III

The emergence of modern progressive hopes out of this static medievalism

is one of the epic occurrences of history. The causes which furthered

the movement seem now in retrospect to be woven into a fabric so tightly

meshed as to resist unraveling. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see

at least some of the major factors which furthered this revolutionary

change from a static to a progressive world.

Among the first, scientific invention is surely to be noted. Even Roger

Bacon, prophecying with clairvoyant insight far in advance of the event,

foresaw one of the determining factors of the modern age: "Machines for

navigating can be made so that without rowers great ships can be guided

by one pilot on river or sea more swiftly than if they were full of

oarsmen. Likewise vehicles are possible which without draught-animals

can be propelled with incredible speed, like the scythed chariots, as we

picture them, in which antiquity fought. Likewise a flying machine is

possible in the middle of which a man may sit, using some ingenious

device by which artificial wings will beat the air like those of a flying

bird. Also machines, small in size, can be constructed to lift and move

unlimited weights, than which in an emergency nothing is more useful."

[6] So dreamed the great friar in the thirteenth century. When, then,

we find the minds of men first throwing off their intellectual vassalage

to antiquity and beginning to believe in themselves, their present powers

and their future prospects, it is this new-found mastery over nature's

latent resources which is the spring and fountain of their confidence.

Cardan, in the sixteenth century, marveling at the then modern inventions

of the compass, the printing press, and gunpowder, cried, "All antiquity

has nothing comparable to these three things." [7] Every year from that

day to this has deepened the impression made upon the minds of men by the

marvelous prospect of harnessing the resources of the universe. The last

one hundred and twenty-five years have seen the invention of the

locomotive, the steamship, the telegraph, the sewing machine, the camera,

the telephone, the gasoline engine, wireless telegraphy and telephony,

and the many other applications of electricity. As one by one new areas

of power have thus come under the control of man, with every conquest

suggesting many more not yet achieved but brought within range of

possibility, old theories of cosmic degeneration and circular futility

have gone to pieces, the glamour of antiquity has lost its allurement,

the great days of humanity upon the earth have been projected into the

future, and the gradual achievement of human progress has become the hope

of man.

Another element in the emergence of the modern progressive outlook upon

life is immediately consequent upon the first: world-wide discovery,

exploration and intercommunication. Great as the practical results have

been which trace their source to the adventurers who, from Columbus down,

pioneered unknown seas to unknown lands, the psychological effects have

been greater still. Who could longer live cooped up in a static world,

when the old barriers were so being overpassed and new continents were

inviting adventure, settlement, and social experiment hitherto untried?

The theological progressiveness of the Pilgrim Fathers, starting out from

Leyden for a new world, was not primarily a matter of speculation; it was

even more a matter of an adventurous spirit, which, once admitted into

life, could not be kept out of religious thought as well. In Edward

Winslow's account of Pastor Robinson's last sermon before the little

company of pioneers left Leyden, we read that Robinson "took occasion

also miserably to bewaile the state and condition of the Reformed

Churches, who were come to a period in Religion, and would goe no further

than the instruments of their Reformation: As for example, the

_Lutherans_ they could not be drawne to goe beyond what _Luther_ saw, for

whatever part of God's will he had further imparted and revealed to

_Calvin_, they will die rather than embrace it. And so also, saith he,

you see the _Calvinists_, they stick where he left them: a misery much to

bee lamented; For though they were precious shining lights in their

times, yet God hath not revealed his whole will to them: And were they

now living, saith hee, they would bee as ready and willing to embrace

further light, as that they had received." [8] Static methods of

thinking are here evidently going to pieces before the impact of a

distinctly unstatic world. They were looking for "more truth and light

yet to breake forth out of his holy Word" [9] because they lived in a

time when new things had been happening at an exhilarating rate and when

pioneering adventure and general travel in a world of open avenues were

already beginning to have that liberating effect which has increased with

every passing century.

Closely allied with the two elements already noted is a third: the

increase of knowledge, which, as in the case of astronomy, threw

discredit upon the superior claims of antiquity and made modern men seem

wiser than their sires. For ages the conviction had held the ground that

the ancients were the wisest men who ever lived and that we, their

children, were but infants in comparison. When, therefore, the

Copernican astronomy proved true, when the first terrific shock of it had

passed through resultant anger into wonder and from wonder into stupefied

acceptance, and from that at last into amazed exultation at the vast, new

universe unveiled, the credit of antiquity received a stunning blow. So

far was Aristotle from being "the master of those who know" whom the

medievalists had revered, that he had not even known the shape and motion

of the earth or its relation with the sun. For the first time in history

the idea emerged that humanity accumulates knowledge, that the ancients

were the infants, that the moderns represent the age and wisdom of the

race. Consider the significance of those words of Pascal in the

seventeenth century: "Those whom we call ancient were really new in all

things, and properly constituted the infancy of mankind; and as we have

joined to their knowledge the experience of the centuries which have

followed them, it is in ourselves that we should find this antiquity that

we revere in others." [10] For the first time in history men turned

their faces, in their search for knowledge, not backward but forward, and

began to experience that attitude which with us is habitual--standing on

tip-toe in eager expectancy, sure that tomorrow some new and unheard of

truth will be revealed.

New inventions, new discoveries, new knowledge--even before the

eighteenth century all these factors were under way. Then a new factor

entered which has played a powerful part in substituting a progressive

for a static world: new social hopes. The medieval age had no

expectation of a better social life on earth. Charity was common but it

was purely individual and remedial; it did not seek to understand or to

cure the causes of social maladjustment; it was sustained by no

expectation of better conditions among men; it was valued because of the

giver's unselfishness rather than because of the recipient's gain, and in

consequence it was for the most part unregulated alms-giving, piously

motived but inefficiently managed. In the eighteenth century a new

outlook and hope emerged. If man could pioneer new lands, learn new

truth and make new inventions, why could he not devise new social systems

where human life would be freed from the miseries of misgovernment and

oppression? With that question at last definitely rising, the long line

of social reformers began which stretched from Abbé de Saint-Pierre to

the latest believer in the possibility of a more decent and salutary

social life for human-kind. The coming of democracy in government

incalculably stimulated the influence of this social hope, for with the

old static forms of absolute autocracy now broken up, with power in the

hands of the people to seek as they would "life, liberty and the pursuit

of happiness," who could put limits to the possibilities? The medieval

age was gone; the modern age had come, and its distinctive note was

progress, with new inventions, new discoveries, new knowledge and new

social hope.

It would be a fascinating task to watch these interweaving factors at

their work and to trace their commingled influence as slowly their

involved significance became clear, now to this man and now to that. The

best narrative that has been written yet of this epochal movement is

contained in Professor Bury's volume on "The Idea of Progress." There one

sees the stream of this progressive conception of life pushing its way

out as through a delta by way of many minds, often far separated yet

flowing with the same water. Some men attacked the ancients and by

comparison praised the modern time as Perrault did with "The Age of Louis

the Great"; some men foresaw so clearly the possibility of man's control

over nature that they dreamed of terrestrial Utopias as Francis Bacon did

in "New Atlantis"; some men, like Descartes, sought to grasp the

intellectual conditions of human improvement; and others, like Condorcet,

became the fervid prophets of human perfectibility; some, like Turgot,

re-examined history in terms of the new ideas; and some, like Saint Simon

and Comte, sought to discover the law by which all progress moves. This

new idea of life and history came "by divers portions and in divers

manners," but no one can doubt its arrival. The life of man upon this

earth was no longer conceived as static; it was progressive and the

possibilities that lay ahead made all the achievements of the past seem

like the play of childhood.

At last, in the nineteenth century, the climactic factor was added which

gathered up all the rest and embraced them in a comprehensive philosophy

of life. Evolution became a credible truth. No longer a dim conjecture,

it was established in biology, and then it spread its influence out into

every area of human thought until all history was conceived in genetic

terms and all the sciences were founded upon the evolutionary idea.

Growth became recognized as the fundamental law of life. Nothing in the

universe without, or in man's life within, could longer be conceived as

having sprung full-statured, like Minerva from the head of Jove. All

things achieved maturity by gradual processes. The world itself had thus

come into being, not artificially nailed together like a box, but growing

like a tree, putting forth ever new branches and new leaves. When this

idea had firmly grasped the human mind, the modern age had come indeed,

and progress was its distinctive category of understanding and its

exhilarating phrasing of human hope. Then came the days of mid-Victorian

optimism with songs like this upon men's lips:

"Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion kill'd,

Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till'd,

"Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles,

Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles." [11]