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.
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| 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. |
+--------------------------------------------------------------+