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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.
* * * * *