THE TENTATIVE CHARACTER OF PROGRESS
PROGRESS IS NOT IDENTICAL WITH GROWTH OF INTELLIGENT CONTROL—NOR IS IT
DEMONSTRABLE—IT IS ESSENTIALLY TENTATIVE
I cannot accept the view that progress is nothing more or other than the
growth of intelligent control. No doubt this is a large part of it; an
enlightened and organized public will is, perhaps, our most urgent need;
but, after all, life is more than intelligence, and a conception that
exalts this alone is sure to prove inadequate. Progress must be at least
as many-faceted as the life we already know. Moreover, it is one of
those ideas, like truth, beauty and right, which have an outlook upon
the infinite, and cannot, in the nature of the case, be circumscribed by
a definition.
The truth is that it is often one of the requisites of progress that we
trust to the vague, the instinctive, the emotional, rather than to what
is ascertained and intellectual. The spirit takes on form and clarity
only under the stress of experience: its newer outreachings are bound to
be somewhat obscure and inarticulate. The young man who does not trust
his vague intuitions as against the formulated wisdom of his elders will
do nothing original.
The opinion sometimes expressed that social science should set forth a
definite, tangible criterion of progress is also, I think, based on a
false conception of the matter, derived, perhaps, from mechanical
theories of evolution. Until man himself is a mechanism the lines of his
higher destiny can never be precisely foreseen. It is our part to form
ideals and try to realize them, and these ideals give us a working test
of progress, but there can be nothing certain or final about them.
The method of our advance is, perhaps, best indicated by that which
great individuals have used in the guidance of their own lives. Goethe,
for example, trusted to the spontaneous motions of his spirit, studying
these, however, and preparing for and guiding their expression. Each of
his works represented one of these motions, and he kept it by him for
years to work upon when the impulse should return. So the collective
intelligence must wait upon the motions of humanity, striving to
anticipate and further their higher working, but not presuming to impose
a formal programme upon them.
The question whether, after all, the world really does progress is not
one that can be settled by an intellectual demonstration of any kind. It
is possible to prove that mankind has gained and is gaining in material
power, in knowledge, and in the extent and diversity of social
organization; that history shows an enlarging perspective and that the
thoughts of men are, in truth, “broadened with the process of the suns”:
but it is always possible to deny that these changes are progress. We
seem to mean by this term something additional, a judgment, in fact,
that the changes, whatever they may be, are on the whole _good_. In
other words progress, as commonly understood, is essentially a moral
category, and the question whether it takes place or not is one of moral
judgment. Nothing of this kind is susceptible of incontrovertible
demonstration, because the moral judgment is not bound by definite
intellectual processes, nearly the same in all minds, but takes in the
most obscure and various impulses of human nature.
Suppose you compare the state of the first white settlers in America,
narrow and hard, physically, mentally, and socially, with the
comparatively easy and spacious life of their descendants at the present
time; or contrast the life of a European peasant, dwelling in mediæval
ignorance and bondage, with that of the same peasant and his family
after they have emigrated to the United States and come to a full share
in its intelligence and prosperity. It may seem clear to most people
that these changes, which are like those the world in general has been
undergoing, are for the better; but the matter is quite debatable. The
simpler lot of the pioneer and the peasant can easily be made to appear
desirable, and there are, and no doubt always will be, those who
maintain that we are no better off than we were.
Development, I should say, can be proved. That is, history reveals,
beyond question, a process of enlargement, diversification, and
organization, personal and social, that seems vaguely analogous to the
growth of plant and animal organisms; but whether we are to write our
moral indorsement on the back of all this is another matter. Is it
better to be man or the marine animal, “resembling the larvæ of existing
Ascidians,”[83] from which he is believed to have descended? In the end
it comes down to this: is life itself a good thing? We see it waxing and
shining all about us, and most of us are ready to pronounce that it is
good; but the pessimist can always say: “To me it is an evil thing, and
the more of it the worse.” And there is no way of convincing him of
error.
In short, the reality of progress is a matter of faith, not of
demonstration. We find ourselves in the midst of an onward movement of
which our own spirits are a part, and most of us are glad to be in it,
and to ascribe to it all the good we can conceive or divine. This seems
the brave thing to do, the hopeful, animating thing, the only thing that
makes life worth while, but it is an act rather of faith than of mere
intelligence.
I hold, then, that progress, like human life in every aspect, is
essentially tentative, that we work it out as we go along, and always
must; that it is a process rather than an attainment. The best is
forever indefinable; it is growth, renewal, onwardness, hope. The higher
life seems to be an upward struggle toward a good which we can never
secure, but of which we have glimpses in a hundred forms of love and
joy. In childhood, music, poetry, in transient hours of vision, we know
a fuller, richer life of which we are a part, but which we can grasp
only in this dim and flitting way. All history is a reaching out for, a
slow, partial realization of, such perceptions. The thing for us is to
believe in the reality of this larger life, seen or unseen, to cling to
all persons and activities that help to draw us into it, to trust that
though our individual hold upon it relax with age and be lost, yet the
great Whole, from which we are in some way inseparable, lives on in
growing splendor. _I_ may perish, but _We_ are immortal.
I look with wonder and reverence upon the great spirits of the past and
upon the expression of human nature in countless forms of art and
aspiration. It seems to me that back of all this must be a greater Life,
high and glorious beyond my imagination, which is trying to work itself
out through us. But this is in the nature of religion, and I do not
expect to impose it upon others by argument.
As regards the proximate future I see little to justify any form of
facile optimism, but conceive that, though the world does move, it moves
slowly, and seldom in just the direction we hope. There is something
rank and groping about human life, like the growth of plants in the
dark: if you peer intently into it you can make out weird shapes, the
expression of forces as yet inchoate and obscure; but the growth is
toward the light.