
+end comes out at the pupil's end in a wholly different form and with a
+wholly different value; and we have the highest authority for believing
+that what really counts is not so much that which goeth into a man but
+that which cometh out of him. That applies to all education--especially
+moral education. So that if you argue from what has gone into the human
+race in the way of moral teaching you may be greatly surprised and
+perhaps disappointed when you compare it with what has come out of the
+human race in the meantime. What has been taught is not what has been
+learnt. It has suffered a sea change in the process. Nor is the question
+wholly one of learning. There is the further question of remembering. I
+believe that a candid examination of the facts would convince us that
+the human race has proved itself a forgetful pupil. It has not always
+retained what it has learnt. Emerson has said that no account of the
+Holy Ghost has been lost. But how did Emerson find that out? The only
+accents Emerson knew of were those which the world happened to have
+remembered. If any had been lost in the meantime Emerson naturally would
+not know of their existence. I have heard of a functionary, whose
+precise office I am not able to define, called 'the Lord's
+Remembrancer'. It would be a great help to Moral Progress if we had in
+modern life a People's Remembrancer. His place is occupied to some
+extent by the study of history, and for that reason one could wish for
+the sake of Moral Progress that the study of history were universal. For
+my own part I seldom open a book of history without recovering what for
+me is a lost account of the Holy Ghost. Next to conceit I reckon
+forgetfulness as the greatest enemy of Moral Progress. I suppose Rudyard
+Kipling had something of this in mind when he wrote his poem--
+
+    Lord God of Hosts be with us yet,
+    Lest we forget, lest we forget.
+
+Another cause of our over-estimate of Moral Progress is that we have
+thought too much of the abstract State and too little of the actual
+States now in being. Our devotion to 'the' State as an ideal has led us
+to overlook the fact that many actual States represent a form of
+morality so low that it is doubtful if it can be called morality at all.
+In their relations _with one another_ they display qualities which would
+disgrace the brutes. And the worst of it is that at times these States
+drag down to their own low level the morality of the individuals
+belonging to them. Thus at the present moment we see quite decent
+Englishmen and quite decent Germans tearing one another to pieces like
+mad dogs, a thing they would never dream of doing as between man and
+man, and which they do only because they are in the grip of forces alien
+to their own nature. We have overestimated Progress by thinking only of
+what is happening inside each of the States. We have forgotten to
+consider the bearing of the States to one another, which remains on a
+level lower than that of individuals.
+
+The impression has gone abroad that the nations of the world need to
+take _only one step_ from the position where they now stand to
+accomplish the final unity of all mankind. Taking any one of these
+nations--our own for example--we can trace the steps by which the
+warring elements within it have become reconciled, until finally there
+has emerged that vast unitary corporation--the British Empire. So with
+all the others. What more is required therefore than one step further in
+the same direction, to join up all the States into a single world State.
+But I am bound to think we are too hasty in treating the unity of
+mankind as needing only one step more. It is not so easy as all that.
+When you study the process by which unity has been brought about in the
+various European communities you find that motives of conquest and
+corresponding motives of defence have had a great deal to do with it.
+Germany, for example, was built up and now holds together as a fighting
+unit. Whether Germany and the other States would still maintain their
+cohesion when they were no longer fighting units, and when the motives
+of conquest and defence were no longer in operation, is a question on
+which I should not like to dogmatize either way. Certainly we have no
+right to assume offhand that the unifying process which has given the
+nations the mass cohesion and efficiency they require for holding their
+own against enemy States would still remain in full power when there
+were no longer any enemy States to be considered.
+
+But what do we mean by Progress?
+
+Progress may be defined as that process by which a thing advances from a
+less to a more complete state of itself. Now whether this process is a
+desirable one or not obviously depends on the nature of the thing which
+is progressing. Take the largest and most inclusive of all things--the
+whole world. And now suppose philosophy to have proved that the world,
+the whole world, is advancing from a less to a more complete state of
+itself--which as a matter of fact is what the doctrine of evolution
+claims to have proved. Ought I to rejoice in this discovery? Will it
+give me satisfaction? That clearly depends on the nature of the world.
+If I am antecedently assured that the world is good, I shall naturally
+rejoice on hearing that it is advancing from a less to a more complete
+state of itself. But if the nature of the world is evil, what reason can
+I possibly have for rejoicing in its evolution? Assuming the world to be
+evil in its essential nature, I for my part, if I were consulted in the
+matter, would certainly give my vote against its being allowed to
+advance from a less to a more complete state of itself. The less such a
+world progresses the easier it will be for moral beings to live in it.
+Our interest lies in its remaining as undeveloped as possible.
+
+Obvious as this seems there are some evolutionists who take a rather
+different view. They seem to think that any sort of world, no matter
+what its nature might be, would ultimately become a good world if it
+were allowed to develop its nature far enough. It is just the fact of
+its continually becoming more of itself that makes it good. But this
+would compel us to abandon our definition that progress is the advance
+of a thing from a less to a more complete state of _itself_. For if
+itself were a bad self to begin with all such advance of _itself_ would
+only make it worse. It is possible that an essentially bad man like Iago
+might be converted into a good one, but not by advancing from a less to
+a more complete state of _himself_ as he originally was--unless indeed
+we change the hypothesis and suppose that he was not essentially bad to
+begin with. So with the world at large. Our nature being what it is,
+namely moral, we must first be convinced that the world is in principle
+good before we can derive the least satisfaction from knowing that it is
+advancing from a less to a more complete state of _itself_. The
+alternative doctrine makes a breach in the doctrine of progress which is
+inconsistent with its original form. A thing develops by retaining its
+essential nature--that is the original form. But a bad world which
+develops into a good one doesn't retain its essential nature. There
+comes a point somewhere when the next step of progress can be achieved
+only by the thing dropping its original nature--a point at which the
+thing is no longer becoming more of its former self, which was bad, but
+is ceasing to be its former self altogether and becoming something else,
+which is good.
+
+Let us apply this to progress in three specific directions--Science, the
+Mechanical Arts, and Government.
+
+We find that the progress of science has enormously increased man's
+power over the forces of nature. Is it a good thing that man's power
+over the forces of nature should be increased? That surely depends on
+the manner in which this power is used, and this depends again on the
+moral nature of man. When we observe, as we may truly observe,
+especially at the present time, that of all the single applications
+which man has made of science, the most extensive and perhaps the most
+efficient is that of devising implements for destroying his brother man,
+it is at least permissible to raise the question whether the progress of
+science has contributed on the whole to the progress of humanity. Had it
+not been for the progress of science, which has enormously increased the
+wealth of the world, it is doubtful if this war, which is mainly a war
+about wealth, would have taken place at all. Or if a war had broken out,
+it would not have involved the appalling destruction of human life and
+property we are now witnessing--such that, within a space of two years,
+about six million human beings have been killed, thirty-five millions
+wounded, and wealth destroyed to the extent of about fifteen thousand
+millions sterling--though some say it is very much more. Science taught
+us to make this wealth: science has also taught us how to destroy it.
+When one thinks of how much of this is attributable to the progress of
+science, I say it is _permissible to raise the question_ whether man is
+a being who can safely be entrusted with that control over the forces of
+nature which science gives him. What if he uses this power, as he
+plainly can do, for his own undoing? To ask this, as we can hardly help
+asking, is to transfer the question of scientific progress into the
+sphere of morality. It is conceivable that the progress of science might
+involve for us no progress at all. It might be, and some have feared
+that it may become, a step towards the self-destruction of the human
+race.
+
+Take the mechanical arts. The chief effects of progress in the
+mechanical arts have been an enormous increase in the material wealth
+of mankind, and, partly consequent upon this, a parallel growth of
+population in the industrial countries of the world. It is by no means
+clear that either of these things constitutes a definite step in human
+progress. Consider the growth of population--the immense increase in the
+total bulk and volume of the human race. Whether this constitutes a
+clear gain to humanity obviously cannot be answered without reference to
+moral considerations. To increase the arithmetical quantity of life in
+the world can be counted a gain only if the general tendencies of life
+are in the right direction. If they are in the wrong direction, then the
+more lives there are to yield to these tendencies the less reason has
+the moralist to be satisfied with what is happening. No one, so far as I
+know, has ever seriously maintained that the end and aim of progress is
+to increase the number of human beings up to the limit which the planet
+is able to support; though some doctrines if pressed to their conclusion
+would lead to that, notably the doctrine that all morality rests
+ultimately on the instinct for the preservation and the reproduction of
+life. We have first to be convinced that the human race is not on the
+wrong road before we can look with complacency on the increase of its
+numbers. We may note in this connexion that mankind possesses no sort of
+collective control over its own mass or volume. The mass or total number
+of lives involved is determined by forces which are not subject to the
+unitary direction of any existing human will either individual or
+collective. This applies not only to the human race as a whole, but to
+particular communities. Their growth is unregulated. They just come to
+be what they are in point of size. This fact seems to me a very
+important one to bear in mind when we talk of the progress of science
+giving us control over the forces of nature. So far no state, no
+government, no community has won any effective control over that group
+of the forces of nature which determine the total size of the community
+in question. It is an aspect of human destiny which appears to be left
+to chance; and yet when we consider what it means, is there any aspect
+of human destiny on which such tremendous consequences depend? And ought
+we not to consider this before claiming, as we so often claim, that the
+progress of science has given us control of the forces of nature? It is
+strange that this point has not been more considered, especially by
+thinkers who are fond of the word 'humanity'--'the good of humanity'--or
+the 'greatest happiness of the greatest number'. Humanity has an
+arithmetical or quantitative side, and the good of humanity surely
+depends, to some extent, on how much humanity there is. I can imagine
+many things which might be good for a Greek city state of 10,000 souls
+which would not be good, or not good in the same sense, for a community
+of 100,000,000 souls. Surely it needs no reasoning to prove that our
+power to do our duty to others is affected by the number of others to
+whom duty has to be done--it makes a difference where there are 10,000
+of men or 100,000,000. Similarly with the greatest happiness of the
+greatest number. What is the _greatest_ number? A great deal that has
+been said about this would not have been said if we had considered that
+the _greatest number_ itself is left at the disposal of forces outside
+the present scope of our own will. Even the proposal to sell our goods
+and give the proceeds to the poor would surely be affected, from the
+moral point of view, by the number of the poor who were to receive the
+distribution. Were this so small that the poor would get five pounds
+apiece it would be one question; were it so large that they would
+receive a halfpenny apiece it would be another question. Thus we may
+conclude that the progress of the mechanical arts with the consequent
+increase in the bulk of the human race has not solved the problem of
+moral progress, but only placed that problem in a new and more
+perplexing context. A similar conclusion would meet us if we were to
+consider the parallel increase of the wealth of the world. The moral
+question is not about the amount of wealth the world possesses, but
+about the way men spend it and the use they make of it. Industrially
+speaking, the human race has made its fortune during the last hundred
+years. But has it made up its mind what to do with the fortune? And has
+its mind been made up in the right way? To raise these questions is to
+see that progress from the economic point of view may be the reverse of
+progress from the moral. But I shall not further enlarge upon this--the
+theme being too familiar.
+
+The third question which relates itself to moral progress is that of
+Government. Now Government, I need hardly say, is not an end in itself.
+It is a device which man has set up to help him in attaining the true
+end of his life. To make up our minds how we ought to be governed is
+therefore impossible unless we have previously made up our minds how we
+ought to live. What might be a good government for a people whose end is
+industrial success might be a very bad one for a people who had some
+other end in view. Well, then, are we well governed at the present time?
+Are we better governed than we were? Has progress taken place in this
+department? Plainly we cannot answer these questions unless we have
+chosen our end in life and are morally satisfied with it. In the history
+of modern states we discover a tendency, more strongly marked in some
+quarters than in others, towards that form of democracy which is called
+responsible self-government. Government of the people, for the people,
+by the people. The people are going to govern themselves. But they may
+do so in a thousand different ways--each of which has a different moral
+value. A people may go wrong just as fatally in governing itself as in
+being governed by some external authority. I confess that nothing I can
+learn from the history of government entirely reassures me on this
+point. I see everywhere progress towards organization, but then one is
+bound to ask on what ulterior end is this organization directed? I see
+everywhere a growing subordination of the individual to the State. This
+may or may not be a very good thing. What _kind of State_ is it to which
+the individual is becoming subordinated? There are great differences
+among them--some seem to me, one in particular at the present time,
+thoroughly bad, and I cannot see that the individual gains morally by
+being subordinated to such a State--at least if he gains in one
+direction he loses more in another.
+
+Even the social unity which Governments are capable of achieving must
+not be too hastily translated into moral progress. We are entitled to
+ask several questions before the one can be equated with the other. To
+begin with, do men know what they want to achieve by their unified life?
+And if they do know what they want, have we not still the right to
+criticize its moral value and say 'this is right' or this is wrong?
+Should the time ever come when the common will of mankind should get
+itself expressed by the decrees of a universal democracy, would moral
+criticism be at an end so far as the said decrees were concerned? For my
+part I cannot see that it would. Perhaps it were truer to say that only
+then would moral criticism effectively begin. As things now are, we are
+prevented from criticizing the common will because none of us knows what
+exactly the common will demands. But if it could get itself expressed
+and defined by the decrees of a perfect democracy we should know. Those
+decrees would reveal the human community to itself, and it is possible
+that the revelation would not be altogether agreeable to our moral
+sense. We might then discover that the common will is capable of being
+grossly immoral. So far it has been impossible for us to make this
+discovery because no organ exists for expressing the common will on the
+human scale, and even those which express it on the national scale are
+not perfect. I am far from saying the discovery would be made; but I
+know of no line of argument which rules it out as impossible. Meanwhile
+we are scarcely justified in regarding the common will as necessarily
+moral until we know more than we do of what precisely it is that the
+common will aims at and intends to achieve. To back the common will
+through thick and thin, as some of our philosophers seem disposed to do,
+is a dangerous speculation--it might perhaps be described as putting
+your money on a dark horse.
+
+This leads me to say a word concerning a phrase which has been much in
+use of late--the Collective Wisdom of Mankind, or the Collective Wisdom
+of the State. Progress is sometimes defined as a gradual approach to a
+state of things where this collective wisdom rules the course of events.
+And collective wisdom is sometimes represented as vastly wiser than that
+possessed by any individual, even the wisest.
+
+Now if this really is so it seems pretty obvious that, when the
+collective wisdom speaks, no individual can have the right of appeal.
+What are you, what am I, that either of us should set up our private
+intelligence against the intelligence of forty million of our fellow
+citizens? That surely would be a preposterous claim. The collective
+wisdom must know best: at least it knows much better than you or I.
+
+But is the collective wisdom of the State so immensely superior to that
+of the individual, and of necessity so? Have we any means of bringing
+the matter to the test? It is extremely difficult to do so. Not until
+we make the experiment do we find how rare are the occasions of which we
+can say that then and there the collective wisdom of the community
+fairly and fully expressed itself. Acts of Parliament are not good
+examples. They usually represent not the collective wisdom of the whole
+community, but the wisdom of the majority after it has been checked,
+modified, and perhaps nullified by the opposing wisdom of an almost
+equal minority. Take as an example the history of the Irish Question.
+How difficult it is to put one's finger on any moment in that tangled
+story and say that then and there the collective wisdom of the community
+knew what it wanted to do and did it! So with almost everything else.
+
+Now if there be such a thing as the collective wisdom of the State I
+suppose that the moment when we are most likely to find it in action is
+the moment when one State has dealings with another State. That surely
+is a fair test. If States possess collective wisdom they ought to show
+its existence and measure when they confront one another _as
+States_--when State calls to State across the great deeps of
+international policy. What should we say of any State which claimed
+collective wisdom only when dealing with its own individual
+members--with you and me--but dropped the claim when the question was
+one of reasonable intercourse with another State similarly endowed? This
+we should say is a very dubious claim.
+
+Well, how stands the matter when this test is applied? The present war
+provides the answer. The war arose out of a type of quarrel which, had
+it occurred between half a dozen individuals of average intelligence,
+would have been amicably settled, by reasonable human intercourse, in
+twenty minutes. Does not this afford a rough measure of the collective
+wisdom of such States as at present exist in this world? Does it not
+suggest that they have little faculty of reasonable intercourse with
+one another? And when you say _that_ of any being, or any collection of
+beings, do you not put it pretty low down in the scale of intelligence?
+It is literally true that these States do not understand one another.
+Thus we are driven back upon a plain alternative; either the States do
+not represent collective wisdom, or else this collective wisdom is one
+of the lowest forms of wisdom now extant on this planet. In either case
+we must be very cautious in our use of the phrase. We must not infer
+moral progress from the reign of collective wisdom until we are assured
+that collective wisdom is really as wise as some of its devotees assume
+it to be.
+
+About the idea of moral progress, which is only another name for the
+idea of progress in its widest form, I need say little, the question
+having been adequately treated by other lecturers. But I will add this.
+Belief in moral progress is a belief which no man can live without, and,
+at the same time, a belief which cannot be proved by any appeal to human
+experience. We cannot live without it, because life is just the process
+of reaching forward to a better form of itself. Were a man to say that
+since the world began no moral progress has taken place he would thereby
+show his latent belief in moral progress. For no man would take the
+trouble to deny moral progress unless he believed that the world would
+in some way be made better by his denial. He would not even trouble to
+come to a private conclusion in the matter unless he believed that his
+private conclusion was something to the good. In that sense perhaps we
+may say that moral progress is proved, for the best proof of any belief
+is that it remains indispensable to the life we have to live. But the
+appeal to experience would not prove it--and for this reason. A
+progressive world is a world which not only makes gains, but _keeps_ its
+gains when they are made. If the Kingdom of Heaven were to become a
+fact to-morrow, that of itself would not prove progress, if you admit
+the possibility that the world might hereafter retreat from the position
+it had won. That possibility you could never rule out--except by an
+appeal to faith. A world which attained the goal and then lost it would
+be a greater failure, from the point of view of moral progress, than one
+which never attained the goal at all. The doctrine that the gains of
+morality can never be lost is widely held; but it does not rest on a
+philosophic or a scientific basis. As Hume taught long ago, you cannot
+infer an infinite conclusion from finite data--and in this case the
+conclusion is infinite and the data are finite. They are not only finite
+but various: some pointing one way, some another.
+
+Finally we cannot prove moral progress by appeal to any objective
+standard, such as the amount of happiness existing in the world at
+successive dates. Suppose you were able to show that, up to date, the
+amount of happiness in the world has shown a steady increase until it
+has reached the grand sum total now existing. Now suppose that you were
+transferred to another planet where the conditions were the exact
+opposite: where the inhabitants ages ago started with the happiness we
+now possess, and gradually declined until, at the present moment, they
+are no happier than the human race was at the first stage of its career.
+Now add together the totals of happiness for both your worlds, the
+ascending world which starts with the minimum and ends with the maximum,
+the declining world which starts with the maximum and ends with the
+minimum. The grand totals in both cases are exactly the same. So far as
+the total result is concerned, the declining world has just as much to
+show for itself as the ascending. Valued in terms of happiness, the one
+world would be worth as much as the other.
+
+And yet we know that the value of these two worlds is not the same. The
+ascending is worth a lot more than the descending. Why? I leave you with
+that conundrum. Answer it, and you have the key to the meaning of Moral
+Progress.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+T. H. Green, _Prolegomena to Ethics_, Book III, ch. 3.
+
+Lecky, _History of European Morals_, ch. 1.
+
+Spencer, _Data of Ethics_, ch. 13 to 14.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+PROGRESS IN GOVERNMENT
+
+A. E. ZIMMERN
+
+
+When I was asked to speak to you on the subject of Progress in
+Government I gladly accepted, for it is a subject on which I have
+reflected a good deal. But when I came to think over what I should say,
+I saw that you had asked me for the impossible. For what is Government?
+I do not know whether there are any here for whom Government means no
+more than a policeman, or a ballot-box, or a list of office-holders. The
+days of such shallow views are surely over. Government is the work of
+ordering the external affairs and relationships of men. It covers all
+the activities of men as members of a community--social, industrial, and
+religious as well as political in the narrower sense. It is concerned,
+as the ancients had it, with 'that which is public or common', what the
+Greeks called [Greek: to koinon] and the Romans _res publica_. The Old
+English translation of these classical terms is 'The Commonwealth' or
+Common Weal; and I do not see that we can do better than adopt that
+word, with its richness of traditional meaning and its happy association
+of the two conceptions, too often separated in modern minds, of Wealth
+and Welfare.
+
+Our subject then is the Progress of the Commonwealth or, in other words,
+the record of the course of the common life of mankind in the world. It
+is a theme which really underlies all the other subjects of discussion
+at this week's meetings: for it is only the existence of the
+Commonwealth and its organized efforts to preserve and sustain the life
+of the individuals composing it, which have made possible the
+achievements of mankind in the various separate fields of effort which
+are claiming your attention. Lord Acton spent a lifetime collecting
+material for a History of Liberty. He never wrote it: but, if he had, it
+would have been a History of Mankind. A History of Government or of the
+Commonwealth would be nothing less. Such is the nature of the invitation
+so kindly given to me and so cheerfully accepted. If you could wait a
+lifetime for the proper treatment of the subject I would gladly give the
+time; for, in truth, it is worth it.
+
+What is the nature of this common life of mankind and with what is it
+concerned? The subjects of its concern are as wide as human nature
+itself. We cannot define them in a formula: for human nature overleaps
+all formulas. Whenever men have tried to rule regions of human activity
+and aspiration out of the common life of mankind, and to hedge them
+round as private or separate or sacred or by any other kind of taboo,
+human nature has always ended by breaking through the hedges and
+invading the retreat. Man is a social animal. If he retires to a
+monastery he finds he has carried problems of organization with him, as
+the promoters of this gathering would confess you have brought with you
+here. If he shuts himself up in his home as a castle, or in a workshop
+or factory as the domain of his own private power, social problems go
+with him thither, and the long arm of the law will follow after. If he
+crosses the seas like the Pilgrim Fathers, to worship God unmolested in
+a new country, or, like the merchant-venturers, to fetch home treasure
+from the Indies, he will find himself unwittingly the pioneer of
+civilization and the founder of an Empire or a Republic. In the life of
+our fellows, in the Common Weal, we live and move and have our being.
+Let us recall some wise words on this subject from the Master of
+Balliol's book on the Middle Ages. 'The words "Church" and "State"', he
+writes,
+
+     represent what ought to be an alliance, but is, in modern
+     times, at best a dualism and often an open warfare.... The
+     opposition of Church and State expresses an opposition
+     between two sides of human nature which we must not too
+     easily label as good and evil, the heavenly and the earthly,
+     the sacred and the profane. For the State, too, is divine as
+     well as the Church, and may have its own ideals and
+     sacramental duties and its own prophets, even its own
+     martyrs. The opposition of Church and State is to be
+     regarded rather as the pursuit of one great aim, pursued by
+     contrasted means. The ultimate aim of all true human
+     activity must be in the noble words of Francis Bacon 'the
+     glory of God and the relief of man's estate'.[53]
+
+Bacon's words form a fitting starting-point for our reflections: for
+they bring vividly before us both the idealism which should inspire all
+who labour at the task of government and the vastness and variety of the
+field with which they are concerned. Looked at in this broad light, the
+history of man's common life in the world will, I think, show two great
+streams of progress--the progress of man over Nature, or, as we say
+to-day, in the control of his environment, and the progress of man in
+what is essentially a moral task--the art of living together with his
+fellows. These two aspects of human activity and effort are in constant
+contact and interaction. Studied together, they reveal an advance which,
+in spite of man's ever-present moral weakness, may be described as an
+advance from Chaos to Cosmos in the organization of the world's common
+life; yet they are so distinct in method and spirit that they can best
+be described separately.
+
+Let us first, then, consider the history of Government, as a record of
+the progress of man's power over Nature.
+
+Human history, in this sphere, is the story of man making himself at
+home in the world. When human history begins we find men helpless,
+superstitious, ignorant, the plaything of blind powers in the natural
+and animal world. Superstitious because he was helpless, helpless
+because he was ignorant, he eked out a bare existence rather by avoiding
+than controlling the forces in the little world by which he found
+himself surrounded. Human life in its earliest stages is, as Hobbes
+described it, nasty, brutish, and short. Man was the slave of his
+environment. He has risen to become its master. The world, as the
+prophetic eye of Francis Bacon foretold, has become 'The Kingdom of
+Man'.
+
+How complete this conquest is, can best be realized perhaps by
+considering man's relation to the lower animals. When history opens, the
+animals are in their element; it is man who is the interloper. Two
+thousand years ago it was not the Society of Friends but wolves and wild
+boars who felt themselves at home on the site of Bournville Garden
+Village. To-day we are surprised when we read that in remote East Africa
+lions and giraffes venture occasionally to interfere in the murderous
+warfare between man and man. Man has imposed himself on the animals, by
+dint of his gradual accumulation of knowledge and his consequent power
+of organization and government. He has destroyed the conditions under
+which the animals prospered. He has, as we might say, destroyed their
+home life, exposing them to dangers of his own making against which they
+are now as powerless as he was once against them. 'It is a remarkable
+thing,' writes Sir E. Ray Lankester,
+
+     which possibly may be less generally true than our present
+     knowledge seems to suggest--that the adjustment of organisms
+     to their surroundings is so severely complete in Nature
+     apart from Man, that diseases are unknown as constant and
+     normal phenomena under those conditions. It is no doubt
+     difficult to investigate this matter, since the presence of
+     Man as an observer itself implies human intervention. But it
+     seems to be a legitimate view that every disease to which
+     animals (and probably plants also) are liable, excepting as
+     a transient and very exceptional occurrence, is due to Man's
+     interference. The diseases of cattle, sheep, pigs, and
+     horses are not known except in domesticated herds and those
+     wild creatures to which Man's domesticated productions have
+     communicated them. The trypanosome lives in the blood of
+     wild game and of rats without producing mischief. The hosts
+     have become tolerant of the parasite. It is only when man
+     brings his unselected, humanly-nurtured races of cattle and
+     horses into contact with the parasite, that it is found to
+     have deadly properties. The various cattle-diseases which in
+     Africa have done so much harm to native cattle, and have in
+     some regions exterminated big game, have _per contra_ been
+     introduced by man through his importation of diseased
+     animals of his own breeding from Europe. Most, if not all,
+     animals in extra-human conditions, including the minuter
+     things such as insects, shellfish, and invisible aquatic
+     organisms, have been brought into a condition of
+     'adjustment' to their parasites as well as to the other
+     conditions in which they live: it is this most difficult and
+     efficient balance of Nature which Man everywhere upsets.[54]
+
+And Sir E. Ray Lankester goes on to point out the moral to be drawn from
+this development. He points out that
+
+     civilized man has proceeded so far in his interference with
+     extra-human nature, has produced for himself and the living
+     organisms associated with him such a special state of things
+     by his rebellion against natural selection and his defiance
+     of Nature's pre-human dispositions, that he must either go
+     on and acquire firmer control of the conditions, or perish
+     miserably by the vengeance certain to fall on the
+     half-hearted meddler in great affairs. We may indeed compare
+     civilized man to a successful rebel against Nature, who, by
+     every step forward, renders himself liable to greater and
+     greater penalties, and so cannot afford to pause or fail in
+     one single step. Or again we may think of him as the heir to
+     a vast and magnificent kingdom, who has been finally
+     educated so as to take possession of his property, and is at
+     length left alone to do his best; he has wilfully abrogated,
+     in many important respects, the laws of his mother Nature by
+     which the kingdom was hitherto governed; he has gained some
+     power and advantage by so doing, but is threatened on every
+     hand by dangers and disasters hitherto restrained: no
+     retreat is possible--his only hope is to control, as he
+     knows that he can, the sources of these dangers and
+     disasters.
+
+The time will come, not too long hence, as I believe, when men have
+realized, with the scientists, that the world is one kingdom not many,
+and these problems of man's relation to his non-human environment will
+be the first concern of statesmen and governors. In some of our tropical
+colonies they have, perforce, become so already. If you live on the Gold
+Coast, the war against malaria cannot help seeming more important to you
+than the war against German trade: and in parts of Central Africa the
+whole possibility of continued existence centres round the presence or
+absence of the tsetse fly which is the carrier of sleeping sickness.
+Some day, when means have been adopted for abating our fiercer
+international controversies, we shall discover that in these and kindred
+matters lies the real province of world-politics. When that day comes
+the chosen representatives of the human race will see their
+constituents, as only philosophers see them now, as the inheritors of a
+great tradition of service and achievement, and as trustees for their
+successors of the manifold sources of human happiness which the advance
+of knowledge has laid open to us.
+
+If the first and most important of these sources is the discovery of
+the conditions of physical well-being, the second is the discovery of
+means of communication between the widely separate portions of man's
+kingdom. The record of the process of bringing the world under the
+control of the organized government of man is largely the record of the
+improvement of communications. Side by side with the unending struggle
+of human reason against cold and hunger and disease we can watch the
+contest against distance, against ocean and mountain and desert, against
+storms and seasons. There can be few subjects more fascinating for a
+historian to study than the record of the migrations of the tribes of
+men. He might begin, if he wished, with the migrations of animals and
+describe the westward progress of the many species whose course can be
+traced by experts along the natural highways of Western Europe. Some of
+them, so the books tell us, reached the end of their journey while
+Britain was still joined to the continent. Others arrived too late and
+were cut off by the straits of Dover. I like to form an imaginary
+picture, which the austerity of the scientific conscience will, I know,
+repudiate with horror, of the unhappy congregation, mournfully assembled
+bag and baggage on the edge of the straits and gazing wistfully across
+at the white cliffs of England, which they were not privileged to
+reach--_tendentesque manus ripae ulterioris amore_, 'stretching out
+their paws in longing for the further bank.'
+
+Our historian would then go on to describe the early 'wanderings of
+peoples' (_Voelkerwanderungen_) how whole tribes would move off in the
+spring-time in the search for fresh hunting-grounds or pasture. He would
+trace the course of that westward push which, starting from somewhere in
+Asia, brought its impact to bear on the northern provinces of the Roman
+Empire and eventually loosened its whole fabric. He would show how
+Europe, as we know it, was welded into unity by the attacks of
+migratory warriors on three flanks--the Huns and the Tartars, a host of
+horsemen riding light over the steppes of Russia and Hungary: the Arabs,
+bearing Islam with them on their camels as they moved westward along
+North Africa and then pushing across into Spain: and the Northmen of
+Scandinavia, those carvers of kingdoms and earliest conquerors of the
+open sea, who left their mark on England and northern France, on Sicily
+and southern Italy, on the Balkan Peninsula, on Russia, on Greenland,
+and as far as North America. Then, passing to Africa and Asia, he would
+describe the life of the pack-saddle and the caravan, the long and
+mysterious inland routes from the Mediterranean to Nubia and Nigeria, or
+from Damascus with the pilgrims to Medina, and the still longer and more
+mysterious passage through the ancient oases of Turkestan, now buried in
+sand, along which, as recent discoveries have shown us, Greece and
+China, Christianity and Buddhism, exchanged their arts and ideas and
+products. Then he would tell of the great age of maritime discovery, of
+the merchant-adventurers and buccaneers, of their gradual transformation
+into trading companies, in the East and in the West, from companies to
+settlements, from settlements to colonies. Then perhaps he would close
+by casting a glimpse at the latest human migration of all, that which
+takes place or took place up to 1914, at the rate of a million a year
+from the Old World into the United States. He would take the reader to
+Ellis Island in New York harbour, where the immigrants emerge from the
+steerage to face the ordeal of the Immigration Officer. He would show
+how the same causes, hunger, fear, persecution, restlessness, ambition,
+love of liberty, which set the great westward procession in motion in
+the early days of tribal migration, are still alive and at work to-day
+among the populations of Eastern Europe. He would look into their minds
+and read the story of the generations of their nameless fore-runners;
+and he would ask himself whether rulers and statesmen have done all that
+they might to make the world a home for all its children, for the poor
+as for the rich, for the Jew as for the Gentile, for the yellow and
+dark-skinned as for the white.
+
+Let us dwell for a moment more closely on one phase of this record of
+the conquest of distance. The crucial feature in that struggle was the
+conquest of the sea. The sea-surface of the world is far greater than
+its land-surface, and the sea, once subdued, is a far easier and more
+natural means of transport and communication. For the sea, the
+uncultivable sea, as Homer calls it, is itself a road, whereas on earth,
+whether it be mountain or desert or field, roads have first painfully to
+be made. Man's definitive conquest of the sea dates from the middle of
+the fifteenth century when, by improvements in the art of sailing and by
+the extended use of the mariner's compass, it first became possible to
+undertake long voyages with assurance. These discoveries are associated
+with the name of Prince Henry of Portugal, whose life-long ambition it
+was, to quote the words engraved on his monument at the southern
+extremity of Portugal, 'to lay open the regions of West Africa across
+the sea, hitherto not traversed by man, that thence a passage might be
+made round Africa to the most distant parts of the East.'
+
+The opening of the high seas which resulted from Prince Henry's
+activities is one of the most momentous events in human history. Its
+effect was, sooner or later, to unite the scattered families of mankind,
+to make the problems of all the concern of all: to make the world one
+place. Prince Henry and his sailors were, in fact, the pioneers of
+internationalism, with all the many and varied problems that
+internationalism brings with it. 'In 1486,' says the most recent history
+of this development,
+
+     Bartholomew Dias was carried by storm beyond the sight of
+     land, round the southern point of Africa, and reached the
+     Great Fish River, north of Algoa Bay. On his return journey
+     he saw the promontory which divides the oceans, as the
+     narrow waters of the Bosphorus divide the continents, of the
+     East and West. As in the crowded streets of Constantinople,
+     so here, if anywhere, at this awful and solitary headland
+     the elements of two hemispheres meet and contend. As Dias
+     saw it, so he named it, 'The Cape of Storms'. But his
+     master, John II, seeing in the discovery a promise that
+     India, the goal of the national ambition, would be reached,
+     named it with happier augury 'The Cape of Good Hope'. No
+     fitter name could have been given to that turning-point in
+     the history of mankind. Europe, in truth, was on the brink
+     of achievements destined to breach barriers, which had
+     enclosed and diversified the nations since the making of the
+     World, and commit them to an intercourse never to be broken
+     again so long as the World endures. That good rather than
+     evil may spring therefrom is the greatest of all human
+     responsibilities.[55]
+
+The contrast between Constantinople and the Cape, so finely drawn in
+these lines, marks the end of the age when land-communications and
+land-power were predominant over sea-power. The Roman Empire was, and
+could only be, a land-power. It is no accident that the British
+Commonwealth is, as the American Commonwealth is fast becoming,
+predominantly a sea-power.
+
+How was 'the greatest of all human responsibilities', arising from this
+new intercourse of races, met? Knowledge, alas, is as much the devil's
+heritage as the angels': it may be used for ill, as easily as for good.
+The first explorers, and the traders who followed them, were not
+idealists but rough adventurers. Breaking in, with the full tide of
+western knowledge and adaptability, to the quiet backwaters of primitive
+conservatism, they brought with them the worse rather than the better
+elements of the civilization, the control of environment, of which they
+were pioneers. To them Africa and the East represented storehouses of
+treasure, not societies of men; and they treated the helpless natives
+accordingly.
+
+     England and Holland as well as the Latin monarchies treated
+     the natives of Africa as chattels without rights and as
+     instruments for their own ends, and revived slavery in a
+     form and upon a scale more cruel than any practised by the
+     ancients. The employment of slaves on her own soil has
+     worked the permanent ruin of Portugal. The slave trade with
+     America was an important source of English wealth, and the
+     philosopher John Locke did not scruple to invest in it.
+     There is no European race which can afford to remember its
+     first contact with the subject peoples otherwise than with
+     shame, and attempts to assess their relative degrees of
+     guilt are as fruitless as they are invidious. The question
+     of real importance is how far these various states were able
+     to purge themselves of the poison, and rise to a higher
+     realization of their duty towards their races whom they were
+     called by the claims of their own superior civilization to
+     protect. The fate of that civilization itself hung upon the
+     issue.[56]
+
+The process by which the Western peoples have risen to a sense of their
+duty towards their weaker and more ignorant fellow citizens is indeed
+one of the chief stages in that progress of the common life of mankind
+with which we are concerned.
+
+How is that duty to be exercised? The best way in which the strong can
+help the weak is by making them strong enough to help themselves. The
+white races are not strong because they are white, or virtuous because
+they are strong. They are strong because they have acquired, through a
+long course of thought and work, a mastery over Nature and hence over
+their weaker fellow men. It is not virtue but knowledge to which they
+owe their strength. No doubt much virtue has gone to the making of that
+knowledge--virtues of patience, concentration, perseverance,
+unselfishness, without which the great body of knowledge of which we are
+the inheritors could never have been built up. But we late-born heirs of
+the ages have it in our power to take the knowledge of our fathers and
+cast away any goodness that went to its making. We have come into our
+fortune: it is ours to use it as we think best. We cannot pass it on
+wholesale, and at one step, to the more ignorant races, for they have
+not the institutions, the traditions, the habits of mind and character,
+to enable them to use it. Those too we must transmit or develop together
+with the treasure of our knowledge. For the moment we stand in the
+relation of trustees, teachers, guides, governors, but always in their
+own interest and not ours, or rather, in the interest of the
+commonwealth of which we and they, since the opening of the high seas,
+form an inseparable part.
+
+It has often been thought that the relation of the advanced and backward
+races should be one purely of philanthropy and missionary enterprise
+rather than of law and government. It is easy to criticize this by
+pointing to the facts of the world as we know it--to the existing
+colonial empires of the Great Powers and to the vast extension of the
+powers of civilized governments which they represent. But it may still
+be argued that the question is not Have the civilized powers annexed
+large empires? but Ought they to have done so? Was such an extension of
+governmental authority justifiable or inevitable? Englishmen in the
+nineteenth century, like Americans in the twentieth, were slow to admit
+that it was; just as the exponents of _laissez-faire_ were slow to
+admit the necessity for State interference with private industry at
+home. But in both cases they have been driven to accept it by the
+inexorable logic of facts. What other solution of the problem, indeed,
+is possible? 'Every alternative solution', as a recent writer
+remarks,[57]
+
+     breaks down in practice. To stand aside and do nothing under
+     the plea that every people must be left free to manage its
+     own affairs, and that intervention is wicked, is to repeat
+     the tragic mistake of the Manchester School in the economic
+     world which protested against any interference by the State
+     to protect workmen ... from the oppression and rapacity of
+     employers, on the ground that it was an unwarranted
+     interference with the liberty of the subject and the freedom
+     of trade and competition. To prevent adventurers from
+     entering the territory is impossible, unless there is some
+     civilized authority within it to stop them through its
+     police. To shut off a backward people from all contact with
+     the outside world by a kind of blockade is not only
+     unpracticable, but is artificially to deny them the chances
+     of education and progress. The establishment of a genuine
+     government by a people strong enough and liberal enough to
+     ensure freedom under the law and justice for all is the only
+     solution.... They must undertake this duty, not from any
+     pride of dominion, or because they wish to exploit their
+     resources, but in order to protect them alike from
+     oppression and corruption, by strict laws and strict
+     administration, which shall bind the foreigner as well as
+     the native, and then they must gradually develop, by
+     education and example, the capacity in the natives to manage
+     their own affairs.
+
+Thus we see that the progress in knowledge and in the control of their
+environment made by the civilized peoples has, in fact and inevitably,
+led to their leadership in government also, and given them the
+predominant voice in laying down the lines along which the common life
+of mankind is to develop. If we are to look for the mainspring of the
+world's activities, for the place where its new ideas are thought out,
+its policies framed, its aspirations cast into practical shape, we must
+not seek it in the forests of Africa or in the interior of China, but in
+those busy regions of the earth's surface where the knowledge, the
+industries, and all the various organizations of government and control
+find their home. Because organization is embodied knowledge, and because
+knowledge is power, it is the Great Powers, as we truly name them,[58]
+who are predominantly responsible for the government of the world and
+for the future of the common life of mankind.
+
+In the exercise of this control the world has already, in many respects,
+become a single organism. The conquest of distance in the fifteenth
+century was the beginning of a process which led, slowly but inevitably,
+to the widening of the boundaries of government. Two discoveries made
+about the same time accentuated the same tendency. By the invention of
+gunpowder the people of Europe were given an overwhelming military
+superiority over the dwellers in other continents. By the invention of
+printing, knowledge was internationalized for all who had the training
+to use it. Books are the tools of the brain-worker all the world over;
+but, unlike the file and the chisel, the needle and the hammer, books
+not only create, but suggest. A new idea is like an electric current set
+running throughout the world, and no man can say into what channels of
+activity it may not be directed.
+
+But neither travel nor conquest nor books and the spread of ideas caused
+so immense a transformation in the common life of mankind as the process
+beginning at the end of the eighteenth century which is known to
+historians as the Industrial Revolution. As we have spoken of the
+conquest of distance perhaps a better name for the Industrial
+Revolution would be the Conquest of Organization. For it was not the
+discovery of the steam-engine or the spinning-jenny which constituted
+the revolution: it was the fact that men were now in a position to apply
+these discoveries to the organization of industry. The ancient Greeks
+played with the idea of the steam-engine: it was reserved for
+eighteenth-century England to produce a generation of pioneers endowed
+with the knowledge, the power, the foresight, and the imagination to
+make use of the world-transforming potentialities of the idea. The
+Industrial Revolution, with its railways and steamships, telegraphs and
+telephones, and now its airships and submarines and wireless
+communication, completed the conquest of distance. Production became
+increasingly organized on international lines. Men became familiar with
+the idea of an international market. Prices and prospects, booms and
+depressions, banking and borrowing, became international phenomena. The
+organization of production led to an immensely rapid increase of wealth
+in Western Europe. The application of that wealth to the development of
+the world's resources in and outside Europe led to a correspondingly
+huge advance in trade and intercourse. The breakfast-table in an
+ordinary English home to-day is a monument to the achievements of the
+Industrial Revolution and to the solid reality of the economic
+internationalism which resulted from it. There is still poverty in
+Western Europe, but it is preventable poverty. Before the Industrial
+Revolution, judged by a modern standard, there was nothing but poverty.
+The satisfying physical and economic condition which we describe by the
+name of comfort did not exist. The Italian historian Ferrero, in one of
+his essays, recommends those who have romantic yearnings after the good
+old times to spend one night on what our forefathers called a bed. Mr.
+Coulton, in his books on the Middle Ages, has used some very plain
+language on the same text. And Professor Smart, in his recently
+published posthumous work, pointing a gentle finger of rebuke at certain
+common Socialist fantasies, remarks:
+
+     There never was a golden age of equality of wealth: there
+     was rather a leaden one of inequality of poverty.... We
+     should speak more guardedly of the riches of the old world.
+     A careful examination of any old book would show that the
+     most splendid processions of pomp and luxury in the Middle
+     Ages were poor things compared to the parade of a modern
+     circus on its opening day.[59]
+
+Such prosperity as we enjoy to-day, such a scene as we can observe on
+these smiling outskirts of Birmingham, is due to man's Conquest of
+Organization and to the consequent development and linking-up, by mutual
+intercourse and exchange, of the economic side of the world's life.
+
+So far we have been watching the progress of man in his efforts to 'make
+himself at home' in the world. We have seen him becoming more skilful
+and more masterful century by century, till in these latter days the
+whole world is, as it were, at his service. He has planted his flag at
+the two poles: he has cut a pathway for his ships between Asia and
+Africa, and between the twin continents of America: he has harnessed
+torrents and cataracts to his service: he has conquered the air and the
+depths of the sea: he has tamed the animals: he has rooted out
+pestilence and laid bare its hidden causes: and he is penetrating
+farther and ever farther in the discovery of the causes of physical and
+mental disease. He has set his foot on the neck of Nature. But the last
+and greatest conquest is yet before him. He has yet to conquer himself.
+Victorious against Nature, men are still at war, nay, more than ever at
+war, amongst themselves. How is it that the last century and a half,
+which have witnessed so unparalleled an advance in the organization of
+the common life of man on the material side, should have been an age of
+wars and rumours of wars, culminating in the vastest and most
+destructive conflict that this globe of ours has ever witnessed? What
+explanation could we give of this to a visitor from the moon or to those
+creatures of inferior species whom, as Sir E. Ray Lankester has told us,
+it is our function, thanks to our natural superiority, to command and
+control?
+
+This brings us to the second great branch of our subject--the progress
+of mankind in the art of living together in the world.
+
+Government, as we have seen, covers the whole social life of man: for
+the principles that regulate human association are inherent in the
+nature of man. But in what follows we shall perforce confine ourselves
+mainly to the sphere of what is ordinarily called politics, that is to
+the recognized and authoritative form of human association called the
+State, as opposed to the innumerable subordinate or voluntary bodies and
+relationships, which pervade every department of man's common life.
+
+The progress of Government in this second sphere may be defined as the
+deepening and extension of man's duty towards his neighbour. It is to be
+reckoned, not in terms of knowledge and organization, but of character.
+The ultimate goal of human government, in the narrower sense, as of all
+social activity--let us never forget it--is liberty, to set free the
+life of the spirit. 'Liberty,' said Lord Acton, who could survey the
+ages with a wealth of knowledge to which no other man, perhaps, ever
+attained, 'Liberty is not a means to a higher political end. It is
+itself the highest political end. It is not for the sake of a good
+public administration that it is required but for security in the
+pursuit of the highest objects of civil society and of private
+life.'[60] Government is needed in order to enable human life to become,
+not efficient or well-informed or well-ordered, but simply good; and
+Lord Acton believed, as the Greeks and generations of Englishmen
+believed before him, that it is only in the soil of liberty that the
+human spirit can grow to its full stature, and that a political system
+based upon any other principle than that of responsible self-government
+acts as a bar at the outset to the pursuit of what he called 'the
+highest objects of civil society or of private life'. For though a
+slave, or a man living under a servile political system, may develop
+many fine qualities of character: yet such virtues will, in Milton's
+words, be but 'fugitive and cloistered', 'unexercised and unbreathed'.
+For liberty, and the responsibilities that it involves, are the school
+of character and the appointed means by which men can best serve their
+neighbours. A man deprived of such opportunities, cut off from the
+quickening influence of responsibility, has, as Homer said long ago
+'lost half his manhood'. He may be a loyal subject, a brave soldier, a
+diligent and obedient workman: but he will not be a full-grown man.
+Government will have starved and stunted him in that which it is the
+supreme object of government to develop and set free.
+
+It is idle, then, to talk in general terms about the extension of
+government as a good thing, whether in relation to the individual
+citizen or to the organization of the world into an international State.
+We have always first to ask: What kind of Government? On what principles
+will it be based? What ideal will it set forth? What kind of common life
+will it provide or allow to its citizens? If the whole world were
+organized into one single State, and that State, supreme in its control
+over Nature, were armed with all the knowledge and organization that
+the ablest and most farseeing brains in the world could supply, yet
+mankind might be worse off under its sway, in the real essentials of
+human life, than if they were painted savages. 'Though I have the gift
+of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge: and though I
+have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity,
+I am nothing.' Government may be the organization of goodness, or the
+organization of evil. It may provide the conditions by which the common
+life of society can develop along the lines of man's spiritual nature:
+or it may take away the very possibility of such a development. Till we
+know what a Government stands for, do not let us judge it by its
+imposing externals of organization. The Persian Empire was more imposing
+than the Republics of Greece: Assyria and Babylon than the little tribal
+divisions of Palestine: the Spanish Empire than the cities of the
+Netherlands. There is some danger that, in our new-found sense of the
+value of knowledge in promoting happiness, we should forget what a
+tyrant knowledge, like wealth, can become. No doubt, just as we saw that
+moral qualities, patience and the like, are needed for the advancement
+of knowledge, so knowledge is needed, and greatly needed, in the task of
+extending and deepening the moral and spiritual life of mankind. But we
+cannot measure that progress in terms of knowledge or organization or
+efficiency or culture. We need some other standard by which to judge
+between Greece and Persia, between Israel and Babylon, between Spain and
+the Netherlands, between Napoleon and his adversaries, and between
+contending powers in the modern world. What shall that standard be?
+
+It must be a similar standard--let us boldly say it--to that by which we
+judge between individuals. It must be a standard based on our sense of
+right and wrong. But right and wrong in themselves will not carry us
+very far, any more than they will carry the magistrate on the bench or
+the merchant in his counting-house. Politics, like business, is not the
+whole of life--though some party politicians and some business men think
+otherwise--but a department of life: both are means, not ends; and as
+such they have developed special rules and codes of their own, based on
+experience in their own special department. In so far as they are framed
+in accordance with man's spiritual nature and ideals these rules may be
+considered to hold good and to mark the stage of progress at which
+Politics and Business have respectively arrived in promoting the common
+weal in their own special sphere. With the rules of business, or what is
+called Political Economy, we have at the moment no concern. It is the
+rules of politics, or the working experience of rulers, crystallized in
+what is called Political Science or Political Philosophy, to which we
+must devote a few moments' attention.
+
+We are all of us, of course, political philosophers. Whether we have
+votes or not, whether we are aware of it or not, we all have views on
+political philosophy and we are all constantly making free use of its
+own peculiar principles and conceptions. Law, the State, Liberty,
+Justice, Democracy are words that are constantly on our lips. Let us try
+to form a clear idea of the place which these great historic ideals
+occupy in the progress of mankind.
+
+The great political thinkers of the world have always been clear in
+their own minds as to the ultimate goal of their own particular study.
+Political thought may be said to have originated with the Jewish
+prophets, who were the first to rebuke kings to their faces and to set
+forth the spiritual aims of politics--to preach Righteousness and Mercy
+as against Power and Ambition and Self-interest. Their soaring
+imagination, less systematic than the Greek intellect, was wider in its
+sweep and more farseeing in its predictions. 'As the earth bringeth
+forth her bud and as the garden causeth the things sown in it to spring
+forth', says Isaiah, in magnificent anticipation of the doctrine of
+Natural Law, 'so the Lord God will cause righteousness and praise to
+spring forth before all the nations.' 'Peace, peace, to him that is far
+off, and to him that is near, saith the Lord, and I will heal him: but
+the wicked are like the troubled sea when it cannot rest, whose waters
+cast up mire and dirt. There is no peace, saith my God, for the wicked.'
+'Out of Zion shall go forth the Law and the word of the Lord from
+Jerusalem. And he shall judge between the nations and shall reprove many
+peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their
+spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against
+nation, neither shall they learn war any more.'[61]
+
+It was, however, Plato and Aristotle who first made politics a branch of
+separate study: and, unlike many of their modern successors, they
+pursued it throughout in close connexion with the kindred studies of
+ethics and psychology. Their scope was, of course, confined to the field
+of their own experience, the small self-contained City-States of Greece,
+and it did not fall within their province to foreshadow, like the Jewish
+Prophets, the end of warfare, or to speculate on the ultimate unity of
+mankind. Their task was to interpret the work of their own
+fellow-countrymen on the narrow stage of Greek life. Their lasting
+achievement is to have laid down for mankind what a State is, as
+compared with other forms of human association, and to have proclaimed,
+once and for all, in set terms, that its object is to promote the 'good
+life' of its members. 'Every State', says Aristotle in the opening
+words of his _Politics_, 'is a community of some kind.' That is to say,
+States belong to the same _genus_, as it were, as political parties,
+trade unions, cricket clubs, business houses, or such gatherings as
+ours. What, then, is the difference between a State and a political
+party? 'If all communities', he goes on, 'aim at some good, the State or
+political community, which is the highest of all and which embraces all
+the rest, aims, and in a greater degree than any other, at the highest
+good.'
+
+Why is the State the highest of all forms of association? Why should our
+citizenship, for instance, take precedence of our trade unionism or our
+business obligations? Aristotle replies, and in spite of recent critics
+I think the reply still holds good: because, but for the existence of
+the State and the reign of law maintained by it, none of these
+associations could have been formed or be maintained. 'He who first
+founded the State was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when
+protected, is the best of animals, but when separated from law and
+righteousness, he is the worst of all.' Or, to put it in the resounding
+Elizabethan English of Hooker: 'The public power of all societies is
+above every soul contained in the same societies. And the principal use
+of that power is to give laws to all that are under it; which laws, in
+such case, we must obey, unless there be reason showed which may
+necessarily enforce that the law of Reason or of God doth enjoin the
+contrary. Because except our own private and probable resolutions be by
+the law of public determinations overruled, we take away all possibility
+of social life in the world.'[62] The Greeks did not deny, as the
+example of Socrates shows, the right of private judgement on the
+question of obedience to law, or the duty of respect for what Hooker
+calls the Law of Reason or of God. Against the authentic voice of
+conscience no human authority can or should prevail. But Aristotle
+held, with Hooker, that obedience to law and faithful citizenship are
+themselves matters normally ordained by the law of Reason or of God and
+that, as against those of any other association ([Greek: koinonia]), the
+claims of the State are paramount. In other words, he would deny what is
+sometimes loosely called the _right_ of rebellion, whilst not closing
+the door to that _duty_ of rebellion which has so often advanced the
+cause of liberty. When Aristotle speaks of the State, moreover, he does
+not mean a sovereign authority exercising arbitrary power, as in Persia
+or Babylon: he means an authority administering Law and Justice
+according to recognized standards: and he is thinking of Law and
+Justice, not simply as part of the apparatus of government but as based
+upon moral principles. 'Righteousness', he says, 'is the bond of men in
+States and the administration of Justice, which is the determination of
+what is righteous, is the principle of order in political society.' 'Of
+Law', says Hooker,[63] here as elsewhere echoing the ancients, 'there
+can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her
+voice the harmony of the world.' The State takes precedence of the party
+or the trade union because, however idealistic in their policy these
+latter may be, the State covers all, not merely a section of the
+community, and is able not merely to proclaim but to enforce the rule of
+law and justice. Put in modern language, one might define the Greek idea
+of the State as the Organization of Mutual Aid.
+
+The Greek States did not remain true to this high ideal. Faced with the
+temptations of power they descended almost to the level of the oriental
+monarchies with which they were contrasted. But even had they remained
+faithful to their philosophers' ideal of public service they would not
+have survived. Unable to transcend the limits of their own narrow
+State-boundaries and to merge their ideals with those of their
+neighbours, they were helpless in the face of the invader. First
+Macedonia and then Rome swept over them, and political idealism
+slumbered for many centuries. Rome gave the world, what it greatly
+needed, centuries of peace and order and material prosperity: it built
+up an enduring fabric of law on principles of Reason and Humanity: it
+did much to give men, what is next to the political sense, the social
+sense. It made men members of one another from Scotland to Syria and
+from Portugal to Baghdad. But it did not give them 'the good life' in
+its fullness: for it did not, perhaps it could not, give them liberty.
+Faced with the choice between efficiency and the diffusion of
+responsibility, the rulers of the Roman Empire unhesitatingly chose
+efficiency. But the atrophy of responsibility proved the canker at the
+heart of the Empire. Deprived of the stimulus that freedom and the habit
+of responsibility alone can give, the Roman world sank gradually into
+the morass of Routine. Life lost its savour and grew stale, flat and
+unprofitable, as in an old-style Government office. 'The intolerable
+sadness inseparable from such a life', says Renan, 'seemed worse than
+death.' And when the barbarians came and overturned the whole fabric of
+bureaucracy, though it seemed to educated men at the time the end of
+civilization, it was in reality the beginning of a new life.
+
+Amid the wreckage of the Roman Empire, one governing institution alone
+remained upright--the Christian Church with its organization for
+ministering to the spiritual needs of its members. With the conversion
+of the barbarians to Christianity the governing functions and influence
+of the Church became more and more important; and it was upon the basis
+of Church government that political idealism, so long in abeyance, was
+reawakened. The thinkers who took up the work of Plato and Aristotle on
+the larger stage of the Holy Roman Empire boldly looked forward to the
+time when mankind should be united under one government and that
+government should embody the highest ideals of mankind. Such an ideal
+seemed indeed to many one of the legacies of the Founder of
+Christianity. The familiar petition in the Lord's Prayer: _thy kingdom
+come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven_ sounded, in the ears
+of Dante and Thomas Aquinas and innumerable theologians and canonists,
+as a prayer and a pledge for the ultimate political unity of mankind on
+the basis of Christian Law. Such a belief was indeed the bedrock of
+mediaeval political thought. To devout Christians, brought up in the
+oecumenical traditions of the Roman Empire,
+
+     'every ordering of a human community must appear as a
+     component part of that ordering of the world which exists
+     because God exists, and every earthly group must appear as
+     an organic member of that _Civitas Dei_, that God-State,
+     which comprehends the heavens and the earth.[1] ... Thus the
+     Theory of Human Society must accept the divinely created
+     organization of the Universe as a prototype of the first
+     principles which govern the construction of human
+     communities.... Therefore, in all centuries of the Middle
+     Age, Christendom, which in destiny is identical with
+     Mankind, is set before us as a single, universal Community,
+     founded and governed by God Himself. Mankind is one
+     "mystical body"; it is one single and internally connected
+     "people" or "folk"; it is an all-embracing corporation,
+     which constitutes that Universal Realm, spiritual and
+     temporal, which may be called the Universal Church, or, with
+     equal propriety, the Commonwealth of the Human Race.
+     Therefore, that it may attain its one purpose, it needs One
+     Law and One Government.'[64]
+
+
+But the mediaeval ideal, like the Greek, broke down in practice. 'Where
+the Middle Ages failed', says the Master of Balliol, continuing a
+passage already quoted, 'was in attempting ... to make politics the
+handmaid of religion, to give the Church the organization and form of a
+political State, that is, to turn religion from an indwelling spirit
+into an ecclesiastical machinery.' In other words, the mediaeval attempt
+broke down through neglecting the special conditions and problems of the
+political department of life, through declining, as it were, to
+specialize. While men were discussing the Theory of the Two Swords,
+whether the Emperor derived his power directly from God or indirectly
+through the Pope, or whether the sword should be used at all, the actual
+work of government in laying the foundations of the good life was
+neglected. Not only Liberty but Justice and Order were largely in
+abeyance and the range of State action which we to-day describe as
+'social legislation' was not even dreamed of. Absorbed in theory or
+wrapped in ignorance, men forget the practical meaning of Statehood and
+its responsibilities. Central Europe languished for centuries, under a
+sham Empire, in the unprogressive anarchy of feudalism. 'The feudal
+system', it has been said,[65] 'was nothing more nor less than the
+attempt of a society which had failed to organize itself as a State, to
+make contract do the work of patriotism.' It is the bitter experience
+which Germany went through under the anarchy of feudalism and petty
+governments, lasting to well within living memory, which by a natural
+reaction has led the German people, under Prussian tutelage, to cling to
+the conception of the State as Power and nothing more.
+
+The study of politics had to become secular before it could once more
+become practical, and, by being practical, ministering to practical
+ideals and enlisting practical devotion, become, as it were, sacred
+once more. Where the well-being of our fellow men is concerned it is not
+enough to be well-meaning. Government is an art, not an aspiration: and
+those who are concerned with it, whether as rulers or voters, should
+have studied its problems, reflected on its possibilities and
+limitations, and fitted themselves to profit by its accumulated
+experience.
+
+Since the close of the Middle Ages, when politics became secular, the
+art of government has advanced by giant strides. Invention has followed
+invention, and experiment experiment, till to-day skilled specialists in
+the Old World and the New are at hand to watch and to record the latest
+devices for dealing with a hundred difficult special problems--whether
+it be the administration of justice or patronage, the organization of
+political parties, the fixing of Cabinet responsibility, the
+possibilities and limits of federalism, the prevention of war. There
+has, indeed, been as great an advance in the political art in the last
+four centuries and particularly in the last century, as in the very
+kindred art of medicine. The wonderful concentration of energy which the
+various belligerent powers have been able to throw into the present war
+is at once the best and the most tragic illustration of this truth.
+Man's common life in the State is more real, more charged with meaning
+and responsibility, more potent for good or for ill than it has ever
+been before--than our predecessors even in the time of Napoleon could
+have dreamed of.
+
+The greatest inventors and most skilful practitioners of the political
+art in the modern world have been the English, for it is the English
+who, of all nations, have held closest to the ideal of freedom in its
+many and various manifestations. Superficially regarded, the English are
+a stupid people, and so their continental neighbours have often
+regarded them. But their racial heritage and their island situation seem
+to have given them just that combination of experience and natural
+endowment necessary to success in the task of government. Taken as a
+whole, the English are not brilliant, but they are clear-headed: they
+are not far-sighted, but they can see the fact before their eyes: they
+are ill equipped with theoretical knowledge, but they understand the
+working of institutions and have a good eye for judging character: they
+have little constructive imagination of the more grandiose sort, but
+they have an instinct for the 'next step' which has often set them on
+paths which have led them far further than they dreamed; above all, they
+have a relatively high standard of individual character and public duty,
+without which no organization involving the free co-operation of man and
+man can hope to be effective. It is this unique endowment of moral
+qualities and practical gifts, coupled with unrivalled opportunities,
+which has made the English the pioneers in modern times in the art of
+human association. Englishmen, accustomed to what eighteenth-century
+writers used to call 'the peculiar felicity of British freedom', do not
+always remember how far their own experience has carried them on the
+road of political progress. They do not realize how many problems they
+have solved and abolished, as the art of medicine has abolished
+diseases. When they hear speak of the eternal conflict between
+Nationality and Nationality, they often forget that a war between
+England and Scotland has long since become unthinkable and that the
+platitudes of St. Andrew's Day are still paradoxes in Central and
+Eastern Europe. When they are told of States where the spontaneous
+manifestations of group-life, non-conforming sects, workmen's
+associations, and ordinary social clubs, are driven underground and
+classed as dangerous secret societies, they should realize how precious
+a thing is that freedom of association which is one of the dearest
+attributes of English liberty. So too when they read of monarchical and
+military supremacy in a country like Germany, which is still politically
+speaking in the stage of England under the Tudors, or of Russian
+autocracy, or of the struggle over the King's prerogative which has been
+taking place in Greece. If we believe, as we must, in the cause of
+liberty, let us not be too modest to say that nations which have not yet
+achieved responsible self-government, whether within or without the
+British Commonwealth, are politically backward, and let us recall the
+long stages of political invention by which our own self-government has
+been achieved. Representation, trial by jury, an independent judiciary,
+equality before the law, habeas corpus, a limited monarchy, the practice
+of ministerial responsibility, religious toleration, the freedom of
+printing and association, colonial autonomy--all these are distinctly
+English inventions, but time has shown that most of them are definite
+additions to the universal art of government. We can survey the Balkans,
+for instance, and say with confidence that one thing, amongst others,
+that those nations are in need of is toleration, both in the sphere of
+nationality and of religion: or declare of the United States that their
+industrial future will be menaced till they have freed Trade Unionism
+from the threat of the so-called law of Conspiracy: or ask of our own
+so-called self-governing Dominions whether they are content with a
+system that concedes them no responsible control over the issues of
+peace and war. This is not to say that our own governmental machinery is
+perfect. Far from it. It was never in greater need of overhauling. It is
+only to reaffirm the belief, which no temporary disillusionment can
+shake, that it is founded on enduring principles which are not political
+but moral. To compare a system which aims at freedom and seeks to
+attain that aim through the working of responsible self-government with
+systems, however logically perfect or temporarily effective, which set
+no value on either, is, as it were, to compare black with white. It is
+to go back on the lessons of centuries of experience and to deny the
+cause, not of liberty alone, but of that progress of the spirit of man
+which it is the highest object of liberty to promote.
+
+We have no time here to discuss in detail the various English inventions
+in the art of politics, but we must pause to consider two of the most
+important, because they are typical of British methods. The first is the
+invention called the Principle of Representation. Representation is a
+device by which, and by which alone, the area of effective government
+can be extended without the sacrifice of liberty. It is a device by
+which the scattered many can make their will prevail over the few at the
+centre. Under any non-representative system, whether in a State or a
+Church or a Trade Union or any other association, men always find
+themselves set before the inexorable dilemma between freedom and
+weakness on the one hand and strength and tyranny on the other. Either
+the State or the association has to be kept small, so that the members
+themselves can meet and keep in touch with all that goes on. Or it is
+allowed to expand and grow strong, in which case power becomes
+concentrated at the centre and the great body of members loses all
+effective control. The ancient world saw no way out of this dilemma. The
+great Oriental monarchies never contemplated even the pretence of
+popular control. The city-states of Greece, where democracy originated,
+set such store in consequence by the personal liberty of the individual
+citizen, that they preferred to remain small, and suffered the
+inevitable penalty of their weakness. Rome, growing till she
+overshadowed the world, sacrificed liberty in the process. Nor was the
+Christian Church, when it became a large-scale organization, able to
+overcome the dilemma. It was not till thirteenth-century England that a
+way out was found. Edward I in summoning two burgesses from each borough
+and two knights from each shire to his model Parliament in 1295, hit on
+a method of doing business which was destined to revolutionize the art
+of government. He stipulated that the men chosen by their fellows to
+confer with him must come, to quote the exact words of the summons,
+armed with 'full and sufficient power for themselves and for the
+community of the aforesaid county, and the said citizens and burgesses
+for themselves and the communities of the aforesaid cities and boroughs
+separately, there and then, for doing what shall then be ordained
+according to the Common Council in the premises, so that the aforesaid
+business shall not remain unfinished in any way for defect of this
+power'. In other words, the members were to come to confer with the king
+not as individuals speaking for themselves alone, but as
+representatives. Their words and acts were to bind those on whose behalf
+they came, and those who chose them were to do so in the full knowledge
+that they would be so bound. In choosing them the electors deliberately
+surrendered their own share of initiative and sovereignty and combined
+to bestow it on a fellow citizen whom they trusted. In this way, and in
+this way alone, the people of Cornwall and of Northumberland could bring
+their wishes to bear and play their part, together with the people at
+the centre, in the government of a country many times the size of a
+city-state of ancient Greece. There had been assemblies before in all
+ages of history: but this was something different. It was a Parliament.
+
+Representation seems to us such an obvious device that we often forget
+how comparatively modern it is and what a degree of responsibility and
+self-control it demands both in the representative and in those whom he
+represents. It is very unpleasant to hear of things done or acquiesced
+in by our representatives of which we disapprove, and to have to
+remember that it is our own fault for not sending a wiser or braver man
+to Westminster in his place. It is still more unpleasant for a
+representative to feel, as he often must, that his own honest opinion
+and conscience draw him one way on a matter of business and the opinions
+of most of his constituents another. But these are difficulties inherent
+in the system, and for which there is no remedy but sincerity and
+patience. It is part of the bargain that a constituency should not be
+able to disavow a representative: and that a representative should feel
+bound to use his own best judgement on the issues put before him. To
+turn the representative, as there is a tendency to do in some quarters,
+into a mere mouthpiece with a mandate, is to ignore the very problem
+which made representation necessary, and to presume that a local
+mass-meeting can be as well informed or take as wide a view as those who
+have all the facts before them at the centre. The ancient Greeks, who
+had a strong sense of individuality, were loth to believe that any one
+human being could make a decision on behalf of another. In the deepest
+sense of course they were right. But government, as has been said, is at
+best a rough business. Representation is no more than a practical
+compromise: but it is a compromise which has been found to work. It has
+made possible the extension of free government to areas undreamed of. It
+has enabled the general sense of the inhabitants of the United States,
+an area nearly as large as Europe, to be concentrated at Washington, and
+it may yet make it possible to collect the sense of self-governing
+Dominions in four continents in a Parliament at London. All this lay
+implicit in the practical instructions sent by the English king to his
+sheriffs; but its development would only have been possible in a
+community where the general level of character was a high one and where
+men were, therefore, in the habit of placing implicit trust in one
+another. The relationship of confidence between a member of Parliament
+and his constituents, or a Trade Union leader and his rank and file, is
+a thing of which public men are rightly proud: for it reflects honour on
+both parties and testifies to an underlying community of purpose which
+no passing disagreement on details can break down.
+
+Representation paved the way for the modern development of responsible
+self-government. But it is important to recognize that the two are not
+the same thing. Responsible self-government, in its modern form, is a
+separate and more complex English invention in the art of government. A
+community may be decked out with a complete apparatus of representative
+institutions and yet remain little better than an autocracy. Modern
+Germany is a case in point. The parliamentary suffrage for the German
+Reichstag is more representative than that for the British House of
+Commons. The German workman is better represented in his Parliament than
+the British workman is in ours. But the German workman has far less
+power to make his will effective in matters of policy than the British,
+because the German constitution does not embody the principle of
+responsible self-government. Sovereignty still rests with the Kaiser as
+it rested in the thirteenth century with Edward I. The Imperial
+Chancellor is not responsible to the Reichstag but to the Kaiser, by
+whom he is appointed and whose personal servant he remains. The
+Reichstag can discuss the actions of the Chancellor: it can advise him,
+or protest to him, or even pass votes of censure against him; but it
+cannot make its will effective. We can observe the working of similar
+representative institutions in different parts of the British
+Commonwealth. The provinces of India and many British Colonies have
+variously composed representative assemblies, but in all cases without
+the power to control their executives. The self-governing Dominions, on
+the other hand, do enjoy responsible self-government, but in an
+incomplete form, because the most vital of all issues of policy are
+outside their control. On questions of foreign policy, and the issues of
+war and peace, the Parliaments of the Dominions, and the citizens they
+represent, are, constitutionally speaking, as helpless as the most
+ignorant native in the humblest dependency. Representative institutions
+in themselves thus no more ensure real self-government than the setting
+up of a works committee of employees in a factory would ensure that the
+workmen ran the factory. The distinction between representation and
+effective responsibility is so simple that it seems a platitude to
+mention it. Yet it is constantly ignored, both in this country by those
+who speak of Colonial self-government as though the Dominions really
+enjoyed the same self-government as the people of these islands, and by
+the parties in Germany whose programme it is, not to make Germany a
+truly constitutional country, but to assimilate the retrograde Prussian
+franchise to the broader representation of the Reichstag.
+
+Wherein does the transition from representation to full responsibility
+consist? It came about in England when Parliament, instead of merely
+being consulted by the sovereign, felt itself strong enough to give
+orders to the sovereign. The sovereign naturally resisted, as the Kaiser
+and the Tsar will resist in their turn; but in this country the battle
+was fought and won in the seventeenth century. Since that time, with a
+few vacillations, Parliament has been the sovereign power. But once this
+transfer of sovereignty has taken place, a new problem arises. A
+Parliament of several hundred members, even though it meets regularly,
+is not competent to transact the multitudinous and complex and highly
+specialized business of a modern State. The original function of
+Parliament was to advise, to discuss, and to criticize. It is not an
+instrument fit for the work of execution and administration. Having
+become sovereign, its first business must be to create out of its own
+members an instrument which should carry out its own policy and be
+responsible to itself for its actions. Hence arose the Cabinet. The
+Cabinet is, as it were, a distillation of Parliament, just as Parliament
+itself is a distillation of the country. It consists of members of
+Parliament and it is in constant touch with Parliament; but its methods
+are not the methods of Parliament but of the older, more direct, organs
+of government which Parliament superseded. It meets in secret: it holds
+all the strings of policy: it has almost complete control of political
+and legislative initiative: it decides what is to be done and when and
+how: it has its own staff of agents and confidential advisers in the
+Departments and elsewhere whose acts are largely withdrawn from the
+knowledge and criticism of Parliament. A modern Cabinet in fact is open
+to the charge of being autocracy in a new guise. Such a charge would, of
+course, be a gross overstatement. But there is no doubt that the
+increasing complexity in the tasks of government has led to a
+corresponding growth of power and organization at the centre which has
+strengthened the Cabinet immeasurably of recent years at the expense of
+the direct representatives of the people. There are, however, powerful
+influences at work in the opposite direction, towards decentralization
+and new forms of representation, which there is no space to touch on
+here. Suffice it to say that here, as elsewhere, the price of liberty is
+eternal vigilance.
+
+England, then, and all who enjoy the full privileges of British
+citizenship have been placed by the progress of events in a position of
+peculiar responsibility. The twentieth century finds us the centre of
+the widest experiment of self-government which the world has ever seen;
+for the principles of liberty, first tested in this island, have
+approved themselves on the soil of North America, Australasia, and South
+Africa. It finds us also responsible for the government and for the
+training in responsibility of some 350,000,000 members of the more
+politically inexperienced and backward races of mankind, or about
+one-fifth of the human race. The growth of the British Commonwealth,
+about which so astonishingly little is known either by ourselves or by
+other peoples, is not a mere happy or unhappy accident. It is one of the
+inevitable and decisive developments in the history of mankind. It is
+the direct result of that widening of intercourse, that
+internationalizing of the world, to which reference has already been
+made. It represents the control of law and organized government over the
+blind and selfish forces of exploitation. In the exercise of this
+control we have often ourselves been blind and sometimes selfish. But
+'the situation of man', as Burke finely said of our Indian Empire, 'is
+the preceptor of his duty'. The perseverance of the British character,
+its habit of concentration on the work that lies to hand, and the
+influence of our traditional social and political ideals, have slowly
+brought us to a deeper insight, till to-day the Commonwealth is becoming
+alive to the real nature of its task--the extension and consolidation of
+liberty. If it has thus taken up, in part, the work of the mediaeval
+Empire and has had a measure of success where the other failed, it is
+because of the character of its individual citizens, because despite
+constant and heart-breaking failures in knowledge and imagination, we
+are a people who, in the words of a stern, if friendly, critic, 'with
+great self-assertion and a bull-dog kind of courage, have yet a
+singular amount of gentleness and tenderness'.[66]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+We have come to the end of our long survey. Some of you may feel that I
+have fetched too wide a compass and given too wide an extension to the
+meaning of government. But if I have sinned I have sinned of set
+purpose. I refuse to confine government within the limits of what is
+ordinarily called politics, or to discuss the association called the
+State in isolation from other sides of man's community life. To do so, I
+feel, is to lay oneself open to one of two opposite errors: the error of
+those for whom the State is the Almighty, and who invest it with a
+superhuman morality and authority of its own; and the error of those who
+draw in their skirts in horror from the touch of what Nietzsche called
+this 'cold monster' and take refuge in monastic detachment from the
+political responsibilities of their time. We must be able to see
+politics as a part of life before we can see it steadily and see it
+whole. We must be able to see it in relation to the general ordering of
+the world and to connect it once more, as in the Middle Ages, with
+religion and morality. No thinking man can live through such a time as
+this and preserve his faith unless he is sustained by the belief that
+the clash of States which is darkening our generation is not a mere
+blind collision of forces, but has spiritual bearings which affect each
+individual living soul born or to be born in the world. It is not for us
+to anticipate the verdict of history. But what we can do is to bear
+ourselves worthily, in thought and speech, like our soldiers in action,
+of the times in which we live--to testify, as it were, in our own lives,
+to that for which so many of our friends have laid down theirs. We are
+met at a culminating moment of human fate--when, so far as human
+judgement can discern, the political destinies of this planet are being
+settled for many generations to come--perhaps for good. If the task of
+leadership in the arts of government remains with us, let us face the
+responsibility conscious of the vast spiritual issues which it involves,
+and let us so plan and act that history, looking back on these years of
+blood, may date from them a new birth of freedom and progress, not for
+ourselves in this country alone but throughout that kingdom of Man which
+must one day, as we believe, become in very truth the kingdom of God.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+1. _Man's Control over Nature_:
+
+   Ray Lankester, _The Kingdom of Man_, and other essays. 1912.
+
+   Demolins, _Comment la route cree le type social_.
+
+   Curtis (ed. by), _The Commonwealth of Nations_. Vol. i, 1916.
+
+   Murphy, _The Basis of Ascendancy_. 1909.
+
+   _Introduction to the Study of International Relations_ (Greenwood
+   and others). 1916.
+
+2. _Political Ideals_:
+
+   _The Jews_: Todd, _Politics and Religion in Ancient Israel_. 1904.
+
+   _Greece_: _Aristotle's Politics_, translated by B. Jowett. 1908.
+
+   Dickinson, _The Greek View of Life_. 1909.
+
+   Barker, _The Political thought of Plato and Aristotle_. 1908.
+
+   _Rome_: H. Stuart Jones, _The Roman Empire_. (Story of the
+   Nations.) 1908. Warde Fowler, _Rome_ (Home University
+   Series).
+
+   _The Middle Ages_: A. L. Smith, _Church and State in the Middle
+   Ages_. 1911.
+
+   Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Ages_ (introduction by
+   Maitland). 1900.
+
+   _Miscellaneous_: Wallas, _Human Nature in Politics_. 1908.
+
+   Acton, _The History of Freedom_, and other essays. 1909.
+
+   Lowell, _The Government of England_.
+
+   Buelow, _Imperial Germany_. 1916.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[53] A. L. Smith, _Church and State in the Middle Ages_, pp. 207-8.
+
+[54] Lankester, _Nature and Man_, Romanes Lecture, 1905, pp. 27-9.
+
+[55] _The Commonwealth of Nations_, edited by L. Curtis, Part I, p. 130.
+
+[56] Ibid., p. 166.
+
+[57] P. H. Kerr in _An Introduction to the Study of International
+Relations_, 1915, p. 149.
+
+[58] A still better name would be the Great Responsibilities.
+
+[59] _Second Thoughts of an Economist_, 1916, pp. 17-18, 22.
+
+[60] _Freedom and other Essays_, p. 22.
+
+[61] Isaiah lxvi. 2; lvii. 19, 21; ii. 3, 4.
+
+[62] _Ecclesiastical Polity_, Book I, ch. xvi. 5.
+
+[63] End of Book I of the _Ecclesiastical Polity_.
+
+[64] Gierke, _Political Theories of the Middle Age_, pp. 8 and 10.
+
+[65] _The Commonwealth of Nations_, Part I, p. 73.
+
+[66] _Memoirs and letters of Sir Robert Morier_, ii. 276.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+PROGRESS IN INDUSTRY
+
+A. E. ZIMMERN
+
+
+In our study of Government we traced the upward course of the common
+life of mankind in the world. We saw it in the increasing control of Man
+over his physical environment, and we saw it also in his clearer
+realization of the ultimate ideal of government--the ordering of the
+world's affairs on the basis of liberty. We have now to turn aside from
+this main stream of social development to watch one particular branch of
+it--to survey man's record in the special department of economics. We
+shall no longer be studying human history, or the history of human
+society, as a whole, but what is known as economic or industrial
+history.
+
+It is important to be clear at the outset that economic or industrial
+history _is_ a tributary stream and not the main stream: for there are a
+number of people who are of the contrary opinion. There has been an
+increasing tendency of recent years to write human history in terms of
+economic or industrial progress. 'Tell me what men ate or wore or
+manufactured,' say historians of this school, 'and we will tell you what
+stage of civilization he had reached. We will place him in his proper
+pigeonhole in our arrangement of the record of human progress.' Did he
+use flint implements or fight with nothing but a bow and arrow? Did he
+use a canoe with a primitive pole which he had not even the sense to
+flatten so as to make it into a serviceable paddle? Then our
+sociologist will put him very low down on his list of the stages of
+human progress. For the modern sociologist is a confirmed plutocrat. He
+measures the character of men and races by their wealth. Just as
+old-fashioned people still think of the society of our own country as a
+hierarchy, in which the various classes are graded according to their
+social prestige and the extent of their possessions: so students of
+primitive civilization classify races according to their material
+equipment, and can hardly help yielding to the temptation of reckoning
+their stage of progress as a whole by the only available test. Thus it
+is common, especially in Germany and the United States, to find
+histories of what purports to be the progress of mankind which show man
+first as a hunter and a fisherman, then as a shepherd, then as a tiller
+of the soil, and then work upwards to the complicated industrial system
+of to-day. We are asked to accept the life of Abraham or David among the
+sheepfolds as the bottom of the ladder, and the life of a modern
+wage-earner under the smoky sky of a manufacturing area as the top; and
+when we complain and say, as men like William Morris and Stephen Graham
+are always saying, that we would far prefer to live in David's world, in
+spite of all its discomforts, we are told that we have no right to
+quarrel with the sacred principle of Evolution.
+
+To interpret human history in this way is, of course, to deny its
+spiritual meaning, to deny that it is a record of the progress of the
+human _spirit_ at all. It is to read it as a tale of the improvement, or
+rather the increasing complication, of _things_, rather than of the
+advance of man. It is to view the world as a Domain of Matter, not as
+the Kingdom of Man--still less, as the Kingdom of God. It is to tie us
+helplessly to the chariot wheels of an industrial Juggernaut which knows
+nothing of moral values. Let the progress of industry make life noisy
+and ugly and anxious and unhappy: let it engross the great mass of
+mankind in tedious and uncongenial tasks and the remainder in the
+foolish and unsatisfying activities of luxurious living; let it defile
+the green earth with pits and factories and slag-heaps and the mean
+streets of those who toil at them, and dim the daylight with exhalations
+of monstrous vapour. It is not for us to complain or to resist: for we
+are in the grip of a Power which is greater than ourselves, a Power to
+which mankind in all five continents has learnt to yield--that Economic
+Process which is, in truth, the God, or the Devil, of the modern world.
+
+No thinking man dare acquiesce in such a conclusion or consent to bow
+the head before such fancied necessities. The function of industry, he
+will reply, is to serve human life not to master it: to beautify human
+life not to degrade it: to set life free not to enslave it. Economics is
+not the whole of life: and when it transgresses its bounds and exceeds
+its functions it must be controlled and thrust back into its place by
+the combined activities of men. The soul is higher than the body, and
+life is more than housekeeping. Liberty is higher than Riches, and the
+welfare of the community more important than its economic and material
+progress. These great processes, which the increase of man's knowledge
+has set in motion, are not impersonal inhuman forces: Men originated
+them: men administer them: and men must control them. Against economic
+necessity let us set political necessity: and let the watchword of that
+political necessity, here as always, be the freedom and the well-being
+of mankind.
+
+With this caution in mind, then, let us approach our subject.
+
+What is Economics? Economics is simply the Greek for 'house-keeping'. If
+writers and thinkers on the subject had only kept this simple fact in
+mind, or used the English word instead of the Greek, the world would
+have been saved much misery and confusion. Political economy is not,
+what Mill and other writers define it to be, 'the Science of Wealth'. It
+is the art of community-housekeeping, and community-housekeeping, as
+every woman knows, is a very important if subsidiary branch of the art
+of community-management or government.
+
+Housekeeping, of course, is not a selfish but a social function.
+Housewives do not lay in bread and cheese simply to gratify their own
+desire to be possessors of a large store, but for the sake of their
+household. The true housekeeper or economic man is the man who is
+consciously ministering to the real needs of the community. Like the
+ruler or minister in the political sphere, he is a man who is performing
+a public service.
+
+This is equally true whether the housekeeper has a monopoly of the
+purchase of bread and cheese for the household, or whether he or she has
+to compete with others as to which is to be allowed to serve the public
+in that particular transaction. Just as, under the party system, which
+seems to be inseparable from the working of democratic institutions, men
+stand for Parliament and compete for the honour of representing their
+neighbours, so in most systems of industry men compete for the honour of
+supplying the public. Competition in industry is practically as old as
+industry. In the earliest picture that has come down to us of Greek
+village life we read of the competition between potter and potter and
+between minstrel and minstrel--a competition as keen and as fierce, we
+may be sure, as that between rival shopkeepers to-day. For the opposite
+of competition, as has been truly said, is not co-operation but monopoly
+or bureaucracy: and there is no short and easy means of deciding between
+the rival systems. Sometimes the community is better served by
+entrusting one department wholly to one purveyor or one system of
+management--as in the Postal Service, or the Army and Navy. Sometimes it
+is clearly better to leave the matter open to competition. Nobody, for
+instance, would propose to do with only one minstrel, and seal the lips
+of all poets but the Poet Laureate. Sometimes, as in the case of the
+organized professions and the liquor trade, a strictly regulated system
+of competition has been considered best. No doubt the tendency at the
+present time is setting strongly against competition and towards more
+unified and more closely organized systems of doing business. But it is
+important to make quite clear that there is nothing immoral or
+anti-social about the fact of competition itself, and nothing
+inconsistent with the idea of service and co-operation which should
+underlie all social and economic activity. It is not competition itself,
+as people often wrongly think, which is the evil, but the shallow and
+selfish motives and the ruthless trampling down of the weak that are too
+often associated with it. When we condemn the maxim 'the Devil take the
+hindmost', it is not because we think we ought to treat the hindmost as
+though he were the foremost--to buy cracked jars or patronize incapable
+minstrels. It is because we feel that there is a wrong standard of
+reward among those who have pushed to the front, and that the community
+as a whole cannot ignore its responsibility towards its less fortunate
+and capable members.
+
+It is, indeed, quite impossible to abolish competition for the patronage
+of the household without subjecting its members to tyranny or tying them
+down to an intolerable uniformity--forcing them to suppress their own
+temporary likes or dislikes and to go on taking in the same stuff in the
+same quantities world without end. For the most serious and permanent
+competition is not that between rival purveyors of the same goods,
+between potter and potter and minstrel and minstrel, but between one
+set of goods and another: between the potter and the blacksmith, the
+minstrel and the painter. If we abolished competition permanently
+between the British railways we could not make sure that the public
+would always use them as it does now. People would still be at liberty
+to walk or to drive or to bicycle or to fly, or, at the very worst, to
+stay at home. Competition, as every business man knows, sometimes arises
+from the most unexpected quarters. The picture-house and the bicycle
+have damaged the brewer and the publican. Similarly the motor-car and
+the golf links have spoilt the trade in the fine china ornaments such as
+used to be common in expensively furnished drawing-rooms. People sit
+less in their rooms, so spend less on decorating them. The members of
+the household always retain ultimate control over their economic life,
+if they care to exercise it. 'Whoso has sixpence,' as Carlyle said, 'is
+sovereign (to the length of sixpence), over all men; commands Cooks to
+feed him, Philosophers to teach him, Kings to mount guard over him,'--to
+the length of sixpence. Passive resistance and the boycott are always
+open to the public in the last resort against any of their servants who
+has abused the powers of his position. A good instance of this occurred
+in the events which led to the so-called Tobacco riots in Milan in 1848.
+The Austrians thought they could force the Italians in their Lombard
+provinces to pay for a government they hated by putting a heavy tax on
+tobacco. But the Italians, with more self-control than we have shown in
+the present war, with one accord gave up smoking. Here was a plain
+competition between a monopoly and the consumer, between tobacco and
+patriotism: between a united household and an unpopular servant: and the
+household won, as it always can unless its members are incapable of
+combined action or have been deprived by governmental tyranny of all
+power to associate and to organize.
+
+We are faced then with a community or household which has certain wants
+that need to be supplied. The individual members of the community are
+justified, within the limits of general well-being,[67] in deciding what
+are their own wants and how to satisfy them. They claim the right to
+_demand_, as the economists put it, the goods and services they require,
+bread and cheese, poetry, tobacco, motor-bicycles, china ornaments. In
+order to meet those demands, which are stable in essentials but subject
+to constant modification in detail, there is ceaseless activity,
+rivalry, competition, on the part of the purveyors--on the side of what
+economists call _supply_. The business of housekeeping, or what is
+called the economic process, is that of bringing this demand and this
+supply into relation with one another. If the members of the household
+said they wanted to eat the moon instead of sugar, their demand would
+not be an economic demand: for no housekeeper could satisfy it.
+Similarly on the supply side: if the baker insisted on bringing round
+bad epics instead of bread and the grocer bad sonatas instead of sugar,
+the supply, however good it might seem to the baker and the grocer, and
+however much satisfaction they might personally have derived from their
+work, would not be an economic supply: for the housekeeper, acting on
+behalf of the household, would not take it in. But if the demand was for
+something not yet available, but less impossibly remote than the moon,
+the housekeeper might persuade the purveyors to cudgel their brains till
+they had met the need. For, as we know, Necessity, which is another word
+for Demand, is the mother of invention. Similarly, if a purveyor
+supplied something undreamed of by the household, but otherwise good of
+its kind, he might succeed in persuading the household to like it--in
+other words, in creating a demand. The late Sir Alfred Jones, by putting
+bananas cheap on the market, persuaded us that we liked them. Similarly
+Mr. Marvin, who deals in something better than bananas, has persuaded us
+all to come here, though most of us would never have thought of it
+unless he had created the demand in us.
+
+Economic Progress, then, is progress both on the side of demand and on
+the side of supply. It is a progress in wants as well as in their means
+of satisfaction: a progress in the aspirations of the household as well
+as in the contrivances of its purveyors: a progress in the sense of what
+life might be, as well as in the skill and genius and organizing powers
+of those to whom the community looks for help in the realization of its
+hopes. It is important that this double aspect of our subject should be
+realized, for in what follows we shall have no opportunity to dwell
+further upon it. Space compels us to leave the household and its wants
+and aspirations out of account and to direct our attention solely to the
+side of supply; although it must always be remembered that no real and
+permanent progress in the organization of production is possible without
+improvements in the quality and reduction in the number of the
+requirements of what is called civilization.[68] What we have to watch,
+in our study of progress in industry, is the history of man as a
+purveyor of the household: in other words, as a producer of goods and
+services: from the days of the primitive savage with his bark canoe to
+the gigantic industrial enterprises of our own time.
+
+We can best do so by dividing our subject into two on somewhat similar
+lines to the division in our study of government. Let us consider
+industry, first as an activity involving a relationship between man and
+Nature; secondly, as involving what may be called a problem of
+industrial government, a problem arising out of the co-operation between
+man and man in industrial work. In the first of these aspects we shall
+see man as a maker, an inventor, an artist; in the second as a subject
+or a citizen, a slave or a free man, in the Industrial Commonwealth.
+
+Man as a maker or producer carries us back to the dawn of history. Man
+is a tool-using animal and the early stages of human history are a
+record of the elaboration of tools. The flint axes in our museums are
+the earliest monuments of the activity of the human spirit. We do not
+know what the cave men of the Old Stone Age said or thought, or indeed
+whether they did anything that we should call speaking or thinking at
+all; but we know what they made. Centuries and millenniums elapsed
+between them and the first peoples of whom we have any more intimate
+record--centuries during which the foundations of our existing
+industrial knowledge and practice were being steadily laid. 'One may say
+in general,' says Mr. Marvin,[69]
+
+     that most of the fruitful practical devices of mankind had
+     their origin in prehistoric times, many of them existing
+     then with little essential difference. Any one of them
+     affords a lesson in the gradual elaboration of the simple. A
+     step minute in itself leads on and on, and so all the
+     practical arts are built up, a readier and more observant
+     mind imitating and adapting the work of predecessors, as we
+     imagined the first man making his first flint axe. The
+     history of the plough goes back to the elongation of a bent
+     stick. The wheel would arise from cutting out the middle of
+     a trunk used as a roller. House architecture is the
+     imitation with logs and mud of the natural shelters of the
+     rocks, and begins its great development when men have learnt
+     to make square corners instead of a rough circle. And so on
+     with all the arts of life or pleasure, including clothing,
+     cooking, tilling, sailing, and fighting.
+
+How did this gradual progress come about? Mr. Marvin himself supplies
+the answer. Through the action of the 'readier and more observant
+minds'--in other words, through specialization and the division of
+labour. As far back as we can go in history we find a recognition that
+men are not all alike, that some have one gift and some another, and
+that it is to the advantage of society to let each use his own gift in
+the public service. Among primitive peoples there has indeed often been
+a belief that men are compensated for physical weakness and disability
+by peculiar excellence in some sphere of their own. Hephaestos among the
+Greek gods was lame: so he becomes a blacksmith and uses his arms. Homer
+is blind: so instead of fighting he sings of war. They would not go so
+far as to maintain that all lame men must be good blacksmiths or all
+blind men good poets: but at least they recognized that there was room
+in the community for special types and that the blacksmith and the poet
+were as useful as the ordinary run of cultivators and fighting men. The
+Greek word for craftsman--[Greek: demiourgos]--'worker for the people,'
+shows how the Greeks felt on this point. To them poetry and
+craftsmanship were as much honourable occupations or, as we should say,
+professional activities as fighting and tilling. Whether Homer took to
+poetry because he could not fight or because he had an overwhelming
+poetic gift, he had justified his place in the community.
+
+Specialization is the foundation of all craftsmanship and therefore the
+source of all industrial progress. We recognize this, of course, in
+common speech. 'Practice makes perfect,' 'Genius is an infinite capacity
+for taking pains,' are only different ways of saying that it is not
+enough to be 'ready' and 'observant', but that continued activity and
+concentration are necessary. A perfect industrial community would not be
+a community where everybody was doing the same thing: nor would it be a
+community where every one was doing just what he liked at the moment: it
+would be a community where every one was putting all his strength into
+the work which he was by nature best qualified to do--where, in the
+words of Kipling:
+
+    No one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
+    But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
+    Shall draw the thing as he sees it for the God of Things as They Are.
+
+Progress in industry, then, on this side, consists in increasing
+specialization and in the perfection of the relationship between the
+workman and his work. Man in this world is destined to labour, and
+labour is often described as the curse of Adam. But in reality, as every
+one knows who has tried it, or observed the habits of those who have,
+idleness is far more of a curse than labour. Few men--at any rate in the
+temperate zone--can be consistently idle and remain happy. The born
+idler is almost as rare as the born poet. Most men, and, it must be
+added, most women, are happier working. If holidays were the rule and
+work the exception the world would be a much less cheerful place than it
+is even to-day. Purposeful activity is as natural to man as playing is
+to a kitten. From a purely natural point of view, no one has ever given
+a better definition of happiness than Aristotle when he defined it as
+_an activity of the soul in the direction of excellence in an unhampered
+life_. By excellence, of course, in this famous definition, Aristotle
+does not mean simply virtue: he means excellence in work. It is
+impossible, as we all know, to be good in the abstract. We must be good
+in some particular directions, _at_ some particular thing. And the
+particular thing that we are good at is _our_ work, our craft, our
+art--or, to use our less aesthetic English word, for which there is no
+equivalent in Greek, our duty. If happiness is to be found in doing
+one's duty, it does not result from doing that duty badly, but from
+doing it well--turning out, as we say, a thoroughly good piece of work,
+whether a day's work or a life work. There is a lingering idea, still
+held in some quarters, that the more unpleasant an activity is the more
+virtuous it is. This is a mere barbarous survival from the days of what
+Nietzsche called slave-morality. We are each of us born with special
+individual gifts and capacities. There is, if we only knew it, some
+particular kind or piece of work which we are pre-eminently fitted to
+do--some particular activity or profession, be it held in high or in low
+repute in the world of to-day, in which we can win the steady happiness
+of purposeful labour. Shall we then say that it ministers to human
+progress and to the glory of God deliberately to bury our talent out of
+sight and to seek rather work which, because it is irksome and
+unpleasant to us, we can never succeed in doing either easily or really
+well? No one who knows anything of education or of the training of the
+young, no one, indeed, who has any love for children, would dare to say
+that we should. Our State educational system, miserably defective though
+it is in this regard, is based upon the idea of ministering to the
+special gifts of its pupils--of trying by scholarships, by Care
+Committees, by the institution of schools with a special 'bias', to meet
+the needs of different kinds of young people and to set them in the path
+on which they are best fitted to travel.
+
+In doing this the modern State is only trying to carry out the
+principle laid down in the greatest book ever written on
+education--Plato's _Republic_. Plato's object was to train every citizen
+to fill the one position where he could lead the best life for the good
+of the State. His aim was not to make his citizens happy but to promote
+goodness; but he had enough faith in human nature--and who can be an
+educational thinker without having faith in human nature?--to be
+convinced that to enable men to 'do their bit', as we say to-day, was to
+assure them of the truest happiness. We of this generation know how
+abundantly that faith has been confirmed. And indeed we can appeal in
+this matter not only to the common sense of Education Authorities or to
+the philosophy of the ancients, but to the principles of the Christian
+religion. The late Professor Smart, who was not only a good economist
+but a good man; has some very pertinent words on this subject. 'If for
+some reason that we know not of,' he remarks,[70]
+
+     this present is merely the first stage in being; if we are
+     all at school, and not merely pitched into the world by
+     chance to pick up our living as best we can ... it seems to
+     me that we have reason enough to complain of the existing
+     economic system.... I imagine that many of our churchgoing
+     people, if they ever get to the heaven they sing about, will
+     find themselves most uncomfortable, if it be a place for
+     which they have made no preparation but in the 'business' in
+     which they have earned their living.... A man's daily work
+     is a far greater thing towards the development of the God
+     that is in him than his wealth. And, however revolutionary
+     the idea is, I must say that all our accumulations of wealth
+     are little to the purpose of life if they do not tend
+     towards the giving to all men the opportunity of such work
+     as will have its reward _in the doing_.
+
+And of his own particular life-work, teaching, he remarks, in words that
+testify to his own inner peace and happiness, that 'some of us have got
+into occupations which almost seem to guarantee immortality'.
+
+Let us, then, boldly lay it down that the best test of progress in
+industry and the best measure of success in any industrial system is the
+degree to which it enables men to 'do their bit' and so to find
+happiness in their daily work, or if you prefer more distinctively
+religious language, the degree to which it enables men to develop the
+God that is in them. Let us have the courage to say that in the great
+battle which Ruskin and William Morris fought almost single-handed
+against all the Philistines of the nineteenth century, Ruskin and
+Morris, however wrong they may have been on points of practical detail,
+were right in principle. Let us make up our minds that a world in which
+men have surrendered the best hours of the day to unsatisfying drudgery,
+and banished happiness to their brief periods of tired leisure, is so
+far from civilized that it has not even made clear to itself wherein
+civilization consists. And when we read such a passage as the following
+from a leading modern economist, let us not yield to the promptings of
+our lower nature and acquiesce in its apparent common sense, but
+remember that economists, like all workmen, are bounded by the limits of
+their own particular craft or study. 'The greater part of the world's
+work,' says Professor Taussig,[71] the leading exponent of Economics at
+Harvard,
+
+     is not in itself felt to be pleasurable. Some reformers have
+     hoped to reach a social system under which all work would be
+     in itself a source of satisfaction. It is probable that
+     such persons are made optimistic by the nature of their own
+     doings. They are writers, schemers, reformers; they are
+     usually of strongly altruistic character, and the
+     performance of any duty or set task brings to them the
+     approval of an exacting conscience; and they believe that
+     all mankind can be brought to labour in their own spirit.
+     The world would be a much happier place if their state of
+     mind could be made universal. But the great mass of men are
+     of a humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or any
+     loftiness of character. Moreover, most of the world's work
+     for the satisfaction of our primary wants must be of a
+     humdrum sort, and often of a rough and coarse sort. There
+     must be ditching and delving, sowing and reaping, hammering
+     and sawing, and all the severe physical exertion which,
+     however lightened by tools and machinery, yet can never be
+     other than labour in the ordinary sense of the word.
+
+When Professor Taussig assures us that 'the great mass of men are of a
+humdrum sort, not born with any marked bent or loftiness of character'
+he is simply denying the Christian religion. To argue the point with him
+would carry us too far. We will do no more here than remind him that the
+people to whom the Founder of Christianity preached, and even those who
+were chosen to be its first disciples, were, like this audience,
+distinctly humdrum, and that assuredly the American Professor would not
+have discerned in them promising material for a world-transforming
+religious movement. What people see in others is often a mirror of
+themselves. Perhaps Professor Taussig, in spite of his excellent book,
+is rather a humdrum person himself.
+
+When, however, Professor Taussig declares that 'the greater part of the
+world's work is not in itself felt to be pleasurable' he is saying what,
+under existing conditions, we must all recognize to be true. A year or
+two ago Mr. Graham Wallas made an investigation into this very question,
+the results of which confirmed the general impression that modern
+workmen find little happiness in their work.[72] But two of the
+conclusions which he reached conflict in a rather curious way with the
+statement of Professor Taussig. Mr. Wallas's evidence, which was largely
+drawn from students of Ruskin College, led him to the conclusion 'that
+there is less pleasantness or happiness in work the nearer it approaches
+the fully organized Great Industry'. The only workman who spoke
+enthusiastically of his work was an agricultural labourer who 'was very
+emphatic with regard to the pleasure to be obtained from agricultural
+work'. Professor Taussig, on the other hand, selects four agricultural
+occupations, ditching, delving, sowing, and reaping, as
+characteristically unpleasant and looks to machinery and the apparatus
+of the Industrial Revolution to counteract this unpleasantness. But the
+most interesting evidence gathered by Mr. Wallas was that relating to
+women workers. He had an opportunity of collecting the views of girls
+employed in the laundries and poorer kind of factories in Boston. 'The
+answers', he says,[73] 'surprised me greatly. I expected to hear those
+complaints about bad wages, hard conditions and arbitrary discipline
+which a body of men working at the same grade of labour would certainly
+have put forward. But it was obvious that the question "Are you happy?"
+meant to the girls "Are you happier than you would have been if you had
+stayed at home instead of going to work?" And almost every one of them
+answered "Yes".' Why were they unhappy at home? Let Professor Taussig
+reflect on the answer. Not because they had 'rough' or 'coarse' or
+'humdrum' work to do, as in a factory or laundry, but because they had
+nothing to do, and they had found idleness unbearable. 'One said that
+work "took up her mind", she had been awfully discontented'. Another
+that 'you were of some use'. Another thought 'it was because the hours
+went so much faster. At home one could read, but only for a short time,
+there was the awful lonesome afternoon ahead of you.' 'Asked a little
+girl with dyed hair but a good little heart. She enjoyed her work. It
+made her feel she was worth something.' And Mr. Wallas concludes that it
+is just because 'everything that is interesting, even though it is
+laborious, in the women's arts of the old village is gone': because
+'clothes are bought ready-made, food is bought either ready-cooked, like
+bread and jam and fish, or only requiring the simplest kind of cooking':
+in fact just because physical exertion has been lightened by books and
+machinery, that 'there results a mass of inarticulate unhappiness whose
+existence has hardly been indicated by our present method of
+sociological enquiry'.
+
+It would seem then that the task of associating modern industrial work
+with happiness is not impossible, if we would only set ourselves to the
+task. And the task is a two-fold one. It is, first, to make it possible
+for people to follow the employment for which they are by nature best
+fitted; and secondly, to study much more closely than heretofore, from
+the point of view of happiness, the conditions under which work is done.
+The first task involves a very considerable reversal of current
+educational and social values. It does not simply mean paving the way
+for the son of an engine-driver to become a doctor or a lawyer or a
+cavalryman. It means paving the way for the son of a duke to become,
+without any sense of social failure, an engine-driver or a merchant
+seaman or a worker on the land--and to do so not, as to-day, in the
+decent seclusion of British Columbia or Australia, but in our own
+country and without losing touch, if he desires it, with his own natural
+circle of friends. The ladder is an old and outworn metaphor in this
+connexion. Yet it is still worth remembering that the Angels whom Jacob
+observed upon it were both ascending and descending. It is one of the
+fallacies of our social system to believe that a ladder should only be
+used in one direction--and that the direction which tends to remove men
+from contact and sympathy with their fellows. But in truth we need to
+discard the metaphor of the ladder altogether, with its implied
+suggestion that some tasks of community-service are more honourable and
+involve more of what the world calls 'success' than others. We do not
+desire a system of education which picks out for promotion minds gifted
+with certain kinds of capacity and stimulates them with the offer of
+material rewards, while the so-called humdrum remainder are left, with
+their latent talents undiscovered and undeveloped.
+
+Recent educational experiments,[74] and not least that most testing of
+all school examinations, the war, have shown us that we must revise all
+our old notions as to cleverness and stupidity. We know now that, short
+of real mental deficiency, there is or ought to be no such personage as
+the dunce. Just as the criminal is generally a man of unusual energy and
+mental power directed into wrong channels, so the dunce is a pupil whose
+special powers and aptitudes have not revealed themselves in the routine
+of school life. And just as the criminal points to serious defects in
+our social system, so the dunce points to serious defects in our
+educational system. The striking record of our industrial schools and
+reformatories in the war shows what young criminals and dunces can do
+when they are given a fair field for their special gifts. One of the
+chief lessons to be drawn from the war is the need for a new spirit and
+outlook in our national education from the elementary school to the
+University. We need a system which treats every child, rich or poor, as
+a living and developing personality, which enables every English boy and
+girl to stay at school at least up to the time when his or her natural
+bent begins to disclose itself, which provides for all classes of the
+community skilled guidance in the choice of employment based upon
+psychological study of individual gifts and aptitude,[75] which sets up
+methods of training and apprenticeship in the different trades--or, as I
+would prefer to call them the different professions--such as to
+counteract the deadening influence of premature specialization, and
+which ensures good conditions and a sense of self-respect and
+community-service to all in their self-chosen line of life, whether
+their bent be manual or mechanical or commercial or administrative, or
+for working on the land or for going to sea, or towards the more special
+vocations of teaching or scholarship or the law or medicine or the cure
+of souls. No one can estimate how large a share of the unhappiness
+associated with our existing social system is due to the fact that,
+owing to defects in our education and our arrangements for the choice of
+employment, there are myriads of square pegs in round holes. This
+applies with especial force to women, to whom many of the square holes
+are still inaccessible, not simply owing to the lack of opportunities
+for individuals, but owing to the inhibitions of custom and, in some
+cases, to narrow and retrograde professional enactments. The war has
+brought women their chance, not only in the office and the workshop,
+but in higher administrative and organizing positions, and not the least
+of its results is the revelation of undreamt-of capacities in these
+directions.
+
+In the second task, that of perfecting the adaptation between men and
+their tools, we have much to learn from the industrial history of the
+past. It is natural for men to enjoy 'talking shop', and this esoteric
+bond of union has existed between workmen in all ages. We may be sure
+that there were discussions amongst connoisseurs in the Stone Age as to
+the respective merits of their flint axes, just as there are to-day
+between golfers about niblicks and putters, and between surgeons as to
+the technique of the extraction of an appendix. A good workman loves his
+tools. He is indeed inseparable from them, as our law acknowledges by
+forbidding a bankrupt's tools to be sold up. Give a good workman, in
+town or country, a sympathetic listener and he is only too ready to
+expatiate on his daily work. This sense of kinship between men and their
+tools and material is so little understood by some of our modern expert
+organizers of industry that it is worth while illustrating it at some
+length. I make no apology, therefore, for quoting a striking passage
+from an essay by Mr. George Bourne, who is not a trade unionist or a
+student of Labour politics but an observer of English village life, who
+has taken the trouble to penetrate the mind of what is commonly regarded
+as the stupidest and most backward--as it is certainly the least
+articulate--class of workmen in this country, the agricultural labourer
+in the southern counties. 'The men', he writes,
+
+     are commonly too modest about their work, and too
+     unconscious that it can interest an outsider, to dream of
+     discussing it. What they have to say would not therefore by
+     itself go far in demonstration of their acquirements in
+     technique. Fortunately, for proof of that we are not
+     dependent on talk. Besides talk there exists another kind of
+     evidence open to every one's examination, and the technical
+     skill exercised in country labours may be purely deduced
+     from the aptness and singular beauty of sundry country
+     tools.
+
+     The beauty of tools is not accidental, but inherent and
+     essential. The contours of a ship's sail bellying in the
+     wind are not more inevitable, nor more graceful, than the
+     curves of an adze-head or of a plough-share. Cast in iron or
+     steel, the gracefulness of a plough-share is more
+     indestructible than the metal, yet pliant (in the limits of
+     its type) as a line of English blank verse. It changes for
+     different soils: it is widened out or narrowed; it is
+     deep-grooved or shallow; not because of caprice at the
+     foundry or to satisfy an artistic fad, but to meet the
+     technical demands of the expert ploughman. The most familiar
+     example of beauty indicating subtle technique is supplied by
+     the admired shape of boats, which, however, is so variable
+     (the statement is made on the authority of an old
+     coast-guardsman) that the boat best adapted for one stretch
+     of shore may be dangerous, if not entirely useless, at
+     another stretch ten miles away. And as technique determines
+     the design of a boat, or of a waggon, or of a plough-share,
+     so it controls absolutely the fashioning of tools, and is
+     responsible for any beauty of form they may possess. Of all
+     tools none, of course, is more exquisite than a fiddle-bow.
+     But the fiddle-bow never could have been perfected, because
+     there would have been no call for its tapering delicacy, its
+     calculated balance of lightness and strength, had not the
+     violinist's technique reached such marvellous fineness of
+     power. For it is the accomplished artist who is fastidious
+     as to his tools; the bungling beginner can bungle with
+     anything. The fiddle-bow, however, affords only one example
+     of a rule which is equally well exemplified by many humbler
+     tools. Quarryman's peck, coachman's whip, cricket-bat,
+     fishing-rod, trowel, all have their intimate relation to the
+     skill of those who use them; and like animals and plants,
+     adapting themselves each to its own place in the universal
+     order, they attain to beauty by force of being fit. That law
+     of adaptation which shapes the wings of a swallow and
+     prescribes the poise and elegance of the branches of trees
+     is the same that demands symmetry in the corn-rick and
+     convexity in the beer-barrel; the same that, exerting itself
+     with matchless precision through the trained senses of
+     haymakers and woodmen, gives the final curve to the handles
+     of their scythes and the shafts of their axes. Hence the
+     beauty of a tool is an unfailing sign that in the proper
+     handling of it technique is present ...
+
+'It is not the well-informed and those eager to teach', he says in
+another passage,
+
+     who know the primitive necessary lore of civilization; it is
+     the illiterate. In California, Louis Stevenson found men
+     studying the quality of vines grown on different pockets of
+     earth, just as the peasants of Burgundy and the Rhine have
+     done for ages. And even so the English generations have
+     watched the produce of their varying soils. When or how was
+     it learnt--was it at Oxford or at Cambridge?--that the
+     apples of Devonshire are so specially fit for cider? Or how
+     is it that hops are growing--some of them planted before
+     living memory--all along the strip of green sand which
+     encircles the Weald--that curious strip to which text-books
+     at last point triumphantly as being singularly adapted for
+     hops? Until it got into the books, this piece of knowledge
+     was not thought of as learning; it had merely been acted
+     upon during some centuries. But such knowledge exists,
+     boundless, in whatever direction one follows it: the
+     knowledge of fitting means to ends: excellent rule-of-thumb
+     knowledge, as good as the chemist uses for analyzing water.
+     When the peculiar values of a plot of land have been
+     established--as, for instance, that it is a clay 'too
+     strong' for bricks--then further forms of localized
+     knowledge are brought to supplement this, until at last the
+     bricks are made. Next, they must be removed from the field;
+     and immediately new problems arise. The old farm-cart,
+     designed for roots or manure, has not the most suitable
+     shape for brick-carting. Probably, too, its wide wheels,
+     which were intended for the softness of ploughed land, are
+     needlessly clumsy for the hard road. Soon, therefore, the
+     local wheelwright begins to lighten his spokes and felloes,
+     and to make the wheels a trifle less 'dished'; while his
+     blacksmith binds them in a narrower but thicker tyre, to
+     which he gives a shade more tightness. For the wheelwright
+     learns from the carter--that ignorant fellow--the answer to
+     the new problems set by a load of bricks. A good carter, for
+     his part, is able to adjust his labour to his locality. A
+     part of his duty consists in knowing what constitutes a fair
+     load for his horse in the district where he is working. So
+     many hundred stock bricks, so many more fewer of the red or
+     wire-cut, such and such a quantity of sand, or timber, or
+     straw, or coal, or drain-pipes, or slates, according to
+     their kinds and sizes, will make as much as an average horse
+     can draw in this neighbourhood; but in London the loads are
+     bigger and the vehicles heavier; while in more hilly parts
+     (as you may see any day in the West Country) two horses are
+     put before a cart and load which the London carter would
+     deem hardly too much for a costermonger's donkey.
+
+     So it goes throughout civilization: there is not an industry
+     but produces its own special knowledge relating to
+     unclassified details of adjustment.[76]
+
+It is this craft-knowledge and common professional feeling which is at
+the basis of all associations of workpeople, from the semi-religious
+societies of ancient times, which met in secret to worship their
+patron-god--Hephaestos, the god of the metal-workers, or Asclepios, the
+god of the doctors--through the great guilds of the Middle Ages to the
+trade unions and professional organizations of to-day. Trade unions do
+not exist simply to raise wages or to fight the capitalist, any more
+than the British Medical Association exists simply to raise fees and to
+bargain with the Government. They exist to serve a professional need: to
+unite men who are doing the same work and to promote the welfare and
+dignity of that work. It is this which renders so difficult the problems
+of adjustment which arise owing to the introduction of new and
+unfamiliar processes. Professional associations are, and are bound to
+be, conservative: their conservatism is honourable and to their credit:
+for they are the transmitters of a great tradition. The problem in every
+case is to ensure the progress necessary to the community without injury
+to that sense of 'fellowship in the mystery' on which the social spirit
+of the particular class of workmen depends. It is from this point of
+view that recent American proposals in the direction of 'scientific
+management' are most open to criticism: for they involve the break-up of
+the craft-spirit without setting anything comparable in its place. In
+fact, Mr. F. W. Taylor, one of the inventors of what is called the
+'system' of scientific management, frankly ignores or despises the
+craft-spirit and proposes to treat the workman as a being incapable of
+understanding the principles underlying the practice of his art. He goes
+so far as to lay it down as a general principle that 'in almost all the
+mechanic arts the science which underlies each act of each workman is so
+great and amounts to so much that the workman who is best suited to
+actually doing the work is incapable of fully understanding this
+science, without the guidance and help of those who are working with him
+or over him, either through lack of education or through insufficient
+mental capacity'.[77] Along the lines of this philosophy no permanent
+industrial advance is possible. It may improve the product for a time,
+but only at the cost of degrading the producer. If we are to make
+happiness our test, and to stand by our definition of happiness as
+involving free activity, such a system, destructive as it is of any real
+or intense relationship between the workman and his work, stands
+self-condemned. If we are looking for _real_ industrial progress it is
+elsewhere that we must turn.
+
+This leads us naturally on to the second great division of our subject:
+progress in the methods of co-operation between man and man in doing
+industrial work. For if man is a social animal his power to do his bit
+and his consequent happiness must be derived, in part at least, from his
+social environment. The lonely craftsman perfecting his art in the
+solitude of a one-man workshop does not correspond with our industrial
+ideal any more than the hermit or the monk corresponds with our general
+religious ideal. It was the great apostle of craftsmanship, William
+Morris, who best set forth the social ideal of industry in his immortal
+sentence: 'Fellowship is Life and lack of Fellowship is Death.' Our
+study of the workman, then, is not complete when we have seen him with
+his tools: we must see him also among his workmates. We must see
+industry not simply as a process of production but as a form of
+association; and we must realize that the association of human beings
+for the purpose of industrial work involves what is just as much a
+problem of government as their association in the great political
+community which we call the State.
+
+It is difficult to see the record of the progress of industrial
+government in clear perspective for the simple reason that the world is
+still so backward as regards the organization of this side of its common
+life. The theory and practice of industrial government is generations,
+even centuries, behind the theory and practice of politics. We are still
+accustomed in industry to attitudes of mind and methods of management
+which the political thought of the Western World has long since
+discarded as incompatible with its ideals. Two instances must suffice to
+illustrate this. It is constantly being said, both by employers and by
+politicians, and even by writers in sympathy with working-class
+aspirations, that all that the workman needs in his life is security.
+Give him work under decent conditions, runs the argument, with
+reasonable security of tenure and adequate guarantees against sickness,
+disablement and unemployment, and all will be well. This theory of what
+constitutes industrial welfare is, of course, when one thinks it out,
+some six centuries out of date. It embodies the ideal of the old feudal
+system, but without the personal tie between master and man which
+humanized the feudal relationship. Feudalism, as we saw in our study of
+political government, was a system of contract between the lord and the
+labourer by which the lord and master ran the risks, set on foot the
+enterprises (chiefly military), and enjoyed the spoils, incidental to
+mediaeval life, while the labourer stuck to his work and received
+security and protection in exchange. Feudalism broke down because it
+involved too irksome a dependence, because it was found to be
+incompatible with the personal independence which is the birthright of a
+modern man. So it is idle to expect that the ideal of security will
+carry us very far by itself towards the perfect industrial commonwealth.
+
+Take a second example of the wide gulf that still subsists between men's
+ideas of politics and men's ideas of industry. It is quite common, even
+in these latter days, and among those who have freely sacrificed their
+nearest and dearest to the claims of the State, to hear manufacturers
+and merchants say that they have a 'right to a good profit'. The
+President of the Board of Trade remarked openly in the House of Commons
+after many months of war that it was more than one could expect of human
+nature for coal-owners not to get the highest price they could. Such a
+standpoint is not merely indecent: it is hopelessly out-of-date. Looked
+at from the political point of view it is a pure anachronism. There used
+to be times when men made large fortunes out of the service of
+government, as men still make them out of the service of the community
+in trade and industry to-day. In the days of St. Matthew, when
+tax-gathering was let out by contract, the apostle's partners would
+probably have declared, as Mr. Runciman does to-day, that it was more
+than one could expect of human nature that a publican who had a
+government contract for the collection of the taxes should not get all
+he could out of the tax-payer. It is, indeed, little more than a century
+ago since it was a matter of course in this country to look upon oversea
+colonies merely as plantations--that is, as business investments rather
+than as communities of human beings. The existence of Chartered Company
+government marks a survival of this habit of mind. The old colonial
+system, which embodied this point of view, proved demoralizing not only
+to the home government but to the colonists, as a similar view is to the
+working class, and it led to the loss of the American colonies as surely
+as a similar attitude on the part of employers leads to unrest and
+rebellion among workpeople to-day.
+
+We have thus a long way to travel before the ideals of politics have
+been assimilated into the industrial life of the community and have
+found fitting embodiment in its kindred and more complex problems. But
+at least we have reached a point where we can see what the problem of
+industrial government is. We can say with assurance that a system which
+treats human beings purely as instruments or as passive servants, and
+atrophies their self-determination and their sense of individual and
+corporate responsibility, is as far from perfection in industry as the
+Roman Empire was in politics. Renan's words about 'the intolerable
+sadness' incidental to such a method of organization apply with
+redoubled force to occupations which take up the best part of the day of
+the mass of the working population. The bleak and loveless buildings,
+with their belching chimneys, which arrest the eye of the thoughtful
+traveller in the industrial districts of England are not prisons or
+workhouses. But they often look as if they were, and they resemble them
+in this--that they too often stand for similarly authoritarian ideas of
+government and direction. Industry is still an autocracy, as politics
+was in the days before the supremacy of Parliament. Power still descends
+from above instead of springing from below. It is a power limited no
+doubt by trade union action and parliamentary and administrative
+control: but it is in essence as autocratic as the government of England
+used to be before the transference of sovereignty from the monarch to
+the representatives of his subjects. It was recently announced in the
+press that Lord Rhondda had bought a group of Welsh collieries for 2
+millions, and that as a result 'Lord Rhondda now controls over 3-1/2
+millions of capital, pays 2-1/2 millions in wages every year, and is
+virtually the dictator of the economic destiny of a quarter of a million
+miners. Rumours are also current', the extract continues, 'that Lord
+Rhondda is extending his control over the press of Wales'.[78] The
+existence of such power in this twentieth century in the hands of single
+individuals, not selected from the mass for their special wisdom or
+humanity, is a stupendous fact which must give pause to any one who is
+inclined to feel complacent about modern industrial progress. In days
+gone by political power was as irresponsible as the economic power
+wielded to-day by Lord Rhondda; and it descended from father to son by
+hereditary right in the same way as the control over the lives of
+countless American workers descends to-day as a matter of course from
+John D. Rockefeller senior to John D. Rockefeller junior. If there is
+any reality at all in our political faith we must believe that a similar
+development towards self-government can and must take place in
+industry. It may be that generations will elapse before the problems of
+industrial government find a final and satisfactory constitutional
+solution. But at least we can say that there is only one basis for that
+solution which is compatible with a sound ideal of government, or indeed
+with any reasoned view of morality or religion--the basis of individual
+and corporate freedom with its corresponding obligations of
+responsibility and self-respect. No nation, as Abraham Lincoln said, can
+remain half-slave and half-free: and it was a greater than Lincoln who
+warned us that we cannot serve both God and Mammon. It is this
+underlying conflict of ideals in the organization of our existing
+economic system which is the real cause of the 'Labour unrest' of which
+we have heard so much in recent years.
+
+With this warning in our minds as to the imperfections of our modern
+industrial organization, let us briefly survey the record of the forms
+of economic association which preceded it.
+
+The earliest form of industrial grouping is, of course, the family; and
+the family, as we all know, still retains its primitive character in
+some occupations as a convenient form of productive association. This is
+particularly the case in agriculture in communities where peasant
+holdings prevail. But the family is so much more than an industrial
+group that it hardly falls to us to consider it further here.
+
+Outside the family proper, industrial work among primitive peoples is
+often carried on by slaves. It was a step forward in human progress when
+primitive man found that it was more advantageous to capture his enemies
+than to kill or eat them; and it was a still greater step forward when
+he found that there was more to be got out of slaves by kind treatment
+than by compulsion. This is not the place in which to go into the vexed
+questions connected with various forms of slavery. Suffice it to say
+that it is a profound mistake to dismiss the whole system in one
+undiscriminating condemnation. Slavery involves the denial of freedom,
+and as such it can never be good. But other systems besides slavery
+implicitly involve the denial of freedom. Some of the finest artistic
+work in the world has been done by slaves--and by slaves not working
+under compulsion but in the company of free men and on terms of
+industrial equality with them. This should serve to remind us that, in
+judging of systems of industry, we must look behind the letter of the
+law to the spirit of the times and of social institutions. Slavery at
+its best merges insensibly into wage-labour at its lower end. Many of
+the skilled slaves of ancient Greece and Rome are hardly distinguishable
+in status from a modern workman bound by an unusually long and strict
+indenture and paid for his work not only in money but partly in truck.
+In order to stimulate their productive capacity it was found necessary
+in Greece and Rome to allow skilled slaves to earn and retain
+money--although in the eye of the law they were not entitled to do so;
+and they were thus frequently in a position to purchase their own
+freedom and become independent craftsmen. Slavery in the household and
+in small workshops is open to many and serious dangers, which need not
+be particularized here; but the worst abuses of slavery have always
+taken place where slaves have been easily recruited, as in the early
+days of European contact with Africa, and when there were large openings
+for their employment in gangs on work of a rough and unskilled
+character. The problem of slavery in its worse forms is thus at bottom a
+cheap-labour problem analogous to that which confronts North America and
+South Africa to-day; and there is an essential difference which is often
+ignored between the educated slave in a Roman Government office who did
+the work of a First Division Civil Servant for his imperial master and
+his compeer working in the fields of South Italy: and between the
+household servants of a Virginian family and the plantation-slaves of
+the farther South. Let us remember, in passing judgement on what is
+admittedly an indefensible system, that during the war which resulted in
+the freeing of the American slaves the slaveholders of the South trusted
+their household slaves to protect the women and children during their
+absence from home and that that trust was nowhere betrayed. There is
+another side to _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ as surely as there is another side
+to Mr. Carnegie's paean of modern industrialism in his _Triumphant
+Democracy_.
+
+Systems of serfdom or caste which bind the workman to his work without
+permitting him to be sold like a slave may be regarded as one step
+higher than slavery proper. Such systems are common in stable and
+custom-bound countries, and persisted throughout the European Middle
+Ages. We need not describe how the rising tide of change gradually broke
+up the system in this country and left the old-time villein a free but
+often a landless and property less man. The transition from serfdom to
+the system of wage-labour which succeeded it was a transition from legal
+dependence to legal freedom, and as such it marked an advance. But it
+was also a transition from a fixed and, as it were, a professional
+position of service to the community to a blind and precarious
+individualism. It was a transition, as Sir Henry Maine put it, from
+status to contract. This famous nineteenth-century aphorism is eloquent
+of the limitations of that too purely commercial age. Every thinking man
+would admit to-day that status at its best is a better thing than
+contract at its best--that the soldier is a nobler figure than the army
+contractor, and that corporate feeling and professional honour are a
+better stimulus to right action than business competition and a laudable
+keenness to give satisfaction to a valuable customer. We have always
+suffered from the temptation in this country of adapting business
+methods and ideals to politics rather than political ideals and methods
+to business. Our eighteenth-century thinkers explained citizenship
+itself, not as a duty to our neighbours but as the fulfilment of an
+unwritten contract. Our nineteenth-century legal writers elevated the
+idea of free contract almost to an industrial ideal; while, in somewhat
+the same spirit, the gutter journalists of to-day, when they are at a
+loss for a popular watchword, call for a business government. Such
+theories and battle-cries may serve for a 'nation of shopkeepers'; but
+that opprobrious phrase has never been true of the great mass of the
+English people, and it was never less true than to-day.
+
+The idea of industrial work as the fulfilment of a contract, whether
+freely or forcibly made, is thus essentially at variance with the ideal
+of community service. It is difficult for a man who makes his livelihood
+by hiring himself out as an individual for what he can get out of one
+piece of work after another to feel the same sense of community service
+or professional pride as the man who is serving a vocation and has
+dedicated his talents to some continuous and recognized form of work. It
+is this which makes the system of wage-labour so unsatisfactory in
+principle compared with the guilds of the town workmen in the Middle
+Ages and with the organized professions of to-day; and it is this which
+explains why trade unions of recent years have come to concern
+themselves more and more with questions of status rather than of wages
+and to regard the occupation which they represent more and more as a
+profession rather than a trade. No one has laid bare the deficiencies of
+the wage-system more clearly than Adam Smith in the famous chapter in
+which he foreshadows the principle of collective bargaining. 'What are
+the common wages of labour', he there remarks,[79]
+
+     'depends everywhere upon the contract usually made between
+     those two parties, whose interests are by no means the same.
+     The workmen desire to get as much, the masters to give as
+     little, as possible. The former are disposed to combine in
+     order to raise, the latter in order to lower, the wages of
+     labour.... We rarely hear, it has been said, of the
+     combinations of masters, though frequently of those of
+     workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that
+     masters rarely combine is as ignorant of the world as of the
+     subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of
+     tacit but constant and uniform combination not to raise the
+     wages of labour above their actual rate. To violate this
+     combination is everywhere a most unpopular action and a sort
+     of reproach to a master among his neighbours and equals. We
+     seldom, indeed, hear of this combination, because it is the
+     usual, and one may say, the natural state of things which
+     nobody ever hears of. Masters, too, sometimes enter into
+     particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even
+     below this rate. These are always conducted with the utmost
+     secrecy till the moment of execution; and, when the workmen
+     yield, as they sometimes do without resistance, though
+     severely felt by them, they are never heard of by other
+     people. Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted
+     by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who
+     sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind,
+     combine of their own accord to raise the price of labour.
+     Their usual pretences are, sometimes the high price of
+     provisions, sometimes the great profit which their masters
+     make by their work.'
+
+These words were written 140 years ago, but, as we all know, they are
+still true of the working of the system to-day. Indeed the war has
+served to emphasize their truth by showing us how deeply entrenched are
+the habits of bargaining and of latent antagonism which the working of
+the wage-system has engendered. It is the defect of the wage-system, as
+Adam Smith makes clear to us, that it lays stress on just those points
+in the industrial process where the interests of employers and
+workpeople run contrary to one another, whilst obscuring those far more
+important aspects in which they are partners and fellow-workers in the
+service of the community. This defect cannot be overcome by
+strengthening one party to the contract at the expense of the other, by
+crushing trade unions or dissolving employers' combinations, or even by
+establishing the principle of collective bargaining. It can only be
+overcome by the recognition on both sides that industry is in essence
+not a matter of contract and bargaining at all, but of mutual
+interdependence and community service: and by the growth of a new ideal
+of status, a new sense of professional pride and corporate duty and
+self-respect among all who are engaged in the same function. No one can
+say how long it may take to bring about such a fundamental change of
+attitude, especially among those who have most to lose, in the material
+sense, by an alteration in the existing distribution of economic power.
+But the war has cleared away so much of prejudice and set so much of our
+life in a new light that the dim ideals of to-day may well be the
+realities of to-morrow. This at least we can say: that no country in the
+world is in a better position than we are to redeem modern industry from
+the reproach of materialism and to set it firmly upon a spiritual basis,
+and that the country which shall first have had the wisdom and the
+courage to do so will be the pioneer in a vast extension of human
+liberty and happiness and will have shown that along this road and no
+other lies the industrial progress of mankind.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+1. _Economics_:
+
+   H. Clay, _Economics for the General Reader_. 1916.
+
+   Ruskin, _Unto this last_.
+
+   Smart, _Second Thoughts of an Economist_. 1916.
+
+2. _Man and his Tools_:
+
+   Marvin, _The Living Past_. 1913.
+
+   F. W. Taylor, _The Principles of Scientific Management_. 1911.
+
+   Hoxie, _Scientific Management and Labour_. 1916.
+
+3. _Industrial Government_:
+
+   Aristotle, _Politics_ (Book I, chapters on Slavery).
+
+   Zimmern, _The Greek Commonwealth_ (chapters on Slavery). 1911.
+
+   Ashley, _The Economic Organization of England_. 1914.
+
+   Unwin, _Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth
+   Centuries_.
+
+   S. and B. Webb, _The History of Trade Unionism_.
+
+   Macgregor, _The Evolution of Industry_ (Home University Library).
+
+   Wallas, _The Great Society_. 1914.
+
+   G. D. H. Cole, _The World of Labour_. 1915.
+
+   _Round Table, June 1916 (Article on the Labour Movement and the
+   Future of British Industry)._
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[67] Including the well-being of the producers--a point which is too
+often overlooked.
+
+[68] On this point see _Poverty and Waste_, by Hartley Withers, 1914,
+written before the war, which has driven its lessons home.
+
+[69] _The Living Past_, pp. 20, 21.
+
+[70] _Second Thoughts of an Economist_, p. 89.
+
+[71] _Principles of Economics_, vol. i, p. 11. It is interesting to note
+that in his latest book, _Inventors and Money-making, lectures on some
+relations between Economics and Psychology_ (1915), Professor Taussig to
+some extent goes back upon the point of view of the extract given above.
+
+[72] A similar inquiry on a much larger scale was made by Adolf
+Levinstein in his book _Die Arbeiterfrage_ (Munich, 1910). He examined
+4,000 workpeople, consisting of coalminers, cotton operatives, and
+engineers. With the exception of a few turners and fitters almost all
+replied that they found little or no pleasure in their work.
+
+[73] _The Great Society_, p. 363.
+
+[74] Especially the wonderful results obtained from the young criminals
+at the Little Commonwealth in Dorsetshire.
+
+[75] See _Readings in Vocational Guidance_ by Meyer Bloomfield (Boston,
+1915).
+
+[76] _Lucy Bettesworth_, pp. 178-80, and 214-16.
+
+[77] This sentence is practically an unconscious paraphrase of a passage
+from Aristotle's defence of slavery.
+
+[78] _The Welsh Outlook_, August 1916, p. 272.
+
+[79] _Wealth of Nations_, Book I, ch. viii.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+PROGRESS IN ART
+
+A. CLUTTON BROCK
+
+
+It is often said that there can be no such thing as progress in art. At
+one time the arts flourish, at another they decay: but, as Whistler put
+it, art happens as men of genius happen; and men cannot make it happen.
+They cannot discover what circumstances favour art, and therefore they
+cannot attempt to produce those circumstances. There are periods of
+course in which the arts, or some one particular art, progress. One
+generation may excel the last; through several generations an art may
+seem to be rushing to its consummation. This happened with Greek
+sculpture and the Greek drama in the sixth and fifth centuries; with
+architecture and all kindred arts in western Europe in the twelfth and
+thirteenth centuries, and at the same time with many arts in China. It
+happened with painting and sculpture in Italy in the fourteenth and
+fifteenth centuries, with literature in England in the sixteenth
+century, with music in Germany in the eighteenth century and the
+beginning of the nineteenth. But in all these cases there followed a
+decline, often quite unconscious at the time and one of which we cannot
+discover the causes. Attempts are made by historians of the arts to
+state the causes; but they satisfy only those who make them, for they
+are, in fact, only statements of the symptoms of decline. They tell us
+what happened, not why it happened. And they all seem to point to two
+conclusions about the course of the arts, both of which would make us
+despair of any settled progress in them. The first is that the practice
+of any art by any particular people always follows a certain natural
+course of growth, culmination, and decay. At least it always follows
+this course where an art is practised naturally and therefore with
+success. Art in fact, in its actual manifestations, is like the life of
+an individual human being and subject to inexorable natural laws. It is
+born, as men are born, without the exercise of will; and in the same way
+it passes through youth, maturity, and old age. The second conclusion
+follows from this, and it is that one nation or age cannot take up an
+art where another has left it. That is where art seems to differ from
+science. The mass of knowledge acquired in one country can, if that
+country loses energy to apply or increase it, be utilized by another.
+But we cannot so make use of the art of the Greeks or of the Italian
+Renaissance or of our own Middle Ages. In the Gothic revival we tried to
+make use of the art of the Middle Ages and we failed disastrously. We
+imitated without understanding, and we could not understand because we
+were not ourselves living in the Middle Ages. Art, in fact, is always a
+growth of its own time which cannot be transplanted, and no one can tell
+why it grows in one time and among one people and not in another.
+
+That is what we are always told, and yet we never quite believe all of
+it. For, as art is a product of the human mind, it must also be a
+product of the human will, unless it is altogether unconscious like a
+dream. But that it is not; for men produce it in their waking hours and
+with the conscious exercise of their faculties. If a man paints a
+picture he does so because he wants to paint one. He exercises will and
+choice in all his actions, and the man who buys a picture does the same.
+We talk of inspiration in the arts as something that cannot be
+commanded, but there is also inspiration in the sciences. No man can
+make a scientific discovery by the pure exercise of his will. It jumps
+into one mind and not into another just like an artistic inspiration.
+And further we are taught and trained in the arts as in the sciences;
+and success in both depends a great deal upon the nature of the
+training. In both good training will not give genius or inspiration to
+those who are without it; but it will enable those who possess it to
+make the most of it; and, what is more, it will enable even the mediocre
+to produce work of some value. What strikes us most about the Florentine
+school of painting of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is the fact
+that its second-rate painters are so good, that we can enjoy their works
+even when they are merely imitative. But the Florentine school excelled
+all others of the time in its teaching; most painters of other schools
+in Italy learnt from Florence; and the inspiration came to them from
+Florence, they were quickened from Florence, however much their art kept
+its own natural character. But this school which had the best teaching
+also produced the most painters of genius. Its level was higher and its
+heights were higher; and for this reason, that the whole Florentine
+intellect went both into the teaching and into the practice of painting
+and sculpture. The Florentine was able to put all his mind, the
+scientific faculties as well as the aesthetic, into his art. He never
+relied merely on his temperament or his mood. He was eager for
+knowledge. It was not enough for him to paint things as he saw them; he
+tried to discover how they were made, what were the laws of their growth
+and construction; and his knowledge of these things changed the
+character of his vision, made him see the human body, for instance, as
+no mediaeval artist had ever seen it; made him see it as an engineer
+sees a machine. Just as an engineer sees more in a machine than a man
+who does not understand its working, so the Florentine saw more in the
+human body than a mediaeval artist. He saw it with a scientific as well
+as an aesthetic passion, and all this science of his enriched his art so
+that there has never since been drawing like the Florentine, drawing at
+once so logical and so expressive.
+
+The Florentines in fact did exercise their will upon their art more than
+any other modern artists, more, perhaps, than any other artists known to
+us, and their painting and sculpture were the greatest of the modern
+world. Yet the fact remains that Florentine art declined suddenly and
+irresistibly, and that all the Florentine intellect, which still
+remained remarkable and produced men of science like Galileo, could not
+arrest that decline. Indeed the Florentines themselves seem not to have
+been conscious of it. They thought that the dull imitators of
+Michelangelo were greater than his great predecessors. As we say, their
+taste became bad, their values were perverted; and with that perversion
+all their natural genius for the arts was wasted. To this day Carlo
+Dolci is the favourite painter of the ordinary Florentine. He was a man
+of some ability, and he painted pictures at once feeble and revolting
+because he himself and his public liked such pictures.
+
+There is no accounting for tastes, we say, and in saying that we despair
+of progress in the arts. For it is ultimately this unaccountable thing
+called taste, and not the absence or presence of genius, which
+determines whether the arts shall thrive or decay in any particular age
+or country. People often say that they know nothing about art, but that
+they do know what they like; and what they imply is that there is
+nothing to be known about art except your own likes and dislikes, and
+further that no man can control those. The Florentines of the
+seventeenth century happened to like Carlo Dolci, where the Florentines
+of the fifteenth had liked Botticelli. That is the only explanation we
+can give of the decline of Florentine painting.
+
+It is of course no explanation; and because no explanation beyond it has
+been given, we are told that there can be no such thing as progress in
+the arts. That is the lesson of history. We are far beyond the Egyptians
+in science, but certainly not beyond them in art. Indeed one might say
+that there has been a continual slow decline in all the arts of Europe,
+except music, since the year 1500, and that music itself has been slowly
+declining since the death of Beethoven. But with this slow inexorable
+decline of the arts there has been a great advance in nearly everything
+else, in knowledge, in power, even in morality. Upon everything man has
+been able to exercise his will except upon the arts. Where he has really
+wished for progress there he has got it, except in this one case.
+Therefore it seems that upon the arts he cannot exercise his will, and
+that they alone of all his activities are not capable of progress. What
+do we mean by progress except the successful exercise of the human will
+in a right direction? That is what distinguishes progress from natural
+growth; that alone can preserve it from natural processes of decay.
+There are people who say that it does not exist, that everything which
+happens to man is a natural process of growth or decay. Whether that is
+so or not, we do mean by progress something different from these natural
+processes. When we speak of it we do imply the exercise of the human
+will, man's command over circumstances; and those who deny progress
+altogether deny that man has any will or any command over circumstances.
+For them things happen to man and that is all, it is not man's will that
+makes things happen. But if we use the word progress at all, we imply
+that it is man's will that makes things happen. And since man is
+evidently liable to decline as well as progress, it follows that if we
+believe man to be capable of exercising his will in a right direction we
+must also believe that he can and does exercise it in a wrong direction.
+I assume that man has this power both for good and for evil. If I did
+not, I should not be addressing you upon the question whether man is
+capable of progress in the arts, but upon the question whether he is
+capable of progress at all. And I should be trying to prove that he is
+not.
+
+As it is, the question I have to discuss is whether he has the power of
+exercising for good or evil his will upon the arts as upon other things;
+and hitherto I have been giving you certain facts in the history of the
+arts which seem to prove that he is not. They all amount to this--that
+man has not hitherto succeeded in exercising his will upon the arts;
+that he has not produced good art because he wished to produce it. We,
+for instance, wish to excel in the arts; we have far more power than the
+ancient Greeks or Egyptians; but we have not been able to apply that
+power to the arts. In them we are conscious of a strange impotence. We
+cannot build like our forefathers of the Middle Ages, we cannot make
+furniture like our great-grandfathers of the eighteenth century. Go into
+an old churchyard and look at the tombstones of the past and present.
+You will see that the lettering is always fine up to the first
+generation of the nineteenth century. In that generation there is a
+rapid decline; and since about 1830 there has been no decent lettering
+upon tombstones except what has been produced in the last ten years or
+so by the conscious effort of a few individual artists of great natural
+talent and high training. If I want good lettering on a tombstone I have
+to employ one of these artists and to pay him a high price for his
+talent and his training. But that is only one example of a universal
+decline in all the arts of use, a decline which happened roughly between
+the years 1800 and 1830. And the significant fact about it is that when
+it happened no one was aware of it. So far as I know, this artistic
+catastrophe, far the swiftest and most universal known to us in the
+whole course of history, was never even mentioned in contemporary
+literature. The poets, the lovers of beauty, did not speak of it. They
+talked about nature, not about art. There is not a hint of it in the
+letters of Shelley or Keats. There is just a hint of it in some sayings
+of Blake; but that is all. One would suppose that such a catastrophe
+would have filled the minds of all men who were not entirely occupied
+with the struggle for life, that all would have seen that a glory was
+passing away from the earth, and would have made some desperate struggle
+to preserve it. But, as I say, they saw nothing of it. They were not
+aware that a universal ugliness was taking the place of beauty in all
+things made by man; and therefore the new ugliness must have pleased
+them as much as the old beauty. So it appears once again that there is
+no accounting for tastes, and no test that we can apply to them. When
+science declines, men at least know that they have less power. They are
+more subject to pestilence when they forget medicine and sanitation;
+their machines become useless to them when they no longer know how to
+work them; there is anarchy when they lose their political goodwill. But
+when their taste decays they do not know that it has decayed. And with
+it decays their artistic capacity, so that, quite complacently, they
+lose the power of doing decently a thousand things that their fathers
+did excellently.
+
+But here suddenly I am brought to a stop by a new fact in human history.
+The arts have declined, but our complacency over their decline has
+ceased. The first man who disturbed it was Ruskin. It was he who saw
+the catastrophe that had happened. Suddenly he was aware of it; suddenly
+he escaped from the universal tyranny of the bad taste of his time. He
+was the first to deny that there was no accounting for tastes; the first
+to deny, indeed, that the ordinary man did know what he liked. And he
+was followed with more knowledge and practical power, in fact with more
+science, by William Morris. What both of these great men really said was
+that taste is not unaccountable; that the mass of men do not know what
+they like, that they do not apply their intellect and will to what they
+suppose to be their likes and dislikes, and that they could apply their
+intellect and will to these things if they chose.
+
+When we say that there is no accounting for tastes we imply that tastes
+are always real, that, whether good or bad, they happen to men without
+any exercise of their will. But Ruskin and Morris implied that we must
+exercise our will and our intelligence to discover what our tastes
+really are; that this discovery is not at all easy, but that, if we do
+not make it, we are at the mercy, not of our own real tastes, but of an
+unreal thing which is called the public taste, or of equally unreal
+reactions against it. We think that we like what we suppose other people
+to like, and these other people too think that they like what no one
+really likes. Or in mere blind reaction we think that we dislike what
+the mob likes. But in either case our likes and dislikes are not ours at
+all and, what is more, they are no one's. Taste in fact is bad because
+it is not any one's taste, because no one's will is exercised in it or
+upon it. When it is good, it is always real taste, that is to say some
+real person's taste. In the work of art the artist does what he really
+likes to do and expresses some real passion of his own, not some passion
+which he believes that he, as an artist, ought to express. Art, said
+Morris, is the expression of the workman's pleasure in his work. It
+cannot be real art unless it is a real pleasure. And so the public will
+not demand real art unless they too take a real pleasure in it. If they
+do not know what they really like, they will not demand of the artist
+what they really like or what he really likes. They will demand
+something tiresome and insincere, and by the tyranny of their demand
+will set him to produce it.
+
+That was what happened at the beginning of the nineteenth century in
+nearly all the arts and especially in the arts of use. It had happened
+before in different ages and countries, especially in painting,
+sculpture, architecture, and the arts of use as they were patronized by
+the vulgar rich, such as the court of Louis XV. But now it happened
+suddenly and universally to all arts. There were no longer vulgar rich
+only but also vulgar poor and vulgar middle-classes. Everywhere there
+spread a kind of aesthetic snobbery which obscured real tastes. Of this
+I will give one simple and homely example. The beautiful flowers of the
+cottage garden were no longer grown in the gardens of the well-to-do,
+because they were the flowers of the poor. Instead were grown lobelias,
+geraniums, and calceolarias, combined in a hideous mixture, not because
+any one thought them more beautiful, but because, since they were grown
+in green-houses, they implied the possession of green-houses and so of
+wealth. They did not, of course, even do that, since they could be
+bought very cheaply from nurserymen. They implied only the bad taste of
+snobbery which is the absence of all real taste. For it is physically
+impossible for any one to like such a combination of plants better than
+larkspurs and lilies and roses. What they did enjoy was not the flowers
+themselves but their association with gentility. But so strong was the
+contagion of this association that cottagers themselves began to throw
+away their beautiful cottage-garden flowers and to grow these plants, so
+detestable in combination. And to this day one can see often in cottage
+gardens pathetic imitations of a taste that never was real and which now
+is discredited among the rich, so that a border of lobelias,
+calceolarias, and geraniums has become a mark of social inferiority as
+it was once one of social superiority. But what it never was and never
+could be was an expression of a genuine liking.
+
+Now I owe the very fact that I am able to give this account of a simple
+perversion of taste to Ruskin and Morris. It was they who first made the
+world aware that its taste was perverted and that most of its art was
+therefore bad. It was they who filled us with the conviction of artistic
+sin, and who also in a manner entirely scientific tried to discover what
+was the nature of this sin and how it had come about. First Ruskin
+tentatively, and afterwards Morris systematically and out of his own
+vast artistic experience, connected this decay of the arts with certain
+social conditions. It was not merely that taste had decayed or that the
+arts had developed to a point beyond which there was nothing for them
+but decline. Morris insisted that there were causes for the decay of
+taste and the decline of the arts, causes as much subject to the will of
+man as the causes of any kind of social decay or iniquity. He insisted
+that a work of art is not an irrational mystery, not something that
+happens and may happen well or ill; but that all art is intimately
+connected with the whole of our social well-being. It is in fact an
+expression of what we value, and if we value noble things it will be
+noble, if we pretend to value base things it will be base.
+
+Whistler said that this was not so. He insisted that genius is born, not
+made, and that some peoples have artistic capacity, some have not. Now
+it is true that nations vary very much in their artistic capacity and in
+the strength of their desire to produce art. But even the nations which
+have little artistic capacity and little desire to produce art have in
+their more primitive state produced charming works of real art. Whistler
+gave the case of the Swiss as an excellent people with little capacity
+for art. But the old Swiss chalets are full of character and beauty, and
+there are churches in Switzerland which have all the beauty of the
+Middle Ages. The cuckoo clocks and other Swiss articles of commerce
+which Whistler despised are contemptible, not because they are Swiss,
+but because they are tourist trash produced by workmen who express no
+pleasure of their own in them for visitors who buy them only because
+they think they are characteristic of Switzerland. They are, in fact,
+not the expression of any genuine taste or liking whatever, like the
+tourist trash that is sold in the Rue de Rivoli. Probably the Swiss
+would never be capable of producing works of art like Chartres Cathedral
+or Don Giovanni, but they have in the past possessed a genuine and
+delightful art of their own like nearly every European nation in the
+Middle Ages.
+
+So, though genius is born, it is also made, and though nations differ in
+artistic capacity, they all have some artistic capacity so long as they
+know what they like and express only their own liking in their art, so
+long as they are not infected with artistic snobbism or commercialism.
+This we know now, and we have developed a new and remarkable power of
+seeing and enjoying all the genuine art of the past. This power is part
+of the historical sense which is itself modern. In the past, until the
+nineteenth century, very few people could see any beauty or meaning in
+any art of the past that did not resemble the art of their own time and
+country. The whole art of the Middle Ages, for instance, was thought to
+be merely barbarous until the Gothic revival, and so was the art of all
+the past so far as it was known, except the later art of Greece and
+Rome. For our ancestors' taste did indeed happen as art happened, and
+they could not escape from the taste which circumstances imposed on
+them; any art that was not according to that taste was for them as it
+were in an unknown tongue. But we have made this great progress in
+taste, at least, if not in the production of art, that we can understand
+nearly all artistic languages, and that what used to be called classical
+art has lost its old superstitious prestige for us. Not only can we
+enjoy the art of our own Middle Ages; but many of us can enjoy and
+understand just as well the great art of Egypt and China, and can see as
+clearly when that art is good or bad as if it were of our own time. We
+have, in fact, in the matter of artistic appreciation gained the freedom
+of all the ages, and this is a thing that has never, so far as we know,
+happened before in the history of the human mind.
+
+But still this freedom of all the ages has not enabled us to produce a
+great art of our own. There are some, indeed, who think that it has
+hindered us from doing so, that we are becoming merely universal
+connoisseurs who can criticize anything and produce nothing. We have the
+most wonderful museums that ever were, and the most wonderful power of
+enjoying all that is in them, but, with all our riches from the past,
+our present is barren; and it is barren because our rich men would
+rather pay great prices for past treasures than encourage artists to
+produce masterpieces now. If that is so, if that is all that is coming
+to us from our freedom of all the ages, there is certainly not progress
+in it. Better that we should produce and enjoy the humblest genuine art
+of our own than that we should continue in this learned impotence.
+
+But this power of enjoying the art of all ages, though it certainly has
+had some unfortunate results, must be good in itself. It is sympathy,
+and that is always better than indifference or antipathy. It is
+knowledge, and that is always better than ignorance. And we have to
+remember that it has existed only for a short time and is, therefore,
+not yet to be judged by its fruits. We are still gasping at all the
+artistic treasures of the past that have been revealed to us like a new
+world; and still they are being revealed to our new perceptions. Only in
+the last ten years, for instance, have we discovered that Chinese
+painting is the rival of Italian, or that the golden age of Chinese
+pottery was centuries before the time of that Chinese porcelain which we
+have hitherto admired so much. The knowledge, the delight, is still
+being gathered in with both hands. It is too soon to look for its
+effects upon the mind of Europe.
+
+But it is not the result of mere barren connoisseurship or
+scholasticism. Rather it is a new renaissance, a new effort of the human
+spirit, and an effort after what? An effort to exert the human will in
+the matter of art far more consciously than it has exerted ever before.
+It is to be noted that Morris himself, the man who first told us that we
+must exert our wills in art, was also himself eager in the discovery and
+enjoyment of all kinds of art in the past. He had his prejudices, the
+prejudices of a very wilful man and a working artist. 'What can I see in
+Rome,' he said, 'that I cannot see in Whitechapel?' But he enjoyed the
+art of most ages and countries more than he enjoyed his prejudices. He
+had the historical sense in art to a very high degree. He knew what the
+artist long dead meant by his work as if it were a poem in his own
+language, and from the art of the past which he loved he saw what was
+wrong with the art of our time. So did Ruskin and so do many now.
+Further we are not in the least content to admire the art of the past
+without producing any of our own. There is incessant restless
+experiment, incessant speculation about aesthetics, incessant effort to
+apply them to the actual production of art, in fact to exert the
+conscious human will upon art as it has never been exerted before.
+
+So, if one wished in a sentence to state the peculiarity of the last
+century in the history of art, one would say that it is the first age in
+which men have rebelled against the process of decadence in art, in
+which they have been completely conscious of that process and have tried
+to arrest it by a common effort of will. We cannot yet say that that
+effort has succeeded, but we cannot say either that it has failed. We
+may be discontented with the art of our own time, but at least we must
+allow that it is, with all its faults, extravagances, morbidities and
+blind experiments, utterly unlike the art of any former age of decadence
+known to us. There may be confusion and anarchy, but there is not mere
+pedantry and stagnation. Artists perhaps are over-conscious, always
+following some new prophet, but at least there is the conviction of sin
+in them, which is exactly what all the decadent artists of the past have
+lacked.
+
+The artistic decadence of the past which is most familiar to us is that
+of the later Graeco-Roman art. It was a long process which began at
+least as early as the age of Alexander and continued until the fall of
+the Western Roman Empire and afterwards, until, indeed, the decadent
+classical art was utterly supplanted by the art which we call Romanesque
+and Byzantine, and which seems to us now at its best to be as great as
+any art that has ever been.
+
+But a hundred years ago this Romanesque and Byzantine art was thought to
+be only a barbarous corruption of the classical art. For then the
+classical art even in its last feebleness still kept its immense and
+unique prestige. Shelley said that the effect of Christianity seemed to
+have been to destroy the last remains of pure taste, and he said this
+when he had been looking at the great masterpieces of Byzantine mosaic
+at Ravenna. Now we know with an utter certainty that he was wrong. He
+was himself a great artist, but to him there was only one rational and
+beautiful and civilized art, and that was the decadent Graeco-Roman art.
+To him works like the Apollo Belvedere were the masterpieces of the
+world, and all other art was good as it resembled them. He and in fact
+most people of his time were still overawed by the immense complacency
+of that art. They had not the historical sense at all. They had no
+notion of certain psychological facts about art which are now familiar
+to every educated man. They did not know that art cannot be good unless
+it expresses the character of the people who produce it; that
+characterless art, however accomplished, is uninteresting; that there
+may be more life and so more beauty in the idol of an African savage
+than in the Laocoon.
+
+This later Greek and Graeco-Roman art was doomed to inevitable decay
+because of its immense complacency. The artists had discovered, as they
+thought, the right way to produce works of art, and they went on
+producing them in that way without asking themselves whether they meant
+anything by them or whether they enjoyed them. They knew, in fact, what
+was the proper thing to do just as conventional people now know what is
+the proper thing to talk about at a tea party; and their art was as
+uninteresting as the conversation of such people. In both the talk and
+the art there is no expression of real values and so no expression of
+real will. The past lies heavy upon both. So people have talked, so
+artists have worked, and so evidently people must talk and artists must
+work for evermore.
+
+Now we have been threatened with just the same kind of artistic
+decadence, and we are still threatened with it; so that it would be very
+easy to argue that, when men reach a certain stage in that organization
+of their lives which we call civilization, they must inevitably fall
+into artistic decadence. The Roman Empire did attain to a high stage of
+such organization, and all the life went out of its art. We have reached
+perhaps a still higher or at least more elaborate stage of it, and the
+life has gone or is going out of our art. It has become even more
+mechanical than the Graeco-Roman. We, too, have lost the power of
+expressing ourselves, our real values, our real will, in it; and we had
+better submit to that impotence and not make a fuss about it. Indeed art
+really is an activity proper to a more childish stage of the human mind,
+and we shall do well not to waste our time and energy upon it. That is
+the only way in which we can be superior to the Graeco-Roman world in
+the matter of art. We can give it up altogether or rather put it all
+into museums as a curiosity of the past to be studied for historical and
+scientific purposes.
+
+But I have only to say that to prove that we will not be contented with
+such a counsel of despair. The Romans went on producing art, even if it
+was bad art, and we shall certainly go on producing art whether it is
+good or bad. We have produced an immense mass of bad art, worse perhaps
+than any that the Roman world produced. But there is this difference
+between us and the Romans, that we are not content with it. We have the
+conviction of artistic sin and they had not. Therefore we do not think
+that their example need make us despair. They were not exercising their
+will on their art. It was to them what a purely conventional morality is
+to a morally decadent people. It went from bad to worse, just as
+conventional morals do, when no man arises and says: 'This is wrong,
+although you think it right. I know what is right from my own sense of
+values, and I will do it in spite of you.' So far as we know, there were
+no rebels of that kind in the art of the Graeco-Roman world. But our
+world of art is full of such rebels and has been ever since the artistic
+debacle at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In fact the chief
+and the unique characteristic of the art of the last hundred years has
+been the constant succession of artistic rebels. All our greatest
+artists have been men who were determined to exercise their own wills in
+their art, whatever the mass of men might think of it. And what has
+always happened is that they have been first bitterly abused and then
+passionately praised. This, so far as I know, has never happened before.
+There have been rebel artists like Rembrandt, but only a few of them.
+Most great artists before the nineteenth century have been admired in
+their own time. But in the nineteenth century, and more and more towards
+the end of it, the great artists have had to conquer the world with
+their rebellion, they have had to exercise their own individual wills
+against the common convention. And it seems to us now the mark of the
+great artist so to exercise his individual will, so to rebel and conquer
+the world with his rebellion, even if he kills himself in the process.
+Think of Constable and even Turner, of our pre-Raphaelites, and above
+all of nearly all the great French artists, of Millet, of Manet, of
+Cezanne, Gauguin, of Rodin himself, who has conquered the world now, but
+only in his old age. Think of Beethoven, of Schubert, of Wagner, and of
+all the rebel musicians of to-day. But in the past the great artists,
+Michelangelo, Titian, even the great innovator Giorgione; Mozart, Bach,
+Handel; none of these were thought of as rebels. They had not to conquer
+the world against its will. They came into the world, and the world
+knew them. So, we may be sure, the decadent artists of the Graeco-Roman
+world were not rebels. There they were like Michelangelo and Raphael, if
+they were like them in nothing else. If they had been rebels we might
+not yawn at their works now.
+
+Now, clearly, this rebellion is not so good a thing as the harmony
+between the artist and his public which has prevailed in all great ages
+of art. But it is better than the harmony of dull and complacent
+convention which prevailed in the Graeco-Roman decadence. For it means
+that our artists are not content with such complacence, that they will
+not accept decadence as an inevitable process. And the fact that we do
+passionately admire them for their rebellion as soon as we understand
+what it means, that this rebellion seems to us a glorious and heroic
+thing, is a proof that we, the public, also are not content to sink into
+the Graeco-Roman complacency. We may stone our prophets at first, but
+like the Hebrews, we produce prophets as well as priests, that is to say
+academicians. And we treasure their works as the Hebrews treasured the
+books of the prophets.
+
+Art, in fact, is a human activity in which we try to exercise our wills.
+We are aware that it is threatened with decadence by the mere process of
+our civilization, that it is much more difficult for us to produce
+living art than it was for our forefathers of the Middle Ages. But still
+we are not content to produce dead art. Half unconsciously we are making
+the effort to exercise our wills upon our art, as upon our science, our
+morals, our politics, to avoid decadence in art as we try to avoid it in
+other human activities; and this effort is the great experiment, the
+peculiar feature, of the art of the last century.
+
+It is an effort not merely aesthetic but also intellectual. There is a
+great interest in aesthetics and a constant and growing effort to
+charge them with actual experience and to put them to some practical
+end. In the past they have been the most backward, the most futile and
+barren, kind of philosophy because men wrote about them who had never
+really experienced works of art and who saw no connexion between their
+philosophy and the production of works of art. They talked about the
+nature of the beautiful, as schoolmen talked about the nature of God.
+And they knew no more about the nature of the beautiful from their own
+experience of it than schoolmen knew about the nature of God. But now
+men are interested in the beautiful because they miss it so much in the
+present works of men and because they so passionately desire it; and
+their speculation has the aim of recovering it. So aesthetics, whatever
+some artists in their peculiar and pontifical narrowness may say, is of
+great importance now; they are part of the effort which the modern world
+is making to exercise its will in the production of works of art, and
+they are bound, if that effort is successful, to have more and more
+effect upon that production.
+
+But is that effort going to be successful? That is a question which no
+one can answer yet. But my object is to insist that in our age, because
+of its effort, an effort which has never been made so consciously and
+resolutely before, there is a possibility of a progress in art of the
+same nature as progress in other human activities. If we can escape from
+what has seemed to some men this inexorable process of decadence in art,
+we shall have accomplished one of the greatest achievements of the human
+will. We shall have redeemed art from the tyranny of mere fate.
+
+What we have to do now is to understand what it is that causes decadence
+in art, we have to apply a conscious science to the production of it. We
+have to see what are the social causes that produce excellence and
+decay in it. And we have made a great beginning in this. For we are all
+aware that art is not an isolated thing, that it does not merely happen,
+as Whistler said. We know that it is a symptom of something right or
+wrong with the whole mind of man and with the circumstances that affect
+that mind. We know at last that there is a connexion between the art of
+man and his intellect and his conscience. It was because William Morris
+saw that connexion that he, from being a pure artist, became a socialist
+and spoke at street corners. Such a change, such a waste and perversion
+as it seemed to many, would have been impossible in any former age. It
+was possible and inevitable, it was a natural process for Morris in the
+nineteenth century, because he was determined to exercise his will upon
+art, just as men in the past had exercised their will upon religion or
+politics; because he no longer believed that art happened as the weather
+happens and that the artist is a charming but irresponsible child swayed
+merely by the caprices of his own private subconsciousness. Was he right
+or wrong? I myself firmly believe that he was right. That if man has a
+will at all, if he is not a mere piece of matter moulded by
+circumstances, he has a will in art as in all other things. And,
+further, if he has a common will which can express itself in his other
+activities, in religion or politics, that common will must also be able
+to express itself in art. It has not hitherto done so consciously,
+because man in all periods of artistic success has been content to
+succeed without asking why he succeeded, and in all periods of artistic
+failure he has been content to fail without asking why he has failed. We
+have been for long living in a period of artistic failure, but we have
+asked, we are asking always more insistently, why we fail. And that is
+where our time differs from any former period of artistic decadence,
+why, I believe, it is not a period of decadence but one of experiment,
+and of experiment which will not be wasted, however much it may seem at
+the moment to fail. But if out of all this conscious effort and
+experiment we do arrest the process of decadence, if we do pass from
+failure to success, then we shall have accomplished a progress in art
+such as has never been accomplished before even in the greatest ages.
+For whereas men have never been able to learn from the experience of
+those ages, whereas the Greeks and the men of the thirteenth century
+have not taught men how to avoid decadence in art, we and our children
+will teach them how to avoid it. We shall then have given a security to
+art such as it has never enjoyed before; and we shall do that by
+applying science to it, by using the conscious intelligence upon it.
+
+We may fail, of course, but even so our effort will not have been in
+vain. And some future age in happier circumstances may profit by it, and
+achieve that progress, that application of science to art, which we are
+now attempting.
+
+Many people, especially artists, tell us that the attempt is a mere
+absurdity. But ignorance even about art need not be eternal. Ignorance
+is eternal only when it is despairing or contented. Twenty years ago
+many people said that men never would be able to fly, yet they are
+flying now because they were resolved to fly. So we are more and more
+resolved to have great art. Every year we feel the lack of it more and
+more. Every year more people exercise their wills more and more
+consciously in the effort to achieve it. This, I repeat, has never
+happened before in the history of the world. And the consequence is that
+our art, what real art we have, is unlike any that there has been in the
+world before. It is so strange and so rebellious that we ourselves are
+shocked and amazed by it. Much of it, no doubt, is merely strange and
+rebellious, as much of early Christianity was merely strange and
+rebellious and so provoked the resentment and persecution of
+self-respecting pagans. Every great effort of the human mind attracts
+those who merely desire their own salvation, and so it is with the
+artistic effort now. There are cubists and futurists and
+post-impressionists who are as silly as human beings can be, because
+they hope to attain to artistic salvation by rushing to extremes. They
+are religious egotists, in fact, and nothing can be more disagreeable
+than a religious egotist. But there were no doubt many of them among the
+early Christians. Yet Christianity was a great creative religious effort
+which came because life and truth had died out of the religions of the
+past, and men could not endure to live without life and truth in their
+religion. So now they cannot endure to live without life and truth in
+their art. They are determined to have an art which shall express all
+that they have themselves experienced of the beauty of the universe,
+which shall not merely utter platitudes of the past about that beauty.
+
+So far perhaps there is little but the effort at expression, an effort
+strange, contorted, self-conscious. You can say your worst about it and
+laugh at all its failures. Yet they are failures different in kind from
+the artistic failures of the past, for they are failures of the
+conscious will, not of mere complacency. And it is such failures in all
+human activities that prepare the way for successes.
+
+Let us remember then, always, that art is a human activity, not a fairy
+chance that happens to the mind of man now and again. And let us
+remember, too, that it does not consist merely of pictures or statues or
+of music performed in concert-rooms. It is, indeed, rather a quality of
+all things made by man, a quality that may be good or bad but which is
+always in them. That is one of the facts about art that was discovered
+in the nineteenth century, when men began to miss the excellence of art
+in all their works and to wish passionately that its excellence might
+return to them. And this discovery which was then made about art was of
+the greatest practical importance. For then men became aware that they
+could not have good pictures or architecture or sculpture unless the
+quality of art became good again in all their works. So much they learnt
+about the science of art. They began, or some of them did, to think
+about their furniture and cottages and pots and pans and spoons and
+forks, and even about their tombstones, as well as about what had been
+called their works of art. And in all these humbler things an advance, a
+conscious resolute wilful advance, has been made. We begin to see when
+and also why spoons and forks and pots and pans are good or bad. We are
+less at the mercy of chance or blind fashion in such things than our
+fathers were. We know our vulgarity and the naughtiness of our own
+hearts. The advance, the self-knowledge, is not general yet, but it
+grows more general every year and the conviction of sin spreads. No
+doubt, like all conviction of sin, it often produces unpleasant results.
+The consciously artistic person often has a more irritating house than
+his innocently philistine grandfather had. So, no doubt, many simple
+pagan people were much nicer than those early Christians who were out
+for their own salvation. But there was progress in Christianity and
+there was none in paganism.
+
+The title of this book is _Progress and History_, and it may justly be
+complained that the progress of which I have been talking is not
+historic, but a progress that has not yet happened and may never happen
+at all. But that I think is a defect of my particular branch of the
+subject. Progress in art, if progress is anything more than a natural
+process of growth to be followed inevitably by a natural process of
+decay, has never yet happened in art; but there is now an effort to make
+it happen, an effort to exercise the human will in art more completely
+and consciously than it has ever been exercised before. Therefore I
+could do nothing but attempt to describe that effort and to speculate
+upon its success.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+PROGRESS IN SCIENCE
+
+F.S. MARVIN
+
+
+    'L'Esprit travaillant sur les donnees de l'experience.'
+
+The French phrase, neater as usual than our own, may be taken as the
+starting-point in our discussion. We shall put aside such questions as
+what an experience is, or how much the mind itself supplies in each
+experience, or what, if anything, is the not-mind upon which the mind
+works. We must leave something for the chapter on philosophy; and the
+present chapter is primarily historical. Having defined what we mean by
+science, we are to consider at what stage in history the working of the
+mind on experience can be called scientific, in what great strides
+science has leapt forward since its definite formation, and in what ways
+this growth of science has affected general progress, both by its action
+on the individual and on the welfare and unity of mankind.
+
+Our French motto must be qualified in order to give us precision in our
+definition and a starting-point in history for science in the strict
+sense. In a general sense the action of the mind upon the given in
+experience has been going on from the beginning of animal life. But
+science, strictly so-called, does not appear till men have been
+civilized and settled in large communities for a considerable time. We
+cannot ascribe 'science' to the isolated savage gnawing bones in his
+cave, though the germs are there, in every observation that he makes of
+the world around him and every word that he utters to his mates. But we
+may begin to speak of science when we reach those large and ordered
+societies which are found in the great river-basins and sedentary
+civilizations of East and West, especially in Egypt and Chaldea.
+
+When we turn to the quality of the thing itself, we note in the first
+place that while science may be said to begin with mere description, it
+implies from the first a certain degree of order and accuracy, and this
+order and accuracy increase steadily as science advances. It is thus a
+type of progress, for it is a constant growth in the fullness, accuracy
+and simplification of our experience. From the dawn of science,
+therefore, man must have acquired standards and instruments of
+measurement and means of handing on his observations to others. Thus
+writing must have been invented. But in the second place, there is
+always involved in this orderly description, so far as it is scientific,
+the element of prediction. The particular description is not scientific.
+'I saw a bird fly' is not a scientific description, however accurate;
+but 'The bird flies by stretching out its wings' is. It contains that
+causal connexion or element of generality which enables us to predict.
+
+Before entering on a historical sketch of the most perfect example of
+human progress, it is of the first importance to realize its social
+foundation. This is the key-note, and it connects science throughout with
+the other aspects of our subject. Knowledge depends upon the free
+intercourse of mind with mind, and man advances with the increase and
+better direction of his knowledge. But when we consider the implications
+of any generalization which we can call 'a law of nature' the social
+co-operation involved becomes still more apparent. Geometry and
+astronomy--the measurement of the earth and the measurement of the
+heavens--dispute the honour of the first place in the historical order.
+Both, of course, involved the still more fundamental conception of number
+and the acceptance of some unit for measurement. Now in each case and at
+every step a long previous elaboration is implied of intellectual
+conventions and agreements--conscious and unconscious--between many minds
+stretching back to the beginnings of conscious life: the simplest element
+of thought involves the co-operation of individual minds in a common
+product. Language is such a common product of social life and it prepares
+the ground for science. But science, as the exact formulation of general
+truths, attains a higher degree of social value, because it rises above
+the idioms of person or race and is universally acceptable in form and
+essence. Such is the intrinsic nature of the process, and the historical
+circumstances of its beginnings make it clear. It was the quick mind of
+the Greek which acted as the spark to fire the trains of thought and
+observation which had been accumulating for ages through the agency of the
+priests in Egypt and Babylonia. The Greeks lived and travelled between the
+two centres, and their earliest sages and philosophers were men of the
+most varied intercourse and occupation. Their genius was fed by a wide
+sympathy and an all-embracing curiosity. No other people could have
+demonstrated so well the social nature of science from its inception, and
+they were planting in a soil well prepared. In Egypt conspicuously and in
+Chaldea also to a less extent there had been a social order which before
+the convulsions of the last millennium B.C. had lasted substantially
+unchanged for scores of centuries. This order was based upon a religious
+discipline which connected the sovereigns on earth with the divine power
+ruling men from the sky. Hence the supreme importance of the priesthood
+and their study of the movements of the heavenly bodies. The calendar,
+which they were the first to frame, was thus not only or even primarily a
+work of practical utility but of religious meaning and obligation. The
+priests had to fix in advance the feast days of gods and kings by
+astronomical prediction. Their standards and their means of measurement
+were rough approximations. Thus the 360 degrees into which the Babylonians
+taught us to divide the circle are thought to have been the nearest round
+number to the days of the year. The same men were also capable of the more
+accurate discovery that the side of a hexagon inscribed in a circle was
+equal to the radius and gave us our division of sixty minutes and sixty
+seconds with all its advantages for calculation. In Egypt, if the
+surveyors were unaware of the true relation between a triangle and the
+rectangle on the same base, they had yet established the carpenter's rule
+of 3, 4 and 5 for the sides of a right-angled triangle.
+
+How much the Greeks drew from the ancient priesthoods we shall never
+know, nor how far the priests had advanced in those theories of general
+relations which we call scientific. But one or two general conclusions
+as to this initial stage of scientific preparation may well be drawn.
+
+One is that a certain degree of settlement and civilization was
+necessary for the birth of science. This we find in these great
+theocracies, where sufficient wealth enabled a class of leisured and
+honoured men to devote themselves to joint labour in observing nature
+and recording their observations. Another point is clear, namely, that
+the results of these early observations, crude as they were, contributed
+powerfully to give stability to the societies in which they arose. The
+younger Pliny points out later the calming effect of Greek astronomy on
+the minds of the Eastern peoples, and we are bound to carry back the
+same idea into the ancient settled communities where astronomy began and
+where so remarkable an order prevailed for so long during its
+preparation.
+
+But however great the value we allow to the observations of the priests,
+it is to the Ionian Greeks that we owe the definite foundation of
+science in the proper sense; it was they who gave the raw material the
+needed accuracy and generality of application, A comparison of the
+societies in the nearer East to which we have referred, with the history
+of China affords the strongest presumption of this. In the later
+millenniums B.C. the Chinese were in many points ahead of the
+Babylonians and Egyptians. They had made earlier predictions of eclipses
+and more accurate observations of the distance of the sun from the
+zenith at various places. They had, too, seen the advantages of a
+decimal system both in weights and measures and in the calculations of
+time. But no Greek genius came to build the house with the bricks that
+they had fashioned, and in spite of the achievements of the Chinese they
+remained until our own day the type in the world of a settled and
+contented, although unprogressive, conservatism.
+
+Science then among its other qualities contains a force of social
+movement, and our age of rapid transformation has begun to do fuller
+justice to the work of the Greeks, the greatest source of intellectual
+life and change in the world. We are now fully conscious of the defects
+in their methods, the guesses which pass for observations, the
+metaphysical notions which often take the place of experimental
+results.[80] But having witnessed the latest strides in the unification
+of science on mathematical lines, we are more and more inclined to prize
+the geometry and astronomy of the Greeks, who gave us the first
+constructions on which the modern mechanical theories of the universe
+are based. We shall quote from them here only sufficient illustrations
+to explain and justify this statement.
+
+The first shall be what is called Euclidean geometry, but which is in
+the main the work of the Pythagorean school of thinkers and social
+reformers who flourished from the seventh to the fifth centuries B.C.
+This formed the greater part of the geometrical truth known to mankind
+until Descartes and the mathematicians recommenced the work in the
+seventeenth century. The second greatest contribution of the Greeks was
+the statics and the conics of which Archimedes was the chief creator in
+the third century B.C. In his work he gave the first sketch of an
+infinitesimal calculus and in his own way performed an integration. The
+third invaluable construction was the trigonometry by which Hipparchus
+for the first time made a scientific astronomy possible. The fourth, the
+optics of Ptolemy based on much true observation and containing an
+approximation to the general law.
+
+These are a few outstanding landmarks, peaks in the highlands of Greek
+science, and nothing has been said of their zoology or medicine. In all
+these cases it will be seen that the advance consisted in bringing
+varying instances under the same rule, in seeing unity in difference, in
+discovering the true link which held together the various elements in
+the complex of phenomena. That the Greek mind was apt in doing this is
+cognate to their idealizing turn in art. In their statues they show us
+the universal elements in human beauty; in their science, the true
+relations that are common to all triangles and all cones.
+
+Ptolemy's work in optics is a good example of the scientific mind at
+work.[81] The problem is the general relation which holds between the
+angles of incidence and of refraction when a ray passes from air into
+water or from air into glass. He groups a series of the angles with a
+close approximation to the truth, but just misses the perception which
+would have turned his excellent raw material into the finished product
+of science. His brick does not quite fit its place in the building. His
+formula _i_ (the angle of incidence) = _nr_ (the angle of refraction)
+only fits the case of very small angles for which the sine is
+negligible, though it had the deceptive advantage of including reflexion
+as one case of refraction. He did not pursue the argument and make his
+form completely general. Sin _i_ = _n_ sin _r_ escaped him, though he
+had all the trigonometry of Hipparchus behind him, and it was left for
+Snell and Descartes to take the simple but crucial step at the beginning
+of the seventeenth century.
+
+The case is interesting for more than one reason. It shows us what is a
+general form, or law of nature in mathematical shape, and it also
+illustrates the progress of science as it advances from the most
+abstract conceptions of number and geometry, to more concrete phenomena
+such as physics. The formula for refraction which Ptolemy helped to
+shape, is geometrical in form. With him, as with the discoverer of the
+right angle in a semicircle, the mind was working to find a general
+ideal statement under which all similar occurrences might be grouped.
+Observation, the collection of similar instances, measurement, are all
+involved, and the general statement, law or form, when arrived at, is
+found to link up other general truths and is then used as a
+starting-point in dealing with similar cases in future. Progress in
+science consists in extending this mental process to an ever-increasing
+area of human experience. We shall see, as we go on, how in the concrete
+sciences the growing complexity and change of detail make such
+generalizations more and more difficult. The laws of pure geometry seem
+to have more inherent necessity and the observations on which they were
+originally founded have passed into the very texture of our minds. But
+the work of building up, or, perhaps better, of organizing our
+experience remains fundamentally the same. Man is throughout both
+perceiving and making that structure of truth which is the framework of
+progress.
+
+Ptolemy's work brings us to the edge of the great break which occurred
+in the growth of science between the Greek and the modern world. In the
+interval, the period known as the Middle Ages, the leading minds in the
+leading section of the human race were engaged in another part of the
+great task of human improvement. For them the most incumbent task was
+that of developing the spiritual consciousness of men for which the
+Catholic Church provided an incomparable organization. But the interval
+was not entirely blank on the scientific side. Our system of
+arithmetical notation, including that invaluable item the cipher, took
+shape during the Middle Ages at the hands of the Arabs, who appear to
+have derived it in the main from India. Its value to science is an
+excellent object-lesson on the importance of the details of form. Had
+the Greeks possessed it, who can say how far they might have gone in
+their applications of mathematics?
+
+Yet in spite of this drawback the most permanent contribution of the
+Greeks to science was in the very sphere of exact measurement where they
+would have received the most assistance from a better system of
+calculation had they possessed it. They founded and largely constructed
+both plane and spherical geometry on the lines which best suit our
+practical intelligence. They gave mankind the framework of astronomy by
+determining the relative positions of the heavenly bodies, and they
+perceived and correctly stated the elementary principles of equilibrium.
+At all these points the immortal group of men who adopted the Copernican
+theory at the Renascence, began again where the Greeks had left off. But
+modern science starts with two capital improvements on the work of the
+Greeks. Measurement there had been from the first, and the effort to
+find the constant thing in the variable flux; and from the earliest days
+of the Ionian sages the scientific mind had been endeavouring to frame
+the simplest general hypothesis or form which would contain all the
+facts. But the moderns advanced decisively, in method, by experimenting
+and verifying their hypotheses, and in subject-matter, by applying their
+method to phenomena of movement, which may theoretically include all
+facts biological as well as physical. Galileo, the greatest founder of
+modern science, perfectly exemplifies both these new departures.
+
+It is, perhaps, the most instructive and encouraging thing in the whole
+annals of progress to note how the men of the Renascence were able to
+pick up the threads of the Greeks and continue their work. The texture
+held good. Leonardo da Vinci, whose birth coincides with the invention
+of the printing-press, is the most perfect reproduction in modern times
+of the early Greek sophos, the man of universal interests and capacity.
+He gave careful and admiring study to Archimedes, the greatest pure man
+of science among the Greeks, the one man among them whose works,
+including even his letters, have come down to us practically complete. A
+little later, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, Copernicus
+gained from the Pythagoreans the crude notion of the earth's movement
+round a great central fire, and from it he elaborated the theory which
+was to revolutionize thought. Another half-century later the works of
+Archimedes were translated into Latin and for the first time printed.
+They thus became well known before the time of Galileo, who also
+carefully studied them. At the beginning of the seventeenth century
+Galileo made the capital discoveries which established both the
+Copernican theory and the science of dynamics. Galileo's death in 1642
+coincides with the birth of Sir Isaac Newton.
+
+Such is the sequence of the most influential names at the turning-point
+of modern thought.
+
+Galileo's work, his experiments with falling bodies and the revelations
+of his telescope, carried the strategic lines of Greek science across
+the frontiers of a New World, and Newton laid down the lines of
+permanent occupation and organized the conquest. Organization, the
+formation of a network of lines connected as a whole, and giving access
+to different parts of the world of experience, is perhaps the best image
+of the growth of science in the mind of mankind. It will be seen that it
+does not imply any exhaustion of the field, nor any identification of
+all knowledge with exact or systematic knowledge. The process is rather
+one of gradual penetration, the linking up and extension of the area of
+knowledge by well-defined and connected methods of thought. No
+all-embracing plan thought out beforehand by the first founders of
+science, or any of their successors, can be applied systematically to
+the whole range of our experience. It has not been so in the past; still
+less does it seem possible in the future. For the most part the
+discoverer works on steadily in his own plot, occupying the nearest
+places first, and observing here and there that one of his lines runs
+into some one else's. Every now and then a greater and more
+comprehensive mind appears, able to treat several systems as one whole,
+to survey a larger area and extend that empire of the mind which, as
+Bacon tells us, is nobler than any other.
+
+Of such conquerors Newton was the greatest we have yet known, because he
+brought together into one system more and further-reaching lines of
+communication than any one else. He unified the forms of measurement
+which had previously been treated as the separate subjects of geometry,
+astronomy, and the newly-born science of dynamics. Celestial mechanics
+embraces all three, and is a fresh and decisive proof of the commanding
+influence of the heavenly bodies on human life and thought. Not by a
+horoscope, but by continued and systematic thought, humanity was
+unravelling its nature and destiny in the stars as well as in itself.
+These are the two approaches to perfect knowledge which are converging
+more and more closely in our own time. Newton's work was the longest
+step yet taken on the mechanical side, and we must complete our notice
+of it by the briefest possible reference to the later workers on the
+same line, before turning to the sciences of life which began their more
+systematic evolution with the discovery of Harvey, a contemporary of
+Newton.
+
+The seventeenth century, with Descartes' application of algebra to
+geometry, and Newton's and Leibnitz's invention of the differential and
+integral calculus, improved our methods of calculation to such a point
+that summary methods of vastly greater comprehensiveness and elasticity
+can be applied to any problem of which the elements can be measured. The
+mere improvement in the method of describing the same things (cf. e.g. a
+geometrical problem as written down by Archimedes with any modern
+treatise) was in itself a revolution. But the new calculus went much
+farther. It enabled us to represent, in symbols which may be dealt with
+arithmetically, any form of regular movement.
+
+As movement is universal, and the most obvious external manifestation of
+life itself, the hopes of a mathematical treatment of all phenomena are
+indefinitely enlarged, for all fresh laws or forms might conceivably be
+expressed as differential equations. So to the vision of a Poincare the
+human power of prediction appears to have no assignable theoretical
+limit.
+
+The seventeenth century which witnessed this momentous extension of
+mathematical methods, also contains the cognate foundation of scientific
+physics. Accurate measurement began to be applied to the phenomena of
+light and heat, the expansion of gases, the various changes in the forms
+of matter apart from life. The eighteenth century which continued this
+work, is also and most notably marked by the establishment of a
+scientific chemistry. In this again we see a further extension of
+accurate measurement: another order of things different in quality began
+to be treated by a quantitative analysis. Lavoisier's is the greatest
+name. He gave a clear and logical classification of the chemical
+elements then known, which served as useful a purpose in that science,
+as classificatory systems in botany and zoology have done in those
+cases. But the crucial step which established chemistry, a step also due
+to Lavoisier, was making the test of weight decisive. 'The balance was
+the _ultima ratio_ of his laboratory.' His first principle was that the
+total weight of all the products of a chemical process must be exactly
+equal to the total weight of the substances used. From this, and rightly
+disregarding the supposed weight of heat, he could proceed to the
+discovery of the accurate proportions of the elements in all the
+compounds he was able to analyse.
+
+Since then the process of mathematical synthesis in science has been
+carried many stages further. The exponents of this aspect of scientific
+progress, of whom we may take the late M. Henri Poincare as the leading
+representative in our generation, are perfectly justified in treating
+this gradual mathematical unification of knowledge with pride and
+confidence. They have solid achievement on their side. It is through
+science of this kind that the idea of universal order has gained its
+sway in man's mind. The occasional attacks on scientific method, the
+talk one sometimes hears of 'breaking the fetters of Cartesian
+mechanics', seem to suggest that the great structure which Galileo,
+Newton, and Descartes founded is comparable to the false Aristotelianism
+which they destroyed. The suggestion is absurd: its chief excuse is the
+desire to defend the autonomy of the sciences of life, about which we
+have a word to say later on. But we must first complete our brief
+mention of the greatest stages on the mechanical side, of which a full
+and vivid account may be found in such a book as M. Poincare's _Science
+et Hypothese_.
+
+Early in the nineteenth century a trio of discoverers, a Frenchman, a
+German, and an Englishman, established the theory of the conservation of
+energy. To the labours of Sadi Carnot, Mayer, and Joule is due our
+knowledge of the fact that heat which, as a supposed entity, had
+disturbed the physics and chemistry of the earlier centuries, was itself
+another form of mechanical energy and could be measured like the rest.
+Later in the century another capital step in synthesis was taken by the
+foundation of astrophysics, which rests on the identity of the physics
+and chemistry of the heavenly bodies with those of the earth.
+
+The known universe thus becomes still more one. Later researches again,
+especially those of Maxwell, tend to the identification of light and
+heat with electricity, and in the last stage matter as a whole seems to
+be swallowed up in motion. It is found that similar equations will
+express all kinds of motion; that all are really various forms of the
+motion of something which the mind postulates as the thing in motion; we
+have in each case to deal with wave-movements of different length. The
+broad change, therefore, which has taken place since the mechanics of
+Newton is the advance from the consideration of masses to that of
+molecules of smaller and smaller size, and the truth of the former is
+not thereby invalidated. Newton, Descartes, Fresnel, Carnot, Joule,
+Mayer, Faraday, Helmholtz, Maxwell appear as one great succession of
+unifiers. All have been engaged in the same work of consolidating
+thought at the same time that they extended it. Their conceptions of
+force, mass, matter, ether, atom, molecule have provisional validity as
+the imagined objective substratum of our experience, and the fact that
+we analyse these conceptions still further and sometimes discard them,
+does not in any way invalidate the law or general form in which they
+have enabled us to sum up our experience and predict the future.
+
+But now we turn to the other side. In spite of the continued progress
+noted on the mechanical side, it is true that the predominant scientific
+interest changed in the nineteenth century from mechanics to biology,
+from matter to life, from Newton to Darwin. Darwin was born in 1809, the
+year in which Lamarck, who invented the term biology, published his
+_Philosophie Zoologique_. The _Origin of Species_ appeared in 1858 after
+the conservation of energy had been established, and the range and
+influence of evolutionary biology have grown ever since.
+
+Before anything can be said of the conclusions in this branch of science
+one preliminary remark has to be made. From the philosophical point of
+view the science of life includes all other, for man is a living animal,
+and science is the work of his co-operating mind, one of the functions
+of his living activity. What this involves on the philosophical side
+does not concern us here, but it is necessary to indicate here the
+nature of the contact between the two great divisions of science, the
+mechanical and the biological, considered purely as sciences. For,
+though we know that our consciousness as a function of life must in some
+form come into the science of life, and is, in a sense, above it all, we
+are yet able to draw conclusions, apparently of infinite scope, about
+the behaviour of all living things around us and including ourselves,
+just as we do about a stone or a star. And we are interested in this
+chapter in seeing how this drawing of general conclusions keeps growing
+with regard to the phenomena of life, just as it has grown with regard
+to all other phenomena, and we have to consider what sort of difference
+there is between the one class of generalizations and the other.
+
+For those of us who are content to rest their conclusions on the
+positively known, who, while not setting any limits to the possible
+extension of knowledge, are not prepared to dogmatize about it, it is
+still necessary to draw a line. A dualism remains, name and fact alike
+abhorrent to the completely logical philosophic mind. On the one hand
+the ordinary laws of physical science are constantly extending their
+sphere; on the other, the fact of life still remains unexplained by
+them, and becomes in itself more and more marvellous as we investigate
+it. The general position remains much as Johannes Mueller expressed it
+about the middle of the last century, himself sometimes described as the
+central figure in the history of modern physiology. 'Though there
+appears to be something in the phenomena of living beings which cannot
+be explained by ordinary mechanical, physical, or chemical laws, much
+may be so explained, and we may without fear push these explanations as
+far as we can, so long as we keep to the solid ground of observation and
+experiment.' Since this was written the double process has gone on
+apace. The chemistry and physics of living matter are being sketched,
+and biologists are more and more inclined to study the mechanical
+expression of the facts of life. Mr. Bateson, for instance, tells us
+that the greatest advance that we can foresee will be made 'when it is
+possible to connect the geometrical phenomena of development with the
+chemical'. The process of applying physical laws to life follows, it
+would seem, the reverse order of their original development. First the
+chemistry of organic matter was investigated, then the physical
+attraction of their molecules, and now their geometry is in question.
+So, says Professor Bateson, the 'geometrical symmetry of living things
+is the key to a knowledge of their regularity and the forces which cause
+it. In the symmetry of the dividing cell the basis of that resemblance
+which we call Heredity is contained'.
+
+But such work as this is still largely speculative and in the future. It
+does not solve the secret of life. It does not affect the fact of
+consciousness which we are free to conceive, if we will, as the other
+side of what we call matter, evolving with it from the most rudimentary
+forms into the highest known form in man, or still further into some
+super-personal or universal form. This, however, is philosophy or
+metaphysics. We are here concerned with the progress of science, in one
+of its two great departments, i.e. knowledge about life and all its
+known manifestations, which from Aristotle onwards have been subjected
+to a scrutiny similar to that which has been given to the physical facts
+of the universe and with results in many points similar also. But the
+facts, although superficially more familiar, are infinitely more
+complicated, and the scrutiny has only commenced in earnest some hundred
+years ago. Considering the short space for this concentrated and
+systematic study, the results are at least as wonderful as those
+achieved by the physicists. Two or three points of suggestive analogy
+between the courses of the two great branches of science may here be
+mentioned.
+
+We will put first the fundamental question on which, as we have seen, no
+final answer has yet been reached: What is life, and is there any
+evidence of life arising from the non-living? Now this baffling and
+probably unanswerable question--unanswerable, that is, in terms which go
+beyond the physical concomitants of life--has played the part in biology
+which the alchemists' quest played in chemistry. It led by the way to a
+host of positive discoveries. Aristotle, the father of biology, believed
+in spontaneous generation. He was puzzled by the case of parasites,
+especially in putrefying matter. Even Harvey, who made the first great
+definite discovery about the mechanism of the body, agreed with
+Aristotle in this error. It was left for the minute and careful
+inquirers of the nineteenth century to dispose of the myth. It was only
+after centuries of inquiry that the truth was established that life, as
+we know it, only arises from life. But the whole course of the inquiry
+had illuminated the nature of life and had brought together facts as to
+living things of all kinds, plants and animals, great and small, which
+show superficially the widest difference. Illumination by unification is
+here the note, as clearly as in the mathematical-physical sciences. All
+living things are found to be built up from cells and each cell to be an
+organism, a being, that is, with certain qualities belonging to it as a
+whole, which cannot be predicated of any collection of parts not an
+organism. The cell is such an organism, just as the animal is an
+organism, and among its qualities as an organism is the power of growth
+by assimilating material different from itself. Yet, in spite of this
+assimilation and constant change, it grows and decays as one whole and
+reproduces its like.
+
+Another point of analogy between the animate and the inanimate sphere is
+that the process of study in both has been from the larger to the
+smaller elements. The microscope has played at least as decisive a part
+as the telescope, and it dates from about the same time, at the
+beginning of the seventeenth century. Since then it has penetrated
+farther and farther into the infinitesimal elements of life and matter,
+and in each case there seems to be no assignable limit to our analysis.
+The cell is broken up into physiological units to which almost every
+investigator gives a new name. We are now confronted by the fascinating
+theory of Arrhenius of an infinite universe filled with vital spores,
+wafted about by radio-activity, and beginning their upward course of
+evolution wherever they find a kindly soil on which to rest. To such a
+vision the hopes and fears of mortal existence, catastrophes of nature
+or of society, even the decay of man, seem transient and trivial, and
+the infinities embrace.
+
+A third point, perhaps the most important in the comparison, is the way
+by which the order of science has entered into our notions of life,
+through a great theory, the theory of evolution or the doctrine of
+descent. In this we find a solid basis for the co-ordination of facts:
+it was the rise of this theory in the hands of one thinker of
+unconquerable patience and love of truth which has put the study of
+biology in the pre-eminent position which it now holds. But it is
+necessary to consider the evolution theory as something both older and
+wider than Darwin's presentation of it. Darwin's work was to suggest a
+_vera causa_ for a process which earlier philosophers had imagined
+almost from the beginning of abstract thought. He observed and collected
+a multitude of facts which made his explanations of the change of
+species--within their limits--as convincing as they are plausible. But
+the idea that species change, by slow and regular steps, was an old one,
+and his particular explanations, natural and sexual selection, are seen
+on further reflection to have only a limited scope.
+
+This is no place, of course, to discuss the details of the greatest and
+most vexed question in the whole science of life. But it belongs to our
+argument to consider it from one or two general points of view. Its
+analogies with, and its differences from, the great generalizations of
+mathematical physics, are both highly instructive. The first crude
+hypothesis of the gradual evolution of various vegetable and animal
+forms from one another may be found in the earliest Greek thinkers, just
+as Pythagoras and Aristarchus anticipated the Copernican theory.
+Aristotle gave the idea a philosophic statement which only the fuller
+knowledge of our own time enables us to appreciate. He traced the
+gradual progression in nature from the inorganic to the organic, and
+among living things from the simpler to the higher forms. But his
+knowledge of the facts was insufficient: the Greeks had no microscope,
+and the dissecting knife was forbidden on the human subject. Then, as
+these things were gradually added to science from the seventeenth
+century onwards, and the record of the rocks gave the confirmation of
+palaeontology, the whole realm of living nature was gradually unfolded
+before us, every form connected both in function and in history with
+every other, every organ fulfilling a necessary part, either now or in
+the past, and growing and changing to gain a more perfect accord with
+its environment. Such is the supreme conception which now dominates
+biological science much as the Newtonian theory has dominated physics
+for two hundred years; and it is idle to debate whether this new idea is
+different in kind or only in degree from the great law of physics. It is
+a general notion or law which brings together and explains myriads of
+hitherto unrelated particulars; it has been established by observation
+and experiment working on a previous hypothesis; it involves
+measurement, as all accurate observation must, and it gives us an
+increasing power of prediction. So far, therefore, we must class it with
+the great mathematical laws and dissent from M. Bergson. But seeing that
+the multitudinous facts far surpass our powers of complete colligation,
+that much in the vital process is still obscure, that we are conscious
+in ourselves of a power of shaping circumstances which we are inclined
+in various degrees to attribute to other living things, so far we
+recognize a profound difference between the laws of life and the laws of
+physics, and pay our respects to M. Bergson and his allies of the
+neo-vitalist school. Not for the first time in history we have to seek
+the truth in the reconciliation, or at least the cohabitation, of
+apparent contradictories.
+
+To us who are concerned in tracing the progress of mankind as a whole,
+and constantly find the roots of progress in the growth of the social
+spirit, the development, that is, of unity of spirit and of action on a
+wider and deeper scale, there is one aspect of biological truth, as the
+evolutionists have lately revealed it, which is of special interest. The
+living thing is an organism of which the characteristic is the constant
+effort to preserve its unity. This is in fact the definition of an
+organism. It only dies or suffers diminution in order to reproduce
+itself, and the new creature repeats by some sort of organic memory the
+same preservative acts that its parents did. We recognize life by these
+manifestations. A merely material, non-living thing, such as a crystal,
+cannot thus make good its loss, nor can it assimilate unlike substance
+and make it a part of itself. But these things are of the nature of
+life. Now mankind, as a whole, has, if our argument is correct, this
+characteristic of an organism: it is bound together by more than
+mechanical or accidental links. It is _one_ by the nature of its being,
+and the study of mankind, the highest branch of the science of life,
+rests, or should rest, upon the basis of those common functions by which
+humanity is held together and distinguished from the rest of the animate
+world.
+
+Just as in passing from the mechanical sciences to that of life, we
+noticed that the general laws of the lower sphere still held good, but
+that new factors not analysable into those of the former had to be
+reckoned with, so in passing from the animate realm, as a whole, to man
+its highest member, we find that, while animal, and subject to the
+general laws of animality, he adds features which distinguish him as
+another order and cannot be found elsewhere. His unity as an organism
+has a progressive quality possessed by no other species. Step by step
+his mind advances into the recesses of time and space, and makes the
+farthest objects that his mind can reach a part of his being. His unity
+of organization, of which the humblest animalcule is a simple type, goes
+far beyond the preservation or even the improvement of his species: it
+touches the infinite though it cannot contain it. To trace this widening
+process is the true key to progress, the _idee-mere_ of history. For
+while man's evolution has its practical side, like that of other
+species,--the needs of nutrition, of reproduction, of adapting himself
+to his environment,--with man this is the basis and not the end. The end
+is, first the organization of himself as a world-being, conscious of his
+unity, and then the illimitable conquest of truth and goodness as far as
+his ever-growing powers extend.
+
+Man's reason is thus, as philosophers have always taught, his special
+characteristic, and takes the place for him, on a higher plane, of the
+law of organic growth common to all living things. In this we join
+hands, across two thousand years, with Aristotle: he would have
+understood us and used almost identical language. But the content of the
+words as we use them and their applications are immeasurably greater.
+
+The content is the mass of knowledge which man's reason has accumulated
+and partly put in order since Aristotle taught. It is now so great that
+thoroughly to master a single branch is arduous labour for a lifetime
+of concentrated toil, and at the end of it new discoveries will crowd
+upon the worker and he will die with all his earlier notions crying for
+revision. No case so patent, so conclusive, of the reality of human
+unity and the paramount need of organization. The individual here can
+only thrive and only be of service as a small member of a great whole,
+one atom in a planet, one cell in a body. The demand which Comte raised
+more than fifty years ago for another class of specialists, the
+specialists in generalities, is now being taken up by men of science
+themselves. But the field has now so much extended and is so much fuller
+in every part, that it would seem that nothing less than a committee of
+Aristotles could survey the whole. And even this is but one aspect of
+the matter. Just as the genesis of science was in the daily needs of
+men--the cultivators whose fields must be re-measured after the
+flooding, the priests who had to fix the right hour for sacrifice--so
+all through its history science has grown and in the future will grow
+still more by following the suggestions of practice. It gathers strength
+by contact with the world and life, and it should use its strength in
+making the world more fit to live in. Thus our committee of scientific
+philosophers needs to have constantly in touch with it not one but many
+boards of scientific practitioners.
+
+The past which has given us this most wonderful of all the fruits of
+time, does not satisfy us equally as to the use that has been made of
+it. Our crowded slums do not proclaim the glory of Watt and Stephenson
+as the heavens remind us of Kepler and Newton. Selfishness has grown fat
+on ill-paid labour, and jealous nations have sharpened their weapons
+with every device that science can suggest. But a sober judgement, as
+well as the clearest evidence of history, dictates a more hopeful
+conclusion. Industry, the twin brother of science, has vastly increased
+our wealth, our comfort, and our capacity for enjoyment. Medicine, the
+most human of her children, has lengthened our lives, fortified our
+bodies, and alleviated our suffering. Every chapter in this volume gives
+some evidence of the beneficent power of science. For religion,
+government, morality, even art, are all profoundly influenced by the
+knowledge that man has acquired of the world around him and his
+practical conclusions from it. These do not, with the possible exception
+of art, contradict the thesis of a general improvement of mankind, and
+science must therefore claim a share--it would seem the decisive
+share--in the result. We speak, of course, of science in the sense which
+has been developed in this essay, of the bright well-ordered centre to
+our knowledge which is always spreading and bringing more of the
+surrounding fringe, which is also spreading, into the well-defined area.
+In this sense religion, morality and government have all within historic
+times come within the range of clear and well-ordered thought: and
+mankind standing thus within the light, stands more firmly and with
+better hope. He sees the dark spots and the weaknesses. He knows the
+remedies, though his will is often unequal to applying them. And even
+with this revelation of weakness and ignorance, he is on the whole
+happier and readier to grapple with his fate.
+
+If this appears a fair diagnosis of the Western mind in the midst of its
+greatest external crisis, the reason for this amazing firmness of mind
+and stability of society must be sought in the structure which science
+and industry combined have built around us. The savage, untutored in
+astronomy, may think that an eclipse betokens the end of the world.
+Science convinces him that it will pass. Just so the modern world
+trained to an order of thought and of society which rests on world-wide
+activities elaborated through centuries of common effort, awaits the
+issue of our darkened present calmly and unmoved. The things of the mind
+on which all nations have co-operated in the past will re-assert their
+sway. Fundamentally this is a triumph for the scientific spirit, the
+order which man has now succeeded in establishing between himself and
+his surroundings.
+
+The country is demanding--and rightly--a stronger bias in our
+educational system for teaching of a scientific kind; but teachers and
+professors are not unnaturally perplexed. They see the immeasurable
+scope of the new knowledge; they know the labour, often ineffective,
+that has been expended in teaching the rudiments of the old
+'humanities'. And now a task is propounded to them before which the old
+one with all its faults seems definite, manageable and formative of
+character. The classical world which has been the staple of our
+education for 400 years is a finished thing and we can compass it in
+thought. It lives indeed, but unconsciously, in our lives, as we go
+about our business. This new world into which our youth has now to
+enter, rests also on the past, but it is still more present; it grows
+all round us faster than we can keep pace with its earlier stages. How
+then can such a thing be used as an instrument of education where above
+all something is needed of clear and definite purpose, stimulating in
+itself and tending to mental growth and activity in after life? We could
+not, even if we would, offer any satisfactory answer here to one of the
+most troubled questions of the day. Decades of experiments will be
+needed before even a tolerable solution can be reached. But the argument
+pursued in this and other essays may suggest a line of approach. This
+must lie in a reconciliation between science and history, or rather in
+the recognition that science rightly understood is the key to history,
+and that the history best worth study is the record of man's collective
+thought in face of the infinite complexities, the barriers and byways,
+the lights and shadows of life and nature. From the study of man's
+approach to knowledge and unity in history each new-coming student may
+shape his own. He sees a unity of thought not wholly unattainable, a
+foundation laid beneath the storms of time. To a mind thus trained
+should come an eagerness to carry on the conquests of the past and to
+apply the lessons gained to the amelioration of the present.
+
+This we may hope from the well-disposed. But for all, the contemplation
+of a universe where man's mind has worked for ages in unravelling its
+secrets and describing its wonders, must bring a sense of reverence as
+well as trust. It is no dry category of abstract truths to which we turn
+and would have others turn, but a world as bright and splendid as the
+rainbow to the savage or the forest to the poet or the heavens to the
+lonely watcher on the Babylonian plain. The glories and the depths
+remain, deeper and more glorious, with all the added marvels of man's
+exploring thought. The seeing eye which a true education will one day
+give us, may read man's history in the world we live in, and read the
+world with the full illumination of a united human vision--the eyes of
+us all.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+Alcan, _De la methode dans les Sciences_.
+
+Mach, _History of Mechanics_, Kegan Paul.
+
+Thomson, _Science of Life_, Blackie.
+
+Thomson, _Science in the Nineteenth Century_, Chambers.
+
+_New Calendar of Great Men_, Macmillan.
+
+_The Darwin Centenary Volume._
+
+Bergson, _Creative Evolution_.
+
+
+FOOTNOTES:
+
+[80] See Lewes, 'Aristotle, a chapter in the History of Science'.
+
+[81] H. Bouasse, _La Methode dans les Sciences_, Alcan.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+PROGRESS IN PHILOSOPHY
+
+J.A. SMITH
+
+
+To contend that there has been progress in Philosophy may seem but a
+desperate endeavour. For the reproach against it of unprogressiveness is
+of long standing: where other forms of human knowledge have undoubtedly
+advanced, Philosophy, in modern times at any rate, has (so it is said)
+remained stationary, propounding its outworn problems, its vain and
+empty solutions. Because of this failure it has by common consent been
+deposed from its once proud position at the head of the sciences and
+obliged to confess, in the words of the Trojan queen:
+
+                  modo maxima rerum
+    Nunc trahor exul inops.
+
+The charge of unprogressiveness is not made against it by its foes
+alone; the truth of it is admitted by some of its best friends. If
+Voltaire exclaims 'O metaphysique, metaphysique, nous sommes aussi
+avances qu'aux temps des Druides', Kant sadly admits the fact, sets
+himself to diagnose its cause, and if possible to discover or devise a
+remedy. Yet we must remember that it was philosophers who first descried
+those currents in the world of events which the non-philosophic,
+borrowing the name from them, call Progress, who first attempted to
+determine their direction and the possible goal of their convergence,
+and laboured to clear their own and others' minds in regard to the
+meaning, to capture which the name was thrown out as a net into the
+ocean of experience. Nor must we forget that it was in their own chosen
+field--the world of human thoughts and actions--that they from the
+beginning seemed to themselves to find the surest evidence of the
+reality of Progress. While the world that surrounded and hemmed them and
+their fellows in might or must be regarded as unchanging and
+unchangeable, doomed for ever to reproduce and monotonously reiterate
+whatsoever it had once done and been, the mind or spirit of Man in its
+own realm seemed capable of going beyond all its past achievements and
+rising to new heights, not merely here and there or in isolated
+instances but in such numbers or masses as to raise for long periods of
+history the general level of human efficiency and welfare. It is true
+that many of those who noted these advances or profited by them did not
+always admit that they took place in, or were due to the agency of,
+Philosophy. The advances were most often credited to other powers and
+the new territory claimed by their representatives. The contributions
+made by Philosophy to the general improvement of human life were and are
+obscure, difficult to trace, easily missed or forgotten. It came about
+that the philosopher was misconceived as one indifferent to ordinary
+human interests and disdainful of the more obvious advantages secured by
+others, pressing and urging forward and upward into a cloudland where
+the light was too dim for the eyes of man and the paths too uncertain
+for his feet. Unsatisfied with the region where Man had learned by the
+slow and painful lessons of experience to build himself a habitable city
+he dreamed of something higher, aspiring to explore beyond and above
+where the light of that experience shone and illuminated. Perhaps the
+main idea that the name of Philosophy now to most suggests is that of a
+Utopian ideal of knowledge so wide and so high that it must be by sane
+and sober minds pronounced for ever set beyond the reach of human
+faculty, an ideal which perhaps we cannot help forming and which
+constantly tempts us forward like a mirage, but which like a mirage
+leads us into waste and barren places, so much so that it is no small
+part of human wisdom to resist its subtle seductions and to confine our
+efforts to the pursuit of such ends as we may reasonably regard as well
+within the compass of our powers of thought and action. It is folly, we
+are told, to adventure ourselves upon the uncharted seas into which
+philosophers invite us, to waste our lives and perhaps break our hearts
+in the vain search for a knowledge that is for ever denied us. After
+all, there is much that we can know, and in the knowledge of which we
+can better the estate of Man, relieving him from many of his most
+pressing terrors and distresses. To cherish other hopes is to deceive
+ourselves to our own and our fellows' undoing, to refuse them our help
+and fail to play our part in the common business of mankind. There is
+surely in the world enough suffering and sorrow and sin to engage all
+our energies in dealing with them, nor are our endeavours to do so so
+plainly fruitless as to discourage from perseverance in them. Where in
+this task our hearts do faint and fail, are there not other means than
+the discredited nostrum of Philosophy to revive our hopes and recruit
+our forces? It was only, we are sometimes reminded, in the darkest days
+of human history that men turned desperately to Philosophy for comfort
+and consolation--how surely and demonstrably, we are told, in vain! When
+other duties are so urgent and immediate, have we even the right to
+consume our energies otherwise than in their direct discharge? And is it
+not presumption to ask for any further light than that which is
+vouchsafed to us in the ordinary course of experience or, if that is
+insufficient, in and by Religion?
+
+Much in this plea for a final relinquishment of aid from Philosophy in
+the furtherance of human progress is plausible and more than plausible.
+Yet the hope or, if you will, the dream of attaining some form or kind
+or degree of knowledge which the sciences do not and cannot supply and
+perhaps deny to be possible, some steadiness and firmness of assurance
+other and beyond the confidence of religious faith, is not yet extinct,
+is perhaps inextinguishable, and though it often takes extravagant and
+even morbid and repulsive forms, still haunts and tantalizes many, nor
+these the least wise or sane of our kind, so that they count all the
+labour they spend upon its search worth all the pains. Not for
+themselves alone do they seek it; they view themselves as not alone in
+the quest, but engaged in a matter of universally human moment. In the
+measure in which they count themselves to have attained any result they
+do not hoard it or grudge it to others. The notion of philosophic truth
+as something to be shared and enjoyed only by a few--as what is called
+'esoteric'--is no longer in vogue and is indeed felt to involve an
+essential self-contradiction; rather it is conceived as something the
+value of which is assured and enhanced by being imparted. Those who
+believe themselves to be by nature or (it may be) accident appointed to
+the office of its quest, by no means feel that they are thereby divided
+from their fellows as a peculiar people or a privileged and exclusive
+priesthood, but much rather as fellow servants enlisted and engaged in
+the public service of mankind. Least of all do they believe that their
+efforts are foredoomed to inevitable failure, that progress therein is
+not to be looked for, or that they and their predecessors have hitherto
+made no advance towards what they and, as they also believe, all men
+sought and still seek. To them the history of Philosophy for say the
+last two thousand years is not the dreary and dispiriting narrative of
+repeated error and defeat, but the record of a slow but secure and
+steady advance in which, as nowhere else, the mind of Man celebrates and
+enjoys triumphs over the mightiest obstacles, kindling itself to an
+ever-brightening flame. Reviewing its own past in history the spirit of
+Philosophy sees its own inner light, which is its act and its essence,
+constantly increasing, spreading ever wider into the circumambient dark,
+and touching far-off and hitherto undiscovered peaks with the fire of a
+coming dawn. In place of the starlight of Science or the moonlight of
+Religion it sees a sun arise flooding the world with light and warmth
+and life. High hopes, high claims; but can they be made good, or even
+rationally entertained? Suffice it here that they be openly avowed and
+proclaimed to be laid up in the heart of the philosophic spirit,
+'dreaming', and yet with waking eyes, 'of things to come'. Or rather
+shall we not say, seeing that its eyes are unsealed and the vision
+therefore no dream, beholding a present--an ever-present--Reality?
+
+It was Philosophy, or philosophers, as I have said, that first discerned
+the fact of Progress, named it, and divined its lineaments. To
+Philosophy the name and notion of Progress belongs as of right--the
+right of first occupation. Merely to have invented a name for the fact
+is no small service, for thus the fact was fixed for further study and
+examination. But with the name Philosophy gave us the idea, the notion,
+and therewith the fact began to be understood and to become amenable to
+further and further explanation. To this further explanation Philosophy
+gave notable assistance. To 'elaborate our concepts' has been said to be
+the whole business of Philosophy, that is, to arrest the vague and
+shifting meanings that float before our minds loosely attached to the
+words of ordinary careless speech, to fix their outlines,
+distinguishing, defining, ordering and organizing until each mass of
+meaning is improved and refined into a thought worthy to be called a
+notion, a fit member of the world of mind, a seat and source of
+intellectual light. In this work Philosophy proceeds and succeeds simply
+by reflecting on whatever meaning it has in whatever manner already
+acquired; it employs no strange apparatus or recondite methods, only
+continues more thoughtfully and conscientiously to use the familiar
+means by which the earlier simpler meanings were appropriated and
+developed, following the beaten tracks of the mind's native and
+spontaneous movement. Much more rarely than the sciences has it recourse
+to a technical vocabulary, being content to express itself in ordinary
+words though using them and their collocations with a careful delicacy
+and painstaking adroitness. To follow it in these uses demands an
+effort, for nothing is perhaps more difficult than to force our thoughts
+to run counter to our customary heedless use of words and to learn to
+employ them even for a short time with a steady precision of
+significance. Yet unless this effort is resolutely made we must remain
+the easy prey of manifold confusions and errors which trip us in the
+dark. Our words degrade into tokens which experience will not
+cash--tangles of symbols which we cannot retranslate.
+
+But Philosophy is more than the attempt to refine and subtilize our
+ordinary words so as to fit them for the higher service of
+interpretative thought, more even than the endeavour to improve the
+stock of ideas no matter how come by, by which we interpret to ourselves
+whatever it imports us to understand. All this it is and does, or
+strives to do, but only as subsidiary to its true business and real aim.
+All this it might do and do successfully, and yet make or bring about no
+substantial progress in itself or elsewhere. And when progress in
+Philosophy is spoken of, it is not either such improvement in language
+nor such improvement in ideas that alone or mainly is meant.
+
+What is claimed for (or denied to it) under the name of Progress is an
+advance in knowledge, knowledge clear-sighted, grounded, and assured,
+knowledge of some authentic and indubitable reality. It is by the
+attainment of such knowledge, by progress in and towards it, that the
+claim of Philosophy to be progressive must stand or fall. To the
+question whether it can make good its claim to the possession and
+increase of this knowledge we must give special attention, for if
+Philosophy fails in this it fails in all.
+
+The oldest name for the knowledge in question was simply Wisdom and, in
+some ways, in spite of its apparent arrogance this is the best name for
+what is sought--or missed. Yet from the beginning the name was felt not
+sufficiently to distinguish what was meant from the high skill of the
+cunning craftsman and the worldly wisdom of the man of affairs, the
+statesman or soldier or trader. In the case of all these it was
+difficult to disengage the knowledge involved from natural or trained
+practical dexterity. What was desired and required was knowledge
+distinguished but not divorced from practice and application--'pure
+knowledge' as it was sometimes called; not divorced, I repeat, for it
+was not conceived as without bearing upon the conduct of life, but still
+distinguished, as furnishing light rather than profit. For good or evil
+Philosophy began by considering what it sought and hoped to reach as
+pre-eminently knowledge in some distinctive sense, and having so begun
+it turned to reflect once more upon what it meant by so conceiving it
+and to make this meaning more precise and clear. So it came to present
+to itself as its aim or goal a special kind or degree of knowledge, to
+be inspired and guided by the hope of that. Practical as in many ways
+was the concern of ancient philosophy--its whole bent was towards the
+bettering of human life--it sought to achieve this by the extension and
+deepening of knowledge, and not either through the cultivation or
+refinement of emotion or the organization of practical, civil or social
+or philanthropic activities. It laboured--and laboured not in vain--to
+further the increase of knowledge by defining to itself in advance the
+kind or degree of knowledge which would accomplish the ultimate aim of
+its endeavour or subserve its accomplishment. Hence we must learn to
+view with a sympathetic eye its repeated essays to give precision and
+detail to the conception or ideal of knowledge.
+
+In form the answer rendered to its request to itself for a definition,
+was determined by the principle that the knowledge which was sought and
+alone, if found, could satisfy, was knowledge of the real, or as it was
+at first more simply expressed, of what is, or what really and veritably
+is. Refusing the name of knowledge except to what had this as its
+object, men turned to consider the nature of the object which stood or
+could stand in this relation. With this they contrasted what we, after
+them, call the phenomena, the appearances, the manifold aspects,
+constantly shifting with the shifting points of view of the observer or
+many observers of it, inconstant, unsteady, superficial, mirrored
+through the senses and imagination, multiplied and distorted in
+divergent and changing opinions, or misrepresented and even caricatured
+in the turbid medium of ordinary speech, like a clouded image on the
+broken waters of a rushing stream. 'It'--so at first they spoke of the
+object of true or 'philosophic' knowledge--was one and single, eternal
+and unchangeable, a universe or world-order of parts fixed for ever in
+their external relations and inward structure. In each and all of us
+there was, as it were, a tiny mirror that could be cleared so as to
+reflect all this, and in so far as such reflection took place an inner
+light was kindled in each which was a lamp to his path. Knowing--for to
+know was so to reflect the world as it really was--knowing, man came to
+self-possession and self-satisfaction--to peace and joy--and was even
+'on this bank and shoal of time' raised beyond the reach of all
+accidents and evils of mortal existence--looking around and down upon
+all that could harm or hurt him and seeing it to be in its law-abiding
+orderliness and eternal changelessness the embodiment of good. So
+viewing it, man learned to feel the Universe his true home, and was
+inspired not only with awe but with a high loyalty and public spirit.
+'The poet says "Dear City of Cecrops", and shall I not say "Dear City of
+God"?'
+
+The knowledge thus reached or believed to be attainable was more and
+more discriminated from what was offered or supplied by Art or Science
+or Religion, though it was still often confused with each and all of
+them. As opposed to that of Art, it was not direct or immediate vision
+flashed as it were upon the inner eye in moments of inspiration or
+excitement; as opposed to that of Science, it was a knowledge that
+pierced below the surface and the seeming of Nature and History; as
+opposed to that of Religion (which was rather faith than knowledge), it
+was sober, unimaginative, cleansed of emotional accompaniment and
+admixture, the 'dry light' of the wise soul. True to the principle which
+I have stated, ancient Philosophy proclaimed that the only knowledge in
+the end worth having was knowledge of Fact--of what lay behind all
+seeming however fair--Fact unmodified and unmodifiable by human wish or
+will; it bade us know the world in which we live and move and have our
+being, know it as it is truly and in itself, and knowing it love it,
+loyally acquiescing in its purposes and subserving its ends. In all this
+there was progress (was there not?) to a view, to a truth (how else
+shall we speak of it?) which has always, when apprehended, begotten a
+high temper in heroic hearts. Surely in having reached in thought so
+high and so far the mind of man had progressed in knowledge and in
+wisdom.
+
+But now a change took place, from which we must date the rise or birth
+of modern philosophy. Hitherto on the whole the mind of man had looked
+outward and sought knowledge of what lay or seemed to lie outside
+itself. So looking and gazing ever deeper it had encountered a spectacle
+of admirable and awe-compelling order, yet one which for that very
+reason seemed appallingly remote from, if not alien to, all human
+businesses and concerns. Now it turned inward and found within itself
+not only matter of more immediate or pressing interest, but a world that
+compelled attention, excited curiosity, rewarded study. Slowly and
+gradually the knowledge of this, the inner world--the world of the
+thinker's self--became the central object of philosophic reflection. The
+knowledge that was most required--that was all-important and
+indispensable (so man began explicitly to realize)--was knowledge of the
+Self, not of the outer world that at best could never be more than
+known, but of the self that knew or could know it, that could both know
+and be known. Henceforward what is studied is not knowledge of
+reality--of any and every reality--or of external reality, but knowledge
+of the Self which can know as well as be known. And the process by which
+it is sought is reflection, for the self-knowledge is not the knowledge
+of other selves, but the knowledge of just that Self which knows itself
+and no other. Thus the knowledge sought is once more and now finally
+distinguished from the knowledge offered or supplied by Art or Science
+or Religion: not by Art, for the Self cannot appear and has no seeming
+nor can it any way be pictured or described or imagined; not by
+Science, for it lies beyond and beneath and behind all observation, nor
+can it be counted or measured or weighed; not by Religion, for knowledge
+of it comes from within and the disclosure of its nature is by the
+self-witness of the Self to its self, not by revelation of any other to
+it. Thus there is disclosed the slowly-won and slowly-revealed secret of
+modern Philosophy, that the knowledge which is indispensable, which is
+necessary as the consummation and key-stone of all other knowledge, is
+knowledge of the knowing-self, self-knowledge, or, as it is sometimes
+more technically called, self-consciousness, with the corollary that
+this knowledge cannot be won by any methods known to or specially
+characteristic of Science or Art or Religion. To become self-conscious,
+to progress in self-consciousness is the end, and the way or means to it
+is by reflection--the special method of Philosophy.
+
+This is the step in advance made by the modern spirit beyond all
+discoveries of the ancients; it is the truth by the apprehension of
+which the modern spirit and its world is made what it is. Not outside us
+lies Truth or the Truth: Truth dwelleth in the inner man--_in interiore
+hominis habitat veritas_. Is this not progress, progress in wisdom, and
+to what else can we ascribe the advance save to Philosophy?
+
+It was one of the earliest utterances of modern Philosophy, and one
+which it has never found reason to retract, that the Self which knows
+can and does know itself better than aught else whatsoever, and in that
+knowledge can without end make confident and sure-footed advance. To
+itself the Self is the most certain and the most knowable of all
+realities--with this it is most acquainted, this it has light in itself
+to explore, of this it can confidently foresee and foretell the method
+of advance to further and further knowledge. It knows not only its
+existence but its essence, its nature, and it knows by what procedure,
+by what ordered effort or exercise of will it can progress to height
+beyond height of its self-knowledge. I say, it knows it, but it also
+knows that that knowledge cannot be attained all at once or taken
+complete and ready-made, for it _is_ itself a progress, a self-created
+and self-determined progress, and on that condition progress alone is or
+is real. For it to be is not to be at the beginning or at the end of
+this process, but to be always coming to be, coming to be what it is not
+and yet also what it has in it to be. Of nothing else is Progress so
+intimately the essence and very being; if we ask 'What progresses or
+evolves?', the most certain answer is 'The spirit which is in man, and
+what it progresses in, is knowledge of itself, which is wisdom'.
+Speaking of and for Philosophy I venture to maintain that nothing is
+more certain than that that spirit which has created it has grown, is
+growing, and will ever grow in wisdom, and that by reflection upon
+itself and its history--nor can the gates of darkness and error prevail
+against the irresistible march of its triumphant progress.
+
+As we look back the history of Philosophy seems strewn with the debris
+of outworn or outlived errors, but out of them all emerges this clear
+and assured truth, that in self-knowledge lies the master-light of all
+our seeing, inexhaustibly casting its rays into the retreating shadow
+world that now surrounds us, melting all mists and dispelling all
+clouds, and that the way to it is unveiled, mapped and charted in
+advance so that henceforward we can walk sure-footedly therein. Yet that
+does not mean that the work of Philosophy is done, that it can fold its
+hands and sit down, for only in the seeking is its prize found and there
+is no goal or end other than the process itself. For this too is its
+discovery, that not by, but in, endless reflection is the Truth
+concerning it known, the Truth that each generation must ever anew win
+and earn it for itself. The result is not without the process, nor the
+end without the means: the fact _is_ the process and other fact there is
+none. In other forms of so-called 'knowledge' we can sever the
+conclusion from its premisses, and the result can be given without the
+process, but with self-knowledge it is not so and no generation, or
+individual, can communicate it ready-made to another, but can only point
+the way and bid others help themselves. And if this, so put, seems hard
+doctrine, I can only remind you that to philosophize has always meant
+'to think by and for oneself'.
+
+It is perhaps more necessary to formulate the warning that what is here
+called self-knowledge and pronounced to constitute the very essence of
+the spirit that is in man, is far removed from what sometimes bears its
+name, the extended and minute acquaintance by the individual mind with
+its individual peculiarities or idiosyncrasies, its weaknesses and
+vanities, its whims and eccentricities; nor is it to be confused with
+the still wider acquaintance with those that make up our common human
+nature in all its folly and frailty which is sometimes called 'knowledge
+of human nature'; no, nor with such knowledge as psychological science,
+with its methods of observation and induction and experiment, offers or
+supplies. It is knowledge of something that lies far deeper within
+us--'the inward man', which is not merely alike or akin but is the same
+in all of us; beneath all our differences, strong against all our
+weaknesses, wise against all our follies, what each of us rightly calls
+his true self and yet what is not his alone, but all men's also. As we
+reflect upon it duly, what discloses or reveals itself to us is a self
+which is both our very own and yet common or universal, the self of each
+and yet the self of all. The more we get to apprehend and understand it,
+the more we become and know ourselves, not so much as being but as
+becoming one with one another; the differences that sunder us in
+feeling and thought and action melting away like mist. The removal of
+these differences is just the unveiling of it, in which it at once comes
+to be and to be known. In coming to know it we create it. The unity of
+the spirit thus becomes and is known as indubitable fact, or rather (I
+must repeat) not as fact, as if it were or were anything before being
+known, but as something which is ever more and more coming to be, in the
+measure in which it is coming to be known--known to itself. For this is
+the hard lesson of modern philosophy, that our inmost nature and most
+genuine self is not aught ready-made or given, but something which is
+created in and by the process of our coming to know it, which progresses
+in existence and substantiality and value as our knowledge of it
+progresses in width and depth and self-assurance. The process is one of
+creative--self-creative--evolution, in which each advance deposits a
+result which prescribes the next step and supplies all the conditions
+for it, and so constantly furnishes all that is required for an endless
+progress in reality and worth. This is the process in which the spirit
+of man capitalizes and substantiates its activities, committing its
+gains to secure custody, amassing and using them for its
+self-enrichment--in which it depends on no other than itself and is
+sovereign master of its future and its fate. This is the way in which
+selves are made, or rather, make themselves.
+
+This is the discovery of modern Philosophy, the now patent secret which
+it offers for the interpretation of all mysteries and the solving of all
+problems--and it offers it with unquestioning assurance, for it has
+explored the ground and has awakened to the true method of progress
+within it. And as I have said or implied, to the reflective mind regress
+is impossible, it cannot go back upon itself, and with due tenderness
+and gratitude it has set behind it the things of its unreflective
+childhood. It stands on the stable foundation of the witness of the
+spirit within us to itself, to its own nature, its own powers and its
+own rights; it knows itself as the knower, the interpreter, the teacher,
+and therefore the master and maker of itself. Yet we must not identify
+or confuse this our deeper or deepest self which we thus create with the
+separate selves or souls which each of us is; it is not any one of them
+nor all of them together, unless we give to the word 'together' a new
+and more pregnant sense than it has yet come to bear. It is not the
+'tribal' or 'collective' or 'social' self, for it is not made by
+congregation or collection or association, but by some far more intimate
+unification than is signified by any of these terms, namely by coming
+together in and by knowledge. It is the spirit which is in us all and in
+which we all are, which is more yet not other than we, without which we
+are nothing and do nothing and yet which is veritably the spirit of man,
+the immortal hero of all the tragedy and comedy--the whole drama--of
+human history; it is of this spirit as it is by it, that Philosophy has
+in repeated and resolute reflection come to know the nature and the
+method of its progress. Such knowledge has come into the world and
+prevails more widely and more potently than ever before; possessed in
+fullness by but a few, it is open and available to all and radiates as
+from a beacon light over the whole field of human experience; at that
+fire every man can light his candle. This is the light in which alone
+the record of man's thoughts and achievements can be construed and which
+exhibits them as steps and stages on that triumphant march to higher and
+higher levels such as alone we can rightly name Progress. Where else
+than in History, and, above all, in the History of Knowledge, is
+Progress manifested, and in that where more certainly than in the
+unretreating and unrevoked advance towards a deeper, a truer, a wiser
+knowledge of itself by the spirit that is in and is, Man?
+
+Yes, such knowledge, truth and wisdom now exists and is securely ours,
+though to inherit it each generation and each individual must win it
+afresh and having won it must develop and promote it, or it ceases not
+only to work but to be. For it exists only as it is made or rather only
+in the act and fact of its progress, and so for it not to progress is at
+once to return to impotence and nothingness. And it is we who maintain
+it in being, maintaining it by endless reiterated efforts of reflection,
+and so maintaining it we maintain ourselves, resting or relying upon it
+and using it as a source of strength and a fulcrum or a platform for
+further effort. Upon self-knowledge in this sense all other 'knowledge'
+reposes; upon it and the knowledge of other selves and the world, which
+flows from it, depends the possibility of all practical advance. In the
+dark all progress is impossible.
+
+But since this discovery was made and made good, the spirit of
+Philosophy has not stood still; it has gone on, and is still going on,
+to extend and deepen and secure its conquests. Once more it has turned
+from its fruitful and enlightening concentration on the inner self and
+its life to review what lies or seems to lie around and outside it. It
+finds that those who have stayed, or fallen, behind its audacious but
+justified advance in self-knowledge, still cherish a view of what is
+external to this (the true or real self so now made patent), thoughts or
+fancies which misconceive and misrepresent it--thoughts persisted in
+against the feebler protesting voices of Art and Religion and so held
+precariously and unstably though apparently grounded upon the authority
+of Science. To the unphilosophic or not yet philosophic mind the spirit
+of man, already in imagination multiplied and segregated into individual
+'souls', appears to be surrounded with an environment of alien
+character, often harsh to man's emotions, often rebellious or
+untractable to his purposes, often impenetrable to his understanding,
+and in a word indifferent or hostile to his ideals and aspirations after
+progress and good. Nay, the individual souls seem to act towards one
+another separately and collectively as such hindrances, and again, each
+individual soul seems to be encrusted with insuperable impediments. Even
+the light within is enclosed in an opaque screen which prevents or
+counteracts its outflow, so that the spirit within is as it were
+entombed or imprisoned. 'Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems us in,' we
+cannot communicate with one another or join with one another in thought
+or deed; and the hope of progress seems defeated by the recalcitrant
+matter that shell upon shell encases us. The world of our bodies, of the
+bodies and spirits of others, and all the vast _compages_ of things and
+forces which we call 'Nature' blinds and baffles us, mocks our hopes and
+breaks our hearts. How idle to dream that amidst and against all this
+neutrality or hostility any substantial or secure advance can be made!
+
+In answer to all these thoughts, these doubts and fears, Philosophy is
+beginning with increasing boldness to speak a word, not of mere comfort
+and consolation, but of secure and confident wisdom. All this so-called
+'external' nature and environment is not hostile or alien to the self or
+spirit which is in man, it is akin and allied to it as we now know it to
+be. Whatever is real and not merely apparent in History or Nature is
+rational, is of the same stuff and character as that which is within us.
+It too is spiritual, the appearance and embodiment of what is one in
+nature and mode of being with what lies deepest and is most potent in
+us. So far as it is not that, it is appearance and not reality, woven
+like a dream by imagination or endowed with an unstable and shifting
+quasi-reality by our thoughts and suppositions and fancies about we
+know not what. Not that it is an illusion, still less a delusion, rather
+what it is is the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual
+reality, a symbol beautiful, orderly, awe-inspiring yet mutilated,
+partial, confused, of something deeper and more real, the expression,
+the face and gesture, of a spirit that, as ours does, knows itself, its
+own profound being and meaning, and does what it does in the light of
+such knowledge, a spirit which above all progresses endlessly towards
+and in a richer and fuller knowledge of itself. What we call
+Fact--historical or natural--is essentially such an expression, on the
+one hand a finished expression, set in the past and therefore for ever
+beyond the possibility of change and so of progress, an exhausted or
+dead expression, on the other hand a passing into the light of what was
+before unknown even to the expresser's self, an act by which was made
+and secured a self-discovery or self-revelation, a creative act of
+self-knowledge and so significant and interpretable. This double
+character of events in History and Nature is dimly descried in what we
+specially call 'nature', but comes more fully into view in the sphere of
+human history, where each step is at once a deed and a discovery, a
+contribution to the constitution of the world of fact and a fulguration
+of the light within illuminating facts as the condition of its own
+inexhaustible continuance. The world of Fact, artistic or aesthetic,
+scientific, moral, political, economic, is what the spirit builds round
+itself, creating it out of its own substance, while it itself in
+creating it grows within, evolving out of itself into itself and
+advancing in knowledge or wisdom and power. And out of its now securely
+won self-knowledge it declares that it--itself--is the source and spring
+of all real fact whatsoever, which is its self-created expression, made
+by it in its own interests, and for its own good, the better and better
+to know itself. Nothing is or can be alien, still less hostile to it,
+for 'in wisdom has it made them all'. Looking back and around it
+re-reads in all fact the results of its own power of self-expression.
+Nothing is but what it has made.
+
+All this might perhaps have been put very simply by saying that ever
+since man has set himself to know his own mind in the right way, he has
+succeeded better and better, and that in knowing his own mind he has
+come to know and is still coming to know all else beside, including all
+that at first sight seems other than, or even counter to, his own mind.
+He has learned what manner of being he is, how that being has been made
+and how it continues to be made and developed, and again, how in the
+course of its self-creation and self-advance it deposits itself in
+'fact' and reflecting on that fact rises beyond and above itself in
+knowledge and power. He is mind or spirit, and what lies behind and
+around him is spiritual. As he reflects upon this the meaning of it
+becomes ever more clear and distinct, ordered and organized, and at the
+same time more substantial, more real, more lively and potent. In
+becoming known what was before dead and dark and threatening or
+obstructive or hostile is made transparent, alive, utilisable,
+contributing to the constantly growing self that knows and is known.
+Here is the growing point of reality, the _fons emanationis_ of truth
+and worth and being, evidencing its power not as it were in increase of
+bulk, but in the enhancing of value. And surely here is Progress, which
+consists not in mere enlargement or expansion but in the heightening of
+forces to a new power--in a word, in their elevation to a more
+spiritual, a more intelligent and therefore more potent, level.
+
+To the artistic eye the universe presents itself as a vast and moving
+spectacle, to the scientific mind as the theatre of forces which repeat
+their work with a mechanical uniformity or perhaps fatally run down to
+a predestined and predictable final arrest, to the devout or religious
+soul as the constant efflux of a beneficent will, unweariedly kind,
+caring for the humblest of its creatures, august, worshipful, deserving
+of endless adoration and love, while to the philosophic mind it is known
+and ever more to be known as the self-expression of a mind in essence
+one with all minds that know it in knowing themselves, know it as the
+work or product of a mind engaged or absorbed in knowing itself, and so
+creating itself and all that is requisite that it may learn more and
+more what is hidden or stored from all eternity within its plenitude. At
+least we may say that the conception of a Mind which in order to know
+itself creates the conditions of such knowledge, which wills to learn
+whatever can be learned of itself from whatever it does, supplies the
+best pattern or original after which to model our vaguer and more
+blurred conceptions of progressive existence and being elsewhere. It
+furnishes to us an ideal of a progress which realizes or maintains and
+advances itself, for it is independent upon external conditions. The
+Progress of Philosophy or of Wisdom is a palmary instance of progress
+achieved out of the internal resources of that which progresses. And
+after this pattern we least untruly and least unworthily conceive the
+mode of that eternal and universal Progress which is the life of the
+Whole within and as part of which we live.
+
+The aim of Philosophy is not edification but the possession and
+enjoyment of Truth, and the Truth may wear an aspect which, while it
+enlightens, also blinds or even at first appals and paralyses. And
+certainly Reality or Philosophy as has come to know it and proclaims it
+to be, is not such as either directly to warm our hearts or stimulate
+our energies. Not to do either has Philosophy come into the world, nor
+so does it help to bring Progress about; nor does it offer prizes to
+those who pursue either moral improvement or business success, nor
+again does it increase that information concerning 'nature' and men
+which is the condition of the one and the other, yet to those who love
+Truth and who will buy no good at the sacrifice of it, what it offers is
+enough, and to progress towards and in it is for them worth all the
+world beside; it is, if not the only real progress, that in the absence
+of which all other progress is without worth or substance or reality. In
+the end, if any advance anywhere is claimed or asserted, must we not
+ask: Is the claim founded on truth, is the good or profit seemingly
+attained a (or the) true good? To whom or to what is it good? Can we
+stop short of the endeavour to assure ourselves beyond question or doubt
+that we are right in what answers we render? And where or by what means
+can we reach this save by turning inward on meditation or reflection,
+that is by philosophizing? [Greek: Ei philosopheteon philosopheteon, ei
+de me, philosopheteon; pantos ara philosopheteon]. Thither the mind of
+man has always turned when the burden of the mystery of its nature and
+fate has weighed all but intolerably upon it, and turning has never
+found itself betrayed, but from knowledge of itself has drawn fresh hope
+and strength to resume the uninterrupted march of Progress which is its
+life and its history, its being, its self-formation, in courage moving
+forwards in and towards the light. It is as if such light were not
+merely the condition of its welfare, but the food on which it lived, the
+stuff which it transmuted into substance and energy, out of it making,
+maintaining and building its very self. So under whatever name, whether
+we call what we are doing Philosophy or something else, the search for
+more and more light upon ourselves and our world is the most
+indispensable activity to which the leagued and co-operative powers of
+Man can be devoted. Fortunately it is also that in which success or
+failure depends most certainly upon ourselves and in which Progress can
+with most confidence be looked for. In it we cannot fail if we will to
+take sufficient trouble; the means to it are open and available; it is
+our fault if we do not employ them and profit by them. If we have less
+wisdom than we might have, it is never any one's fault but our own. The
+door of the treasure-house of Wisdom stands ever open.
+
+
+BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
+
+C. C. J. Webb, _History of Philosophy_ (Home University Library).
+
+Burnet, _History of Greek Philosophy_.
+
+E. J. Bevan, _Stoics and Sceptics_.
+
+Hoeffding, _History of Modern Philosophy_ (translated).
+
+Royce, _The Spirit of Philosophy_.
+
+Merz, _History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century_.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+PROGRESS AS AN IDEAL OF ACTION
+
+J. A. SMITH
+
+
+Throughout this course of lectures, now come to its close, we have
+together been engaged in a theoretical inquiry. We have been looking
+mainly towards the past, to something therefore for ever and in its very
+nature set beyond the possibility of alteration by us or indeed at all.
+'What is done not even God can make to be undone.' Were it otherwise it
+could not be fact or reality and so not capable of being theorized or
+studied. In the words of our programme we have analysed what is involved
+in the conception of Progress, shown when it became prominent in the
+consciousness of mankind and how far the idea has been realized--that is
+has become fact--in the different departments of life. We have taken
+Progress as a fact, something accomplished, and have attempted so taking
+it to explain or understand it. We have not indeed assumed that it is
+confined to the past, but have at times enlarged our consideration so as
+to recognize its continuance in the present and to justify the hope of
+its persistence in the future. Some of us would perhaps go further and
+hold that it has, by these and similar reflections, come to be part of
+our assured knowledge that it must so continue and persist. But however
+we have widened our purview, what we call Progress has remained to us a
+course or movement which still presents the appearance of a fact which
+is largely, if not wholly, independent of us--a fact because independent
+of us--to which we can occupy no other attitude than that of interested
+spectators, interested and concerned, moved or conditioned by it but not
+active or co-operative in it. So far as it is in process of realization
+in the vast theatre of nature, inorganic or organic, dead or living,
+that surrounds us, it pursues its course in virtue of powers not ours
+and unamenable to our control. And even when we view it within the
+closer environment of human history its current seems to carry us
+irresistibly with it. Its existence is indeed of very practical concern
+to us, but apparently all we can do is to come to know it, and knowing
+it to allow for it as or among the set conditions of our self-originated
+or self-governed actions if such actions there be.
+
+The clearer we have become as to the nature of Progress, the more it
+would appear that it must be for us, because it is in itself, a fact to
+be recognized in theory, taken into account and reckoned with. It is or
+it is not, comes to be or does not come to be, and what we have first
+and foremost to seek, is light upon its existence and character as it is
+or occurs. Light, we hope, has been cast upon it. We have learned that
+in its inmost essence and to its utmost bounds Reality--what lies
+outside and around us--is not fixed, rigid, immobile, was not and is not
+and cannot be as the ancient or mediaeval mind feigned or fabled,
+something beyond the reach of time and change--static or stationary--but
+is itself a process of ceaseless alteration. We have learned also to be
+dissatisfied with the compromise which, while acknowledging such
+alteration, all but withdraws it in effect by asserting it to be either
+in gross or in detail a process of mere repetition. The system of laws
+which science had taught us to consider as the truth of nature is itself
+now known to be caught in the evolutionary process, and to be undergoing
+a constant modification. As in the modern state, so in Nature, the
+legislative power is not exhausted but incessantly embodies itself in
+novel forms. Nature itself--_natura naturans_--is now conceived, and
+rightly conceived, as a power not bound to laws other than those which
+it makes for or imposes on itself, and as in its operations at least
+analogous to a will self-determined, self-governing, creative of the
+ways and means by which its purpose or purposes are achieved. What that
+purpose is we have begun to apprehend, and to see its various processes
+as converging or co-operating towards its fulfilment. In the
+mythological language which even Science is still obliged to use, we now
+speak of Nature as 'selecting' or 'devising', and we ascribe to it a
+large freedom of choice wisely used. We can already at least define the
+process as guided towards a greater variety and fullness and harmony of
+life, or (with a larger courage) as pointed towards a heightening or
+potentiation of life. So defining its goal we can sympathize with and
+welcome the successful efforts made toward it, and so feel ourselves at
+heart one with the power that carries on the process in its aspirations
+and its efforts. But still, we cannot help feeling, it and all its ways
+lie outside us, and to us it remains an alien or foreign power. I
+venture to repeat my contention that this is so just because, however
+much we come to learn of its ways, we do not feel that we are coming to
+understand it any better, getting inside it, as we do get inside and
+understand human nature. Its progress is a change, perhaps a betterment,
+in our environment--in externals--and takes place very largely whether
+we will and act or no. The larger our acquaintance with it, the more
+does its action seem to encroach upon the domain within which our
+volitions and acts can make any difference. Even in social life we seem
+in the grip and grasp of forces which carry us towards evil or good
+whether we will or no. _Ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt._ The
+whole known universe outside and around us presents to us the spectacle
+of what has been called a _de facto_ teleology, and just because it is
+so, and so widely and deeply so, it leaves little or no room for us to
+set up our ideals within it and to work for their realization. The fact
+that the laws which prevail in it are modifiable and modified makes no
+difference; they modify themselves, and in their different forms still
+constrain us. And no matter how increasingly beneficent they may in
+their action appear, they are still despotic and we unfree. The rule of
+laws which Science discovers encroaches upon our liberties and
+privacies. What we had hitherto thought our very own, the movement of
+our impulses and desires and imaginations, are reported by science to be
+subject to 'laws of association', and we are borne onwards even if also
+at times upwards on an irresistible flood. We remain bound by the iron
+necessity of a fate that invades our inmost being--which will not let us
+anywhere securely alone. I repeat that it matters not how certainly the
+trend of the tide, which sets everywhere around and outside us, is
+towards what is good or best for us, it still is the case that it
+presents itself as neither asking for from us nor permitting to us the
+formation of any ideals of ours nor any prospect of securing them by our
+efforts. Were the fact of Progress established and conclusively shown to
+be all-pervasive and eternal, it still would bear to us the aspect of a
+paternal government which did good to and for us, but all the more left
+less and less to ourselves.
+
+This will doubtless be pronounced an exaggeration, and we may weakly
+refuse to face the impression naturally consequent upon the progress we
+have made in the ascertainment of the facts concerning the world in
+which we live. But does not the impression exist? The hateful and
+desolating impression made on us earlier by the thought of a 'block'
+universe, once for all and rigidly fixed in unalterable and uniform
+subjection to eternal and omnipresent law, has dissolved like the
+baseless fabric of a vision. And why? Just because being found
+intolerable it was faced and put to the question. Now that there has
+been substituted for it the spectacle of a universe necessarily or
+fatally evolving--or, as we have said, progressing--does it not, while
+still evoking the old awe or reverence, do anything but still daunt and
+dishearten us? What is our part, we ask, our very own part within all
+this? What can we within it do? And the answer, that it is ours, if we
+will, to enter into and live in the contemplation of all this no longer
+appeals to us. In such a progressive universe we can no longer feel
+ourselves 'at home'. In it our active nature would seem to exist only to
+be disappointed and rebuffed.
+
+The only progress which we can care for is the progress which we
+ourselves bring about, or can believe that we bring about, in ourselves
+or our fellows or in the world immediately around us. So long as what is
+so named is something devised and executed by a power not our own--not
+the same as our own--it may call out from us gratitude and reverence,
+but the spectacle of the reality of such Progress cannot exercise the
+attractive force nor, so far as it is realized, beget that creative joy
+which accompanies even humble acts in which we set an ideal of our own
+before ourselves, and see it through our efforts emerge into actual
+existence. A practical ideal must be through and through of our own
+making. It must be devised by us and set to ourselves for our pursuit,
+and its coming to be, or be real, must be our doing. The very idea of it
+must be our own, not given or prescribed, still less imposed, and the
+process towards it must be our doing too. That there should, on their
+view of it, ever be protest and rebellion against its tyrannous demands
+appears to me reasonable and right, and those who make it to be guarding
+the immediate jewel of man's nature. We should, we might say, if this
+were the whole truth about the universe, acknowledge ourselves as its
+sons bound to gratitude and obedience because of the fatherly care for
+us, but it would be an essential complement to our family loyalty that
+we should insist upon and make good our claims to be grown-up sons and
+fellow citizens, declining to pronounce it wholly good, if those claims
+were denied to us. Now all these conditions seem to make straight
+against the possibility of regarding Progress, in the view of it we have
+hitherto taken, as an ideal of our action.
+
+In view of this character of the known fact of Progress, so discouraging
+and disabling to our active or practical nature, certain suggestions
+have been made which are thought to relieve us from these effects. It is
+said sometimes that this fatal--if beneficent or beneficial, still
+fatal--progress leaves as it were certain interstices in the universe
+within which it loses its constraining force, petty provinces but
+sufficient, where man is master and determines all events, from which
+even, it is sometimes conceded, some obscure but important influences
+are permitted to flow, modifying his immediate surroundings, little
+sanctuaries where the spirit that is in him and is his devises and
+realizes ideals of its own. But the notion of such sacrosanct and
+inviolable autonomies is being steadily undermined, and they are felt,
+as science becomes more dominant over our imaginations and emotions, to
+be no more than eddies in the universal stream, only apparently distinct
+and self-maintained, means made and broken for its purpose, really
+products and instruments of the world-progress. At any rate, it has been
+denied that they can rightfully be thought to stand outside it or
+themselves to exercise any effect upon their fortunes and their fate,
+still less upon their environment. Another suggestion fully and frankly
+acknowledges this, but though denying to us any power to affect either
+the form or the direction of the currents on which we are borne along,
+declares still open to us the possibility of affecting their speed, and
+bids us find satisfaction in the thought that by taking thought or
+resolve we can hasten or delay their and the universal movement. Still
+another view, abandoning even that hope, proclaims one last choice open
+to us, namely, that of sullen submission to, or glad and loyal
+acquiescence in, its irresistible sway. But surely all these suggestions
+are idle, and but for a moment conceal or postpone the inevitable
+conclusion that if Progress was, is and must or will be, that is, is
+necessary, what we think or do makes no difference, and can make no
+difference to or in it. Whether or no we convert the fact into an ideal,
+whether or no we set it before as our aim and exert ourselves to work
+for it, it goes on its way all the same. Either then it is not a fact,
+never was, and never will be a fact, or it is no possible ideal for
+which we can act. To be or become a fact, it must be independent of our
+action or our consent or our liking; if it is not all these it is not an
+ideal of action, or at any rate not so for us. I must repeat that what
+is or can be an ideal of action for us must be wholly and solely of our
+making, the very thought of it self-begotten in our mind, every step to
+its actual existence the self-created deed of our will. Not that either
+idea or act comes into being in a void or without suggestion and
+assistance from without us, but still so that the initiative lies in
+what we think or do, and so that without us it is unreal and impossible.
+It is enough, indeed, that we should be contributory, but the ideal must
+be such that without our irreplaceable co-operation it must fail. The
+only Progress in which we can take an active interest or make an ideal
+of action, is one which we conceive and execute, and that the fact we
+call Progress is not.
+
+So far we have found much argument to show that what we have hitherto
+called Progress is not and cannot be an ideal of action, or at least of
+our action. And now we must face another argument more plain and
+apparently fatal, indeed, specially or peculiarly fatal. For the very
+notion of Progress is of a process which continues without end, or we
+have the dilemma that it is either endless or runs to an end in which
+there is no longer Progress but something else. In either case it is not
+itself an end or the end, and whatever an ideal of action is, it must be
+an end--something beyond which there is nothing, which has no Beyond at
+all. To set before oneself as an ideal of action what one certainly
+knows to be incapable of attainment or accomplishment, incapable of
+coming to an end--that is surely futile and vain. Without a best, better
+or better-and-better has no meaning, and when the best is reached
+Progress is no more.
+
+The objection may be put in various ways, as thus. What we seek or want
+or work for, is to be satisfied, and satisfaction is a state, not a
+process or a progress. Or again, acting is a process of seeking, seeking
+and striving for something, and surely the seeking cannot itself be the
+object of the search. Or once more, what we act for is, as we must
+conceive it, something complete, finished, perfect, but Progress is
+essentially something incomplete, unfinished, imperfect. We all feel
+this, and at times at least the thought that what we seek flies ever
+before, affrights and paralyses: recoiling from such a prospect, we set
+before our imaginations as the reward or result of our labours, not
+movement but rest, not creation or production but consumption and
+fruition. We dream of one day coming to participate in a life or
+experience so good that there is no change from less good to more good
+possible within it, and which, if it can be said to progress at all,
+only, in Milton's magnificent words, 'progresses the dateless and
+irrevoluble circle of its own perfections, joining inseparable hands
+with joy and bliss in over-measure for ever'. Once this ideal has
+presented itself to our hopes or desires, it degrades by comparison with
+it to a second-best, the former ideal of endless development from lower
+to higher. What we want and seek is to be there, to have done with
+getting there. 'Here is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the
+cup with the roses around it.' Compared with this, how disconsolate a
+prospect is that 'of the sea that hath no shore beyond it, set in all
+the sea'--the endless voyage or quest. Not Progress is or can be the
+end, but achievement and the enjoyment of it. The progress is towards
+and for the end; the end is the supreme good and the progress is only
+good because of it, because it is on the way that leads to it, the way
+we are content to travel only because it leads there. Once more, and on
+still surer grounds, we must pronounce what we have come to know as
+Progress to be no possible ideal of action. What draws us on is the hope
+of something to be attained in and by the progress. To take Progress,
+which on the one hand is a fact and on the other is an incomplete fact,
+to be the end of our striving and our doing is to acquiesce in a
+self-contradiction.
+
+Yet the counter-ideal of a state in which we shall simply rest from our
+labours and sit down to enjoy the fruits of them does not promise
+satisfaction either, and so cannot be the end or ideal. Our desire and
+our endeavour is not for a moveless, changeless, undeveloping
+perfection. In fact, so often as the dream of such a state attained has
+presented itself, it has to thoughtful minds appeared anything but
+attractive or desirable. Our desire is to go on, and for that we are
+willing to pay a price--nay, it is for more than merely to go on, it is
+to advance and increase in perfection, so much so that the ideal itself
+once more slews round into its opposite and the search appears worth
+more than the attainment. It seems that we were not on the other view so
+wholly wrong, but must try so to frame our ideal of action as to unite
+both characters and satisfy both demands at once, so that it shall be at
+once a state and a movement or process, an achievement and a progress, a
+rest or quiet and a striving after it, a perfection and a perfecting.
+The combination at first sight appears impossible. Yet both characters
+it must combine. Here again, I must confess that the idea of mere
+Progress, even as achieved by our own efforts, seems to me to omit
+something essential to an ideal of action--of what is worth while our
+acting for. What is to be an ideal of action must have the character of
+a fulfilment--something to be consumed, not merely eternally added to.
+For this character of the (or any) ideal of action the best name is
+fruition or enjoyment. And the defect in the conception of it as
+Progress is that it seems to postpone this without a date.
+
+Let us put this truth which we have discovered concerning Progress in a
+nutshell, hiding or disregarding the internal contradiction. What is the
+nature, what is the kind of reality, which we have learned to ascribe to
+Progress (for we did pronounce it real and essentially capable of being
+realized)? It is that it is fact, yet fact not made but in the making;
+it is just the name for what is real only through and in the process of
+becoming real or being realized. Now I have already elsewhere pointed
+out that while a realization which is also a reality, or a reality which
+is also a realization, is in nature or what is external to us a mystery
+and a puzzle, it is just when we look inwards the open secret of our
+being; in our life or action regarded from within, it appears as
+something which is only dark because it is so close and familiar to us
+that inspection of it is difficult, not because it is in itself opaque
+or unintelligible. To its exemplification or illustration there we must
+turn for light upon our problem.
+
+Let us for the time disregard the pressure exercised upon us by the
+suggestions of physical science, or even, I may add, popular and
+imaginative or opinionative--which is Latin for 'dogmatic'--Religion,
+and examine how Progress takes place, or is realized and real, within
+our spirits, or that spirit which is within us. The inward process is
+one by which that spirit is or is real only in the act or fact of being
+or coming to be realized, or rather of realizing itself, and the way in
+which it so becomes or makes itself real is by acknowledging its own
+past, treating it as fact, recognizing its failures or imperfections
+therein, projecting on the future an idea or ideal of itself, suggested
+by those apprehended wants or defects, of what it might be, and using
+that to supply itself with both energy and guidance, drawing from its
+own past both strength and light. In all this it acts autonomously, out
+of itself, and creates both the requisite light and the indispensable
+force, making its very limitations into new sources and reservoirs of
+both.
+
+We do not sufficiently note and hold and use the indubitable truth that,
+in contradistinction to what we call Nature, the forces of the spirit
+reinforce and re-create themselves in their use, are in their use not
+consumed but reinvigorated, not dissipated or degraded but recollected
+and elevated, not expended but enhanced. There is in the realm of spirit
+which is our nature and our world no law of either the conservation or
+the degradation of energy. We must not allow ourselves to be brow-beaten
+by arguments drawn from the obscurer region of physical and external
+nature. We know ourselves to be energies or energizing powers which
+increase and do not waste by exercise. That is what we ought to mean by
+saying that we are wills and not forces, spiritual not physical or
+natural beings. If need be to confirm ourselves in this knowledge, let
+us think of what takes place, has taken place in the advance of
+knowledge, and particularly of the most important kind of knowledge,
+viz. self-knowledge, how we make it by our reflection upon what we have
+already in respect of it achieved, recognize how it or we have fallen
+short or over-shot our mark, define what is required to make good its
+deficiencies, and find ourselves thereby already in actual possession of
+the preconceived supplement. The real, the fact, what is attained or
+accomplished in and by us, prescribes and facilitates, or rather
+supplies, its own missing complement of perfection. The process carries
+itself on, the progress realizes itself, the ideal translates itself
+into the fact or actuality: it accomplishes itself and yet it is the
+doing of our very self, of the spirit within us. All this is not merely
+our doing, it is our being, it is the process by which we make our
+minds, our souls, our very selves or self.
+
+That man is essentially an, or rather the, ideal-forming animal (or
+rather spirit) has long been noted, and also that the formation of
+ideals is an indispensable factor in his progress, which is his life and
+very being. But all the same, this is sometimes put in such a way as to
+make action, or at least human action, a dispensable accident in the
+universe, an ineffective and unsubstantial unreality, while at the same
+time those who put it thus, profess to see through the illusion and to
+enjoy moments of insight which recognize its nullity. This way of
+putting it in my judgement intolerably misconceives and misrepresents
+the truth.
+
+Our ideals of action must be self-made or self-begotten, but yet they
+must be congruent with known fact; but the manner of such congruence is
+hard to see, hard to express. Ideals cannot be themselves facts, and
+therefore cannot be known, but on the other hand they cannot be mere
+imaginations or suppositions or beliefs, still less, of course,
+illusions or delusions. They are not visionary, and the apprehension of
+them is a sort or degree of perception. They point beyond themselves to
+some higher fact which is not cognizable by our senses or perhaps our
+understanding, but which is yet genuinely cognizable and so in some high
+sense fact. Yet they are not, as we envisage them, the fact to which
+they point, but a substitute for or representative of that--an
+anticipation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind
+or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'--a term I do not
+like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of
+a certain incumbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or
+adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is
+that their reality--it seems a paradox that an ideal should possess
+'reality'--consists in their suggestiveness of modes of action and their
+applicability to it, all this being supported by the conception of a
+state of affairs beyond and around us which makes it 'right'.
+
+If all this is so, Progress as an ideal of action cannot be precisely
+identical with Progress as a fact or object of actual or possible
+knowledge. We can never know what we are aiming at. But though
+different, the two are and must be congruent, and this may be enough to
+justify us in using the one name for the two. Unless there were Progress
+as fact everywhere and always in the universe--outside us--in Nature and
+History, and unless we took ourselves genuinely to apprehend this, we
+could not form the practical ideal of Progress, or at least the ideal
+could not be right. But the difference remains, and we must be prepared
+for and allow for it; though we can use the knowledge we obtain of the
+fact of Progress to control and guide our formulation of the practical
+ideal, we cannot identify the one with the other. Our imagining and our
+supposing of what is best for or obligatory upon us to do or work for,
+must go on under conditions--the conditions of what we know as to the
+nature of ourselves and our surroundings--and yet under these conditions
+has a very large liberty or autonomy.
+
+The Progress which is to serve as a practical ideal is not and cannot be
+the Progress that we know, but must be the result of imagination or
+supposition, and it is high and necessary wisdom to trust our
+imaginations and aspirations. The forms which it rightly takes cannot be
+determined by what we have learned in or from the past; it cometh not
+with observation, and the sources of experience cannot of themselves
+supply us with it, and though it comes in and with experience, it does
+not come from or out of it. Yet it is due to an impression made upon us
+by the Universe as we by our faculties apprehend it, and is not merely
+subjective or of subjective origin. Begotten of the imagination, it is
+appearance, not ultimate reality, and it cannot be thought out or wholly
+evacuated of mystery and perplexity. Is this not involved in the
+language we use of it, proclaiming it practical and therefore not
+theoretical?
+
+Nevertheless, while I must acknowledge this insuperable difference
+between the Progress we can make our end or ideal and the Progress we
+believe that in ourselves and around us we apprehend, I still would lay
+renewed stress upon the congruence and affinity of the two, and urge
+that the perception of the one--the Progress without us--and the pursuit
+of the other--the Progress within us--support and fertilize each the
+other. The more we know or can learn of the one the more effectively do
+we pursue the other, and conversely. The light and the fruits are bound
+together: the theory and the practice of Progress cannot be dissevered
+without the ruin of both.
+
+The ideal of Progress which we present to ourselves is and must be one
+which is partly determined or limited by past achievement and partly
+enlarged by the study of what powers higher than our own have
+accomplished and are accomplishing. The formation of it must move
+constantly between a respect for what has been achieved and a worship,
+so to speak, for what is far better than anything that yet has been or
+become fact, and therefore incumbent or imperative upon us.
+
+The mode and manner of the Progress which is achieved in the Universe
+has become in various ways clearer to us and opens out undreamt-of
+possibilities, and our assurance of its reality is ever more and more
+confirmed, while on the other hand its actual or past results at the
+lower level of nature have grown and are growing more familiar. We see
+that Progress is the essential and therefore eternal form of life and
+spiritual being, which endows it everywhere with worth and substance.
+With this comes the conviction that the source of all this lies inward,
+in that inwardness where our true selves lie and springs from the very
+nature of that. The spirit which is within us is not other than the
+spirit which upholds and maintains the whole Universe and works after
+the same fashion. And with regard to this its manner of working, we have
+learned that it proceeds by taking account of its own past achievements,
+imagining or conceiving for itself tasks relevant to these but not
+limited by them, and finds in that the conditions and stimulus to their
+actualization. It is our business to imitate this procedure and so to
+contribute to the advance of the whole. No work so done is or can be
+lost. We are justified in supposing that in so doing we are leagued
+together in effective co-operation with one another and with all other
+forces at work in the whole. In and through us, though not in and
+through us only, Progress goes on, drawing us along with it. Inner and
+outer Progress, free allegiance and loyal subjection concur and do not
+clash, and the world in which we live and act appears to us as it is--a
+city of God which is also a self-governed and self-administered city of
+free men.
+
+But above all, what it prescribes to us is the duty--another name for
+'the ideal of action'--to seek first light as to the true nature of our
+world and ourselves, dismissing and disregarding all appearance, however
+charming or seductive. Unless we learn to see Progress as universal and
+omnipresent and omnipotent, we shall set before ourselves ideals of
+action which are false and treacherous. We must exert ourselves not
+merely to apprehend, but to dwell in the apprehension and vision of it.
+
+And if there were no other reason, we should know it for the right
+ideal--this command first to seek light--because it is the hardest thing
+that can be asked of us or that we can ask of ourselves. But what is
+thus asked is not mere Faith and Hope, but a loyal adherence to the
+knowledge which is within us.
+
+Is this not the hardest? To-day, when over there in France and Flanders,
+and indeed almost all over Europe, as in a sort of Devil's smithy, men
+are busied in the most horrid self-destruction. The accumulated stores
+of age-long and patient industry are being consumed and annihilated; the
+works and monuments of civilized life are laid low: all physical and
+intellectual energies are bent to the service of destruction. The very
+surface of the kindly and fertile earth is seamed and scarred and
+wasted. And the human beings who live and move in this inferno, are
+jerked like puppets hither and thither by the operation of passions to
+which we dare not venture to give names, lest we be found either not
+condemning what defiles and imbrutes our nature or denying our meed of
+praise and gratitude to what ennobles it. All this portentous activity
+and business flows from no other fount and is fed by no other spring
+than the spirit which is within us, that spirit which has created that
+wealth, material, artistic, spiritual, which it is so busily engaged in
+wrecking and undoing. It is still as of old, making History, making it
+in the old fashion with the old ends in view and by the exercise of its
+old familiar powers. And if in this tragic scene or episode we cannot
+still read the features of Progress, our theory is a baseless dream, and
+we can frame no valid or 'right' ideal of action. For except to an
+environment known to be still, because always, the work and
+self-expression of a spirit akin to, and indeed identical with our own,
+and except as knowing ourselves to be still, because always, in all our
+ways of working its vehicles and instruments, we can neither define nor
+realize any ideals of action at all. This war is not an accident, nor an
+outburst of subterranean natural forces, but the act and deed of human
+will, and being so it cannot be merely evil.
+
+What, then, can we read not into, but out of, the tragic spectacle now
+being enacted, not merely before but in, through, and by us? Unless we
+have all along been mistaken, the victims of mere delusion and error,
+here, too, there has been and still is Progress. Primarily and
+principally what is taking place, is a tremendous revelation of the
+potencies which in our nature--in that which makes us men--have escaped
+our notice and therefore, because unseen or ignored, working in the
+dark, have not yet been drawn upon and utilized. There has been and
+still is going on, an enormous increase of self-knowledge. At first
+sight this seems wholly an opening up of undreamt-of evil. Side by side
+there has come to us a parallel revelation of undreamt-of good. I must
+bear witness to my conviction that we are beholding a tremendous inrush
+or uprush of good into man and his world. But what I wish to dwell upon
+is the growing and ever-confirmed revelation of an intimate relation or
+connexion between the two which is the very spring of Progress, viz.
+that the supply of good is not only adequate and more than adequate to
+the utmost demand made upon it, in the combating of the evil, and that
+for this reason, that while on the one hand the evil that impedes or
+counter-works the good is itself of spiritual origin, its existence and
+power is conditioned by the law that it must evoke and stimulate the
+very power which it attempts to crush and defeat. This is, as I have
+said, the now discovered and known spring of Progress both within and
+without us, that whatsoever is evil, evil just because it is enacted and
+does not merely occur, passes within the reach of knowledge and
+understanding, and in the measure that it passes into the light, not
+merely loses its sting and its force, but is convertible and converted
+into a strengthening condition of that which in its first appearance it
+seemed merely to thwart. Even regress is seen to be a necessary incident
+in progress, and the seasons which we call periods of decadence to be
+occasions in which the spirit progresses in secret, recruiting itself
+not by idleness or rest, but genuinely refreshing and recreating itself.
+
+The view here suggested is no sentimental optimism. The drama of the
+universe is no comedy or even melodrama, but a tragedy or epic of
+heroism, and more especially is this the character of the history of the
+spirit which is in Man and is Man. The evil we enact is real evil, the
+only real evil, the checks which our disobedience or disloyalty imposes
+upon the course of good, are genuine retardations or frustrations;
+nevertheless they are not wholly evil, for nothing is such, but are the
+means which the spirit that has begotten them, utilizes in its eternal
+Progress and wins out of them a richness, a complex and varied harmony
+to which they are compelled to contribute. Our ideal of action must
+therefore in principle acknowledge as essential, what I have called the
+'tragic' character suggested by the spectacle of the war, the fear and
+agony which we imagine in Nature and comprehendingly discern in human
+history. The Progress which we can achieve or contribute to--which we
+can make our ideal of action--is one which cannot rightly be conceived
+otherwise than in its essence a victory over evil, and that it may be
+evil, it must come and be done in the dark. For the spirit in
+progressing deposits what, being abandoned by it, corrupts into venomous
+evil, but except in meeting and combating that, it cannot progress. And
+it can only combat it by getting to know it, for in darkness and
+ignorance it can make no secure advance.
+
+It has been profoundly said that to know all is to forgive all. Let us
+rather say that in coming to know its own past, the Spirit which is in
+Man can without undoing it--that it cannot--make it contributory to its
+own wealth of being, can, as I have said, utilize it for its own
+purposes, which are summed up in the knowing of itself. There is and can
+be nothing in its deeds which it cannot know, and so digest and
+assimilate and absorb into its own substance.
+
+In this interpretation of the meaning--the veiled but not hidden meaning
+of what has taken place and is taking place in the world--or rather in
+us and enacted by us, I seem to myself not to be expressing any private
+imagination or supposition which may or may not be so, but a certainty
+that it must be so. Either it is so or 'the pillared firmament is
+rottenness and earth's base built on stubble'. And this means that
+everywhere and always, but most specially and centrally and potently in
+man's spirit, there is Progress, in spite of checks and hindrances which
+come from within it, a constant if chequered advance in true worth or
+value. And that knowledge I build on grounded and reasoned hope that it
+will and must continue--how, I do not know, but can only surmise and
+conjecture and imagine.
+
+To the question, What, then, ought we to do? I can only reply first and
+foremost, Labour to retain this truth, fostering and developing it,
+verifying it as we have been doing in all the varied departments of
+human experience, exercising our imaginations while at the same time
+sobering and controlling them by the light that comes from it. If we are
+true to it and do not through slackness forget and lose it, we shall
+find arising spontaneously out of the depths of our self worthy and
+feasible ideals of action, the pursuit of which will not betray us or
+leave us without an ever-growing assurance that in bending and directing
+all our powers to their realization we are the agents of that Progress
+which is the source of all being and all worth whatsoever. If we will to
+learn from our own past, we can convert anything that is evil in it into
+an occasion, an opportunity, a means to good which without it were not
+possible. Thus we can even do what seems utterly impossible, for we can
+without forgetting or ignoring or denying, forgive ourselves even the
+evil which we have done. Yes, even the darkest and worst evil, the
+disloyalty to ourselves, to the best and deepest within us, which all
+but achieved the impossibility of finally defeating the march of
+Progress. For the basis and ground of our belief in the reality, and
+therefore the eternity, of Progress lies in this, that the now known
+nature of the Spirit which is in Man and not in Man alone, is that it
+can heal any wounds that it can inflict upon itself, can find in its own
+errors and failures, in its own mistakes and misdeeds, if it only will,
+the materials of richer and fuller and worthier life.
+
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+  | Transcriber's Notes                                          |
+  |                                                              |
+  | Page 26: Opening and closing quotes added to "Beg humbly     |
+  | that he unlock the door."                                    |
+  | Page 89: _Suma Theologica_ _sic_                             |
+  | Page 92: course amended to coarse                            |
+  | Page 165: preventible amended to preventable                 |
+  | Page 299: missing word "is" added ("so far as it is          |
+  | realized")                                                   |
+  |                                                              |
+  | The footnote number is for footnote 81 is missing in the     |
+  | original text. The location of the number that has been      |
+  | added is only an assumption.                                 |
+  |                                                              |
+  | Discrepancies between the Table of Contents and chapter      |
+  | headings ("Government"/"Progress in Government";             |
+  | "Industry"/"Progress in Industry"; "Art"/"Progress in Art";  |
+  | "Science"/"Progress in Science" and "Philosophy"/"Progress   |
+  | in Philosophy") have been retained.                          |
+  +--------------------------------------------------------------+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Progress and History, by Various
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