It is this condition which, in spite of progress in details, has raised in men's minds a question whether there is progress in general, and if there is, whether the mass of mankind is better or worse because of it.

3. History of the Concept of Progress

The great task of mankind has been to create an organization which would enable men to realize their wishes. This organization we call civilization. In achieving this result man has very slowly at first, but more rapidly in recent times, established his control over external nature and over himself. He has done this in order that he might remake the world as he found it more after his own heart.

But the world which man has thus remade has in turn reacted back upon man and in doing so has made him human. Men build houses to protect them from the weather and as places of refuge. In the end these houses have become homes, and man has become a domesticated animal, endowed with the sentiments, virtues, and lasting affections that the home inevitably cultivates and maintains.

Men made for themselves clothing for ornament and for comfort, and men's, and especially women's, clothes have become so much a part of their personalities that without them they cease to be persons and have no status in human society. Except under very exceptional circumstances a man who appeared without clothing would be treated as a madman, and hunted like a wild animal.

Men have built cities for security and for trade, and cities have made necessary and possible a division of labor and an economic organization. This economic organization, on the other hand, has been the basis of a society and a social order which imposes standards of conduct and enforces minute regulations of the individual life. Out of the conditions of this common life there has grown a body of general and ruling ideas: liberty, equality, democracy, fate, providence, personal immortality, and progress.

J. B. Bury, who has written a history of the idea of progress, says that progress is "the animating and controlling idea of western civilization." But in defining progress he makes a distinction between ideas like progress, providence, and fate and ideas like liberty, toleration, and socialism. The latter are approved or condemned because they are good or bad. The former are not approved or condemned. They are matters of fact, they are true or false. He says:

When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive power in history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human aims and depend for their realisation on the human will, such as liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism. Some of these have been partly realised, and there is no reason why any of them should not be fully realised, in a society or in the world, if it were the united purpose of a society or of the world to realise it. They are approved or condemned because they are held to be good or bad, not because they are true or false. But there is another order of ideas that play a great part in determining and directing the course of man's conduct but do not depend on his will—ideas which bear upon the mystery of life, such as Fate, Providence, or personal immortality. Such ideas may operate in important ways on the forms of social action, but they involve a question of fact and they are accepted or rejected not because they are believed to be useful or injurious, but because they are believed to be true or false.

The idea of the progress of humanity is an idea of this kind, and it is important to be quite clear on the point.[328]

All of the ideas mentioned are of such a general nature, embody so much of the hopes, the strivings, and the sentiments of the modern world, that they have, or did have until very recently, something of the sanctity and authority of religious dogmas. All are expressions of wishes, but there is this difference: ideas, like liberty, toleration, etc., reflect the will of the people who accept them; ideas like providence and progress, on the contrary, represent their hopes. The question of the progress of humanity like that of personal immortality is, as Bury points out, a question of fact. "It is true or false but it cannot be proved whether true or false. Belief in it is an act of faith." When we hypostatize our hopes and wishes and treat them as matters of fact, even though they cannot be proved to be either true or false, they assume a form which Sorel describes as myth. The progress of humanity, as Herbert Spencer and the other Victorians understood it, is such a myth. Dean Inge calls it a "superstition" and adds: "To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy. The superstition of progress had the singular good fortune to enslave at least three philosophies—those of Hegel, of Comte, and of Darwin."[329]

The conception of progress, if a superstition, is one of recent origin. It was not until the eighteenth century that it gained general acceptance and became part of what Inge describes as the popular religion. The conception which it replaced was that of providence. But the Greeks and Romans knew nothing of providence. They were under the influence of another idea of a different character, the idea, namely, of nemesis and fate. And before them there were more primitive peoples who had no conception of man's destiny at all. In a paper, not yet published, Ellsworth Faris has sketched the natural history of the idea of progress and its predecessors and of a new conception, control, that is perhaps destined to take its place.

The idea of progress which has been so influential in modern times is not a very old conception. In its distinctive form it came into existence in the rationalistic period which accompanied the Renaissance. Progress, in this sense, means a theory as to the way in which the whole cosmic process is developing. It is the belief that the world as a whole is growing better through definite stages, and is moving "to one far-off divine event."

The stages preceding this idea may be thought of under several heads. The first may be called "cosmic anarchy," in which we find "primitive people" now living. It is a world of chaos, without meaning, and without purpose. There is no direction in which human life is thought of as developing. Death and misfortune are for the most part due to witchcraft and the evil designs of enemies; good luck and bad luck are the forces which make a rational existence hopeless.

Another stage of thinking is that which was found among the Greeks, the conception of the cosmic process as proceeding in cycles. The golden age of the Greeks lay in the past, the universe was considered to be following a set course, and the whole round of human experience was governed and controlled by an inexorable fate that was totally indifferent to human wishes. The formula which finally arose to meet this situation was "conformity to nature," a submission to the iron laws of the world which it was vain to attempt to change.

This idea was succeeded in medieval Europe by the idea of providence, in which the world was thought of as a theater on which the drama of human redemption was enacted. God has created man free, but man was corrupted by the fall, given an opportunity to be redeemed by the gospel, and the world was soon to know the final triumph and happiness of the saved. Most of the early church fathers expected the end of the world very soon, many of them in their own lifetime. This is distinctly different from the preceding two ideas. All life had meaning to them, for the evil in the world was but God's way to accomplish his good purposes. It was man's duty to submit, but submission was to take the form of faith in an all-wise beneficent and perfect power, who was governing the world and who would make everything for the best.

The idea of progress arose on the ruins of this concept of providence. In the fourteenth century, progress did not mean merely the satisfaction of all human desires either individual or collective. The idea meant far more than that. It was the conviction that the world as a whole was proceeding onward indefinitely to greater and greater perfection. The atmosphere of progress was congenial to the construction of utopias and schemes of perfection which were believed to be in harmony with the nature of the world itself. The atmosphere of progress produced also optimists who were quite sure everything was in the long run to be for the best, and that every temporary evil was sure to be overcome by an ultimate good.

The difficulty in demonstrating the fact of progress has become very real as the problem has been presented to modern minds. It is possible to prove that the world has become more complex. It is hardly possible to prove that it has become better, and quite impossible to prove that it will continue to do so. From the standpoint of the Mohammedan Turks, the last two hundred years of the world's history have not been years of marked progress; from the standpoint of their enemies, the reverse statement is obviously true.

The conception which seems to be superseding the idea of progress in our day is that of control. Each problem whether personal or social is thought of as a separate enterprise. Poverty, disease, crime, vice, intemperance, or war, these are definite situations which challenge human effort and human ingenuity. Many problems are unsolved; many failures are recorded. The future is a challenge to creative intelligence and collective heroism. The future is thought of as still to be made. And there is no assurance that progress will take place. On the contrary, there is every reason to believe that progress will not take place unless men are able by their skill and devotion to find solutions for their present problems, and for the newer ones that shall arise.

The modern man finds this idea quite as stimulating to him as the idea of progress was to his ancestor of the Renaissance or the idea of providence to his medieval forebears. For while he does not blindly believe nor feel optimistically certain things will come about all right, yet he is nerved to square his shoulders, to think, to contrive, and to exert himself to the utmost in his effort to conquer the difficulties ahead, and to control the forces of nature and man. The idea of providence was not merely a generalization on life, it was a force that inspired hope. The idea of progress was likewise not merely a concept, it was also an energizing influence in a time of great intellectual activity. The idea that the forces of nature can be controlled in the service of man, differs from the others, but is also a dynamic potency that seems to be equally well adapted to the twentieth century.

The conception that man's fate lies somehow in his own hands, if it gains general acceptance, will still be, so far as it inspires men to work and strive, an article of faith, and the image in which he pictures the future of mankind, toward which he directs his efforts, will still have the character of myth. That is the function of myths. It is this that lends an interest to those ideal states in which men at different times have sought to visualize the world of their hopes and dreams.

4. Classification of the Materials

The purpose of the materials in this chapter is to exhibit the variety and diversity of men's thought with reference to the concept of progress. What they show is that there is as yet no general agreement in regard to the meaning of the term. In all the special fields of social reform there are relatively definite conceptions of what is desirable and what is not desirable. In the matter of progress in general there is no such definition. Except for philosophical speculation there is no such thing as "progress in general." In practice, progress turns out to be a number of special tasks.

The "progress of civilization" is, to be sure, a concept in good standing in history. It is, however, a concept of appreciation rather than one of description. If history has to be rewritten for every new generation of men, it is due not merely to the discovery of new historical materials, but just to the fact that there is a new generation. Every generation has its own notion of the values of life, and every generation has to have its own interpretation of the facts of life.

It is incredible that Strachey's Life of Queen Victoria could have been written forty years ago. It is incredible that the mass of men should have been able to see the Victorian Age, as it is here presented, while they were living it.

The materials in this chapter fall under three heads: (a) the concept of progress, (b) progress and science, (c) progress and human nature.

a) The concept of progress.—The first difficulty in the study of progress is one of definition. What are the signs and symptoms, the criteria of progress? Until we have framed some sort of a definition we cannot know. Herbert Spencer identified progress with evolution. The law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Intelligence, if we understand by that the mere accumulations of knowledge, does not represent progress. Rather it consists in "those internal modifications of which this larger knowledge is an expression." In so far, Spencer's conception is that of the eugenists. Real progress is in the breed—in the germ plasm. For men like Galton, Karl Pearson, and Madison Grant,[330] what we call civilization is merely the efflorescence of race. Civilizations may pass away, but if the racial stock is preserved, civilization will reproduce itself. In recent years, a school of political philosophy has sprung up in Europe and in the United States, which is seeking to define our social policy toward the "inner enemies," the dependents, the defectives, and the delinquents, and a foreign policy toward immigrant races and foreign peoples, on the general conception that the chief aim of society and the state is to preserve the germ plasm of the Nordic race.[331] For Spencer, however, the conception that all values were in the organism was modified by the conviction that all life was involved in an irreversible process called evolution which would eventually purge the race and society of the weak, the wicked, and the unfit.

In contrast, both with the views of Spencer and of the eugenists, Hobhouse, voicing a conviction that was first expressed by Huxley,[332] believes that man is bound to intervene in the beneficent law of natural selection. He insists, in fact, that social development is something quite distinct and relatively independent of the organic changes in the individual. It is, in other words, a sociological rather than a biological product. It is an effect of the interaction of individuals and is best represented by organized society and by the social tradition in which that organization is handed on from earlier to later generations.

b) Progress and science.—In contrast with other conceptions of progress is that of Dewey, who emphasizes science and social control, or, as he puts it, the "problem of discovering the needs and capacities of collective human nature as we find it aggregated in racial or national groups on the surface of the globe." The distinction between Hobhouse and Dewey is less in substance than in point of view. Hobhouse, looking backward, is interested in progress itself rather than in its methods and processes. Dewey, on the other hand, looking forward, is interested in a present program and in the application of scientific method to the problems of social welfare and world-organization.

Arthur James Balfour, the most intellectual of the elder statesmen of England, looking at progress through the experience of a politician, speaks in a less prophetic and authoritative tone, but with a wisdom born of long experience with men. For him, as for many other thoughtful minds, the future of the race is "encompassed with darkness," and the wise man is he who is content to act in "a sober and a cautious spirit," seeking to deal with problems as they arise.

c) Progress and human nature.—Progress, which is much a matter of interpretation, is also very largely a matter of temperament. The purpose of the material upon human nature and progress is to call attention to this fact. Progress is with most people an article of faith, and men's faiths, as to their content, at least, are matters of temperament. The conservative who perhaps takes a mild interest in progress is usually "a sober and cautious" person, fairly content with the present and not very sure about the future. The radical, on the other hand, is usually a naturally hopeful and enthusiastic individual, profoundly pessimistic about the present, but with a boundless confidence in even the most impossible future.

Philosophy, like literature, is, in the final analysis, the expression of a temperament, more or less modified by experience. The selections from Schopenhauer and Bergson may be regarded, therefore, as the characteristic reactions of two strikingly different temperaments to the conception of progress and to life. The descriptions which they give of the cosmic process are, considered formally, not unlike. Their interpretations and the practical bearings of these interpretations are profoundly different.

It is not necessary for the students of sociology to discuss the merits of these different doctrines. We may accept them as human documents. They throw light, at any rate, upon the idea of progress, and upon all the other fundamental ideas in which men have sought to formulate their common hopes and guide their common life.

II. MATERIALS

A. THE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS

1. The Earliest Conception of Progress[333]

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. 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, Lucretius.

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 afterward 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 anyone must have noticed in the cases of dogs and horses and birds. No one man set out to invent speech.

Fire was first learned 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 dependents 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 learned from nature herself, and gradually the cultivation of the soil was carried farther and farther up the hills.

Men learned 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."

It is the first definition and use of the word in literature.

2. Progress and Organization[334]

The current conception of progress is shifting and indefinite. Sometimes it comprehends little more than simple growth—as of a nation in the number of its members and the extent of territory over which it spreads. Sometimes it has reference to quantity of material products—as when the advance of agriculture and manufactures is the topic. Sometimes the superior quality of these products is contemplated; and sometimes the new or improved appliances by which they are produced. When, again, we speak of moral or intellectual progress, we refer to states of the individual or people exhibiting it; while, when the progress of science or art is commented upon, we have in view certain abstract results of human thought and action.

Not only, however, is the current conception of progress more or less vague, but it is in great measure erroneous. It takes in not so much the reality of progress as its accompaniments—not so much the substance as the shadow. That progress in intelligence seen during the growth of the child into the man, or the savage into the philosopher, is commonly regarded as consisting in the greater number of facts known and laws understood; whereas the actual progress consists in those internal modifications of which this larger knowledge is the expression. Social progress is supposed to consist in the making of a greater quantity and variety of the articles required for satisfying men's wants; in the increasing security of person and property; in widening freedom of action; whereas, rightly understood, social progress consists in those changes of structure in the social organism which have entailed these consequences. The current conception is a ideological one. The phenomena are contemplated solely as bearing on human happiness. Only those changes are held to constitute progress which directly or indirectly tend to heighten human happiness; and they are thought to constitute progress simply because they tend to heighten human happiness. But rightly to understand progress, we must learn the nature of these changes, considered apart from our interests. Ceasing, for example, to regard the successive geological modifications that have taken place in the earth as modifications that have gradually fitted it for the habitation of man, and as therefore constituting geological progress, we must ascertain the character common to these modifications—the law to which they all conform. And similarly in every other case. Leaving out of sight concomitants and beneficial consequences, let us ask what progress is in itself.

In respect to that progress which individual organisms display in the course of their evolution, this question has been answered by the Germans. The investigations of Wolff, Goethe, and von Baer have established the truth that the series of changes gone through during the development of a seed into a tree, or an ovum into an animal, constitute an advance from homogeneity of structure to heterogeneity of structure. In its primary stage, every germ consists of a substance that is uniform throughout, both in texture and chemical composition. The first step is the appearance of a difference between two parts of this substance; or, as the phenomenon is called in physiological language, a differentiation. Each of these differentiated divisions presently begins itself to exhibit some contrast of parts; and by and by these secondary differentiations become as definite as the original one. This process is continuously repeated—is simultaneously going on in all parts of the growing embryo; and by endless differentiations of this sort there is finally produced that complex combination of tissues and organs constituting the adult animal or plant. This is the history of all organisms whatever. It is settled beyond dispute that organic progress consists in a change from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous.

Now, we propose to show that this law of organic progress is the law of all progress. Whether it be in the development of the earth, in the development of life upon its surface, in the development of society, of government, of manufactures, of commerce, of language, literature, science, art—this same evolution of the simple into the complex, through successive differentiations, holds throughout. From the earliest traceable cosmic changes down to the latest results of civilization, we shall find that the transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous is that in which progress essentially consists.

3. The Stages of Progress[335]

If we regard the course of human development from the highest scientific point of view, we shall perceive that it consists in educing more and more the characteristic faculties of humanity, in comparison with those of animality; and especially with those which man has in common with the whole organic kingdom. It is in this philosophical sense that the most eminent civilization must be pronounced to be fully accordant with nature, since it is, in fact, only a more marked manifestation of the chief properties of our species, properties which, latent at first, can come into play only in that advanced state of social life for which they are exclusively destined. The whole system of biological philosophy indicates the natural progression. We have seen how, in the brute kingdom, the superiority of each race is determined by the degree of preponderance of the animal life over the organic. In like manner we see that our social evolution is only the final term of a progression which has continued from the simplest vegetables and most insignificant animals, up through the higher reptiles to the birds and the mammifers, and still on to the carnivorous animals and monkeys, the organic characteristics retiring and the animal prevailing more and more, till the intellectual and moral tend toward the ascendancy which can never be fully obtained, even in the highest state of human perfection that we can conceive of. This comparative estimate affords us the scientific view of human progression, connected, as we see it is, with the whole course of animal advancement, of which it is itself the highest degree. The analysis of our social progress proves indeed that, while the radical dispositions of our nature are necessarily invariable, the highest of them are in a continuous state of relative development, by which they rise to be preponderant powers of human existence, though the inversion of the primitive economy can never be absolutely complete. We have seen that this is the essential character of the social organism in a statical view; but it becomes much more marked when we study its variations in their gradual succession.

4. Progress and the Historical Process[336]

The conclusion which these reflections suggest is that the uncritical application of biological principles to social progress results in an insuperable contradiction. The factors which determine the survival of physical organism, if applied as rules for the furtherance of social progress, appear to conflict with all that social progress means. A sense of this conflict is no doubt responsible for the further reconstruction which the biological view has in recent years undergone. Biologists now begin to inquire seriously whether "natural" selection may not be replaced by a rational selection in which "fitness for survival" would at length achieve its legitimate meaning, and the development of the race might be guided by reasoned conceptions of social value. This is a fundamental change of attitude, and the new doctrine of eugenics to which it has given rise requires careful examination. Before proceeding to this examination, however, it will be well to inquire into the causes of the contrast on which we have insisted between biological evolution and social progress. Faced by this contradiction, we ask ourselves whether social development may not be something quite distinct from the organic changes known to biology, and whether the life of society may not depend upon forces which never appear in the individual when he is examined merely as an individual or merely as a member of a race.

Take the latter point first. It is easily seen in the arguments of biologists that they conceive social progress as consisting essentially in an improvement of the stock to which individuals belong. This is a way of looking at the matter intelligible enough in itself. Society consists of so many thousand or so many million individuals, and if, comparing any given generation with its ancestors, we could establish an average improvement in physical, mental, or moral faculty, we should certainly have cause to rejoice. There is progress so far. But there is another point of view which we may take up. Society consists of individual persons and nothing but individual persons, just as the body consists of cells and the product of cells. But though the body may consist exclusively of cells, we should never understand its life by examining the lives of each of its cells as a separate unit. We must equally take into account that organic interconnection whereby the living processes of each separate cell co-operate together to maintain the health of the organism which contains them all. So, again, to understand the social order we have to take into account not only the individuals with their capabilities and achievements but the social organization in virtue of which these individuals act upon one another and jointly produce what we call social results; and whatever may be true of the physical organism, we can see that in society it is possible that individuals of the very same potentialities may, with good organization, produce good results, and, with bad organization, results which are greatly inferior.

The social phenomenon, in short, is not something which occurs in one individual, or even in several individuals taken severally. It is essentially an interaction of individuals, and as the capabilities of any given individual are extraordinarily various and are only called out, each by appropriate circumstances, it will be readily seen that the nature of the interaction may itself bring forth new and perhaps unexpected capacities, and elicit from the individuals contributing to it forces which, but for this particular opportunity, might possibly remain forever dormant. If this is so, sociology as a science is not the same thing as either biology or psychology. It deals neither with the physical capacities of individuals as such nor with their psychological capacities as such. It deals rather with results produced by the play of these forces upon one another, by the interaction of individuals under the conditions imposed by their physical environment. The nature of the forces and the point of these distinctions may be made clear by a very simple instance.

The interplay of human motives and the interaction of human beings is the fundamental fact of social life, and the permanent results which this interaction achieves and the influence which it exercises upon the individuals who take part in it constitute the fundamental fact of social evolution. These results are embodied in what may be called, generically, tradition. So understood, tradition—its growth and establishment, its reaction upon the very individuals who contribute to building it up, and its modifications by subsequent interactions—constitutes the main subject of sociological inquiry.

Tradition is, in the development of society, what heredity is in the physical growth of the stock. It is the link between past and future, it is that in which the effects of the past are consolidated and on the basis of which subsequent modifications are built up. We might push the analogy a little further, for the ideas and customs which it maintains and furnishes to each new generation as guides for their behavior in life are analogous to the determinate methods of reaction, the inherited impulses, reflexes, and instincts with which heredity furnishes the individual. The tradition of the elders is, as it were, the instinct of society. It furnishes the prescribed rule for dealing with the ordinary occasions of life, which is for the most part accepted without inquiry and applied without reflection. It furnishes the appropriate institution for providing for each class of social needs, for meeting common dangers, for satisfying social wants, for regulating social relations. It constitutes, in short, the framework of society's life which to each new generation is a part of its hereditary outfit.

But of course in speaking of tradition as a kind of inheritance we conceive of it as propagated by quite other than biological methods. In a sense its propagation is psychological, it is handed on from mind to mind, and even though social institutions may in a sense be actually incorporated in material things, in buildings, in books, in coronation robes, or in flags, still it need not be said that these things are nothing but for the continuity of thought which maintains and develops their significance. Yet the forces at work in tradition are not purely psychological; at least they are not to be understood in terms of individual psychology alone. What is handed on is not merely a set of ideas but the whole social environment; not merely certain ways of thinking or of acting but the conditions which prescribe to individuals the necessity for thinking or acting in certain specific ways if they are to achieve their own desires. The point is worth dwelling on, because some writers have thought to simplify the working of tradition by reducing it to some apparently simple psychological phenomenon like that of imitation. In this there is more than one element of fallacy.

Now the growth of tradition will in a sense gravely modify the individual members of the society which maintains it. To any given set of institutions a certain assemblage of qualities, mental and physical, will be most appropriate, and these may differ as much as the qualities necessary for war differ from those of peaceful industry. Any tradition will obviously call forth from human beings the qualities appropriate to it, and it will in a sense select the individuals in which those qualities are the best developed and will tend to bring them to the top of the social fabric, but this is not to say that it will assert the same modification upon the stock that would be accomplished by the working of heredity. The hereditary qualities of the race may remain the same, though the traditions have changed and though by them one set of qualities are kept permanently in abeyance, while the other are continually brought by exercise to the highest point of efficiency.

We are not to conclude that physical heredity is of no importance to the social order; it must be obvious that the better the qualities of the individuals constituting a race, the more easily they will fit themselves into good social traditions, the more readily they will advance those traditions to a still higher point of excellence, and the more stoutly they would resist deterioration. The qualities upon which the social fabric calls must be there, and the more readily they are forthcoming, the more easily the social machine will work. Hence social progress necessarily implies a certain level of racial development, and its advance may always be checked by the limitations of the racial type. Nevertheless, if we look at human history as a whole, we are impressed with the stability of the great fundamental characteristics of human nature and the relatively sweeping character and often rapid development of social change.

In view of this contrast we must hesitate to attribute any substantial share in human development to biological factors, and our hesitation is increased when we consider the factors on which social change depends. It is in the department of knowledge and industry that advance is most rapid and certain, and the reason is perfectly clear. It is that on this side each generation can build on the work of its predecessors. A man of very moderate mathematical capacity today can solve problems which puzzled Newton, because he has available the work of Newton and of many another since Newton's time. In the department of ethics the case is different. Each man's character has to be formed anew, and though teaching goes for much, it is not everything. The individual in the end works out his own salvation. Where there is true ethical progress is in the advance of ethical conceptions and principles which can be handed on; of laws and institutions which can be built up, maintained, and improved. That is to say, there is progress just where the factor of social tradition comes into play and just so far as its influence extends. If the tradition is broken, the race begins again where it stood before the tradition was formed. We may infer that, while the race has been relatively stagnant, society has rapidly developed, and we must conclude that, whether for good or for evil, social changes are mainly determined, not by alterations of racial type, but by modifications of tradition due to the interactions of social causes. Progress is not racial but social.

B. PROGRESS AND SCIENCE

1. Progress and Happiness[337]

Human progress may be properly defined as that which secures the increase of human happiness. Unless it do this, no matter how great a civilization may be, it is not progressive. If a nation rise, and extend its sway over a vast territory, astonishing the world with its power, its culture, and its wealth, this alone does not constitute progress. It must first be shown that its people are happier than they would otherwise have been. If a people be seized with a rage for art, and, in obedience to their impulses or to national decrees, the wealth of that people be laid out in the cultivation of the fine arts, the employment of master artists, the decoration of temples, public and private buildings, and the embellishment of streets and grounds, no matter to what degree of perfection this purpose be carried out, it is not to progress unless greater satisfaction be derived therefrom than was sacrificed in the deprivations which such a course must occasion. To be progressive in the true sense, it must work an increase in the sum total of human enjoyment. When we survey the history of civilization, we should keep this truth in view, and not allow ourselves to be dazzled by the splendor of pageantry, the glory of heraldry, or the beauty of art, literature, philosophy, or religion, but should assign to each its true place as measured by this standard.

It cannot be denied that civilization, by the many false practices which it has introduced, by the facilities which its very complexity affords to the concealment of crime, and by the monstrous systems of corruption which fashion, caste, and conventionality are enabled to shelter, is the direct means of rendering many individuals miserable in the extreme; but these are the necessary incidents to its struggles to advance under the dominion of natural forces alone.

It would involve a great fallacy to deduce from this the conclusion that civilization begets misery or reduces the happiness of mankind. Against this gross but popular mistake may be cited the principle before introduced, which is unanimously accepted by biologists, that an organism is perfect in proportion as its organs are numerous and varied. This is because, the more organs there are, the greater is the capacity for enjoyment. For this enjoyment is quantitative as well as qualitative, and the greater the number of faculties, the greater is the possible enjoyment derivable from their normal exercise. To say that primitive man is happier than enlightened man, is equivalent to saying that an oyster or a polyp enjoys more than an eagle or an antelope. This could be true only on the ground that the latter, in consequence of their sensitive organisms, suffer more than they enjoy; but if to be happy is to escape from all feeling, then it were better to be stones or clods, and destitute of conscious sensibility. If this be the happiness which men should seek, then is the Buddhist in the highest degree consistent when he prays for the promised Nirvana, or annihilation. But this is not happiness—it is only the absence of it. For happiness can only be increased by increasing the capacity for feeling, or emotion, and, when this is increased, the capacity for suffering is likewise necessarily increased, and suffering must be endured unless sufficient sagacity accompanies it to prevent this consequence. And that is the truest progress which, while it indefinitely multiplies and increases the facilities for enjoyment, furnishes at the same time the most effective means of preventing discomfort, and, as nearly all suffering is occasioned by the violation of natural laws through ignorance of or error respecting those laws, therefore that is the truest progress which succeeds in overcoming ignorance and error.

Therefore, we may enunciate the principle that progress is in proportion to the opportunities or facilities for exercising the faculties and satisfying desire.

2. Progress and Prevision[338]

We have confused rapidity of change with progress. We have confused the breaking down of barriers by which advance is made possible with advance itself.

We had been told that the development of industry and commerce had brought about such an interdependence of peoples that war was henceforth out of the question—at least upon a vast scale. But it is now clear that commerce also creates jealousies and rivalries and suspicions which are potent for war. We were told that nations could not long finance a war under modern conditions; economists had demonstrated that to the satisfaction of themselves and others. We see now that they had underrated both the production of wealth and the extent to which it could be mobilized for destructive purposes. We were told that the advance of science had made war practically impossible. We now know that science has not only rendered the machinery of war more deadly but has also increased the powers of resistance and endurance when war comes. If all this does not demonstrate that the forces which have brought about complicated and extensive changes in the fabric of society do not of themselves generate progress, I do not know what a demonstration would be. Has man subjugated physical nature only to release forces beyond his control?

The doctrine of evolution has been popularly used to give a kind of cosmic sanction to the notion of an automatic and wholesale progress in human affairs. Our part, the human part, was simply to enjoy the usufruct. Evolution inherited all the goods of divine Providence and had the advantage of being in fashion. Even a great and devastating war is not too great a price to pay for an awakening from such an infantile and selfish dream. Progress is not automatic; it depends upon human intent and aim and upon acceptance of responsibility for its production. It is not a wholesale matter, but a retail job, to be contracted for and executed in sections.

Spite of the dogma which measures progress by increase in altruism, kindliness, peaceful feelings, there is no reason that I know of to suppose that the basic fund of these emotions has increased appreciably in thousands and thousands of years. Man is equipped with these feelings at birth, as well as with emotions of fear, anger, emulation, and resentment. What appears to be an increase in one set and a decrease in the other set is, in reality, a change in their social occasions and social channels. Civilized man has not a better endowment of ear and eye than savage man; but his social surroundings give him more important things to see and hear than the savage has, and he has the wit to devise instruments to reinforce his eye and ear—the telegraph and telephone, the microscope and telescope. But there is no reason for thinking that he has less natural aggressiveness or more natural altruism—or will ever have—than the barbarian. But he may live in social conditions that create a relatively greater demand for the display of kindliness and which turn his aggressive instincts into less destructive channels.

There is at any time a sufficient amount of kindly impulses possessed by man to enable him to live in amicable peace with all his fellows; and there is at any time a sufficient equipment of bellicose impulses to keep him in trouble with his fellows. An intensification of the exhibition of one may accompany an intensification of the display of the other, the only difference being that social arrangements cause the kindly feelings to be displayed toward one set of fellows and the hostile impulses toward another set. Thus, as everybody knows, the hatred toward the foreigner characterizing peoples now at war is attended by an unusual manifestation of mutual affection and love within each warring group. So characteristic is this fact that that man was a good psychologist who said that he wished that this planet might get into war with another planet, as that was the only effective way he saw of developing a world-wide community of interest in this globe's population.

The indispensable preliminary condition of progress has been supplied by the conversion of scientific discoveries into inventions which turn physical energy, the energy of sun, coal, and iron, to account. Neither the discoveries nor the inventions were the product of unconscious physical nature. They were the product of human devotion and application, of human desire, patience, ingenuity, and mother-wit. The problem which now confronts us, the problem of progress, is the same in kind, differing in subject-matter. It is a problem of discovering the needs and capacities of collective human nature as we find it aggregated in racial or national groups on the surface of the globe, and of inventing the social machinery which will set available powers operating for the satisfaction of those needs.

We are living still under the dominion of a laissez faire philosophy. I do not mean by this an individualistic, as against a socialistic, philosophy. I mean by it a philosophy which trusts the direction of human affairs to nature, or Providence, or evolution, or manifest destiny—that is to say, to accident—rather than to a contriving and constructive intelligence. To put our faith in the collective state instead of in individual activity is quite as laissez faire a proceeding as to put it in the results of voluntary private enterprise. The only genuine opposite to a go-as-you-please, let-alone philosophy is a philosophy which studies specific social needs and evils with a view to constructing the special social machinery for which they call.

3. Progress and the Limits of Scientific Prevision[339]

Movement, whether of progress or of retrogression, can commonly be brought about only when the sentiments opposing it have been designedly weakened or have suffered a natural decay. In this destructive process, and in any constructive process by which it may be followed, reasoning, often very bad reasoning, bears, at least in western communities, a large share as cause, a still larger share as symptom; so that the clatter of contending argumentation is often the most striking accompaniment of interesting social changes. Its position, therefore, and its functions in the social organism are frequently misunderstood. People fall instinctively into the habit of supposing that, as it plays a conspicuous part in the improvement or deterioration of human institutions, it therefore supplies the very basis on which they may be made to rest, the very mold to which they ought to conform; and they naturally conclude that we have only got to reason more and to reason better in order speedily to perfect the whole machinery by which human felicity is to be secured.

Surely this is a great delusion. A community founded upon argument would soon be a community no longer. It would dissolve into its constituent elements. Think of the thousand ties most subtly woven out of common sentiments, common tastes, common beliefs, nay, common prejudices, by which from our very earliest childhood we are all bound unconsciously but indissolubly together into a compacted whole. Imagine these to be suddenly loosed and their places taken by some judicious piece of reasoning on the balance of advantage, which, after taking all proper deductions, still remains to the credit of social life. These things we may indeed imagine if we please. Fortunately, we shall never see them. Society is founded—and from the nature of the human beings which constitute it, must, in the main, be always founded—not upon criticism but upon feelings and beliefs, and upon the customs and codes by which feelings and beliefs are, as it were, fixed and rendered stable. And even where these harmonize, so far as we can judge, with sound reason, they are in many cases not consciously based on reasoning; nor is their fate necessarily bound up with that of the extremely indifferent arguments by which, from time to time, philosophers, politicians, and, I will add, divines have thought fit to support them.

We habitually talk as if a self-governing or free community was one which managed its own affairs. In strictness, no community manages its own affairs, or by any possibility could manage them. It manages but a narrow fringe of its affairs, and that in the main by deputy. It is only the thinnest surface layer of law and custom, belief and sentiment, which can either be successfully subjected to destructive treatment, or become the nucleus of any new growth—a fact which explains the apparent paradox that so many of our most famous advances in political wisdom are nothing more than the formal recognition of our political impotence.

As our expectations of limitless progress for the race cannot depend upon the blind operation of the laws of heredity, so neither can they depend upon the deliberate action of national governments. Such examination as we can make of the changes which have taken place during the relatively minute fraction of history with respect to which we have fairly full information shows that they have been caused by a multitude of variations, often extremely small, made in their surroundings by individuals whose objects, though not necessarily selfish, have often had no intentional reference to the advancement of the community at large. But we have no scientific ground for suspecting that the stimulus to these individual efforts must necessarily continue; we know of no law by which, if they do continue, they must needs be co-ordinated for a common purpose or pressed into the service of a common good. We cannot estimate their remoter consequences; neither can we tell how they will act and react upon one another, nor how they will in the long run affect morality, religion, and other fundamental elements of human society. The future of the race is thus encompassed with darkness; no faculty of calculation that we possess, no instrument that we are likely to invent, will enable us to map out its course, or penetrate the secret of its destiny. It is easy, no doubt, to find in the clouds which obscure our paths what shapes we please: to see in them the promise of some millennial paradise, or the threat of endless and unmeaning travel through waste and perilous places. But in such visions the wise man will put but little confidence, content, in a sober and cautious spirit, with a full consciousness of his feeble powers of foresight and the narrow limits of his activity, to deal as they arise with the problems of his own generation.

4. Eugenics as a Science of Progress[340]

Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.

What is meant by improvement? There is considerable difference between goodness in the several qualities and in that of the character as a whole. The character depends largely on the proportion between qualities whose balance may be much influenced by education. We must therefore leave morals as far as possible out of the discussion, not entangling ourselves with the almost hopeless difficulties they raise as to whether a character as a whole is good or bad. Moreover, the goodness or badness of character is not absolute, but relative to the current form of civilisation. A fable will best explain what is meant. Let the scene be the Zoological Gardens in the quiet hours of the night, and suppose that, as in old fables, the animals are able to converse, and that some very wise creature who had easy access to all the cages, say a philosophic sparrow or rat, was engaged in collecting the opinions of all sorts of animals with a view of elaborating a system of absolute morality. It is needless to enlarge on the contrariety of ideals between the beasts that prey and those they prey upon, between those of the animals that have to work hard for their food and the sedentary parasites that cling to their bodies and suck their blood and so forth. A large number of suffrages in favour of maternal affection would be obtained, but most species of fish would repudiate it, while among the voices of birds would be heard the musical protest of the cuckoo. Though no agreement could be reached as to absolute morality, the essentials of Eugenics may be easily defined. All creatures would agree that it was better to be healthy than sick, vigorous than weak, well fitted than ill fitted for their part in life. In short, that it was better to be good rather than bad specimens of their kind, whatever that kind might be. So with men. There are a vast number of conflicting ideals of alternative characters, of incompatible civilisations; but all are wanted to give fulness and interest to life. Society would be very dull if every man resembled the highly estimable Marcus Aurelius or Adam Bede. The aim of Eugenics is to represent each class or sect by its best specimens; that done, to leave them to work out their common civilisation in their own way.

The aim of Eugenics is to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes in the community to contribute more than their proportion to the next generation.

The course of procedure that lies within the functions of a learned and active Society such as the Sociological may become, would be somewhat as follows:

1. Dissemination of a knowledge of the laws of heredity so far as they are surely known, and promotion of their further study. Few seem to be aware how greatly the knowledge of what may be termed the actuarial side of heredity has advanced in recent years. The average closeness of kinship in each degree now admits of exact definition and of being treated mathematically, like birth- and death-rates, and the other topics with which actuaries are concerned.

2. Historical inquiry into the rates with which the various classes of society (classified according to civic usefulness) have contributed to the population at various times, in ancient and modern nations. There is strong reason for believing that national rise and decline is closely connected with this influence. It seems to be the tendency of high civilisation to check fertility in the upper classes, through numerous causes, some of which are well known, others are inferred, and others again are wholly obscure. The latter class are apparently analogous to those which bar the fertility of most species of wild animals in zoological gardens. Out of the hundreds and thousands of species that have been tamed, very few indeed are fertile when their liberty is restricted and their struggles for livelihood are abolished; those which are so and are otherwise useful to man becoming domesticated. There is perhaps some connection between this obscure action and the disappearance of most savage races when brought into contact with high civilisation, though there are other and well-known concomitant causes. But while most barbarous races disappear, some, like the Negro, do not. It may therefore be expected that types of our race will be found to exist which can be highly civilised without losing fertility; nay, they may become more fertile under artificial conditions, as is the case with many domestic animals.

3. Systematic collection of facts showing the circumstances under which large and thriving families have most frequently originated; in other words, the conditions of Eugenics. The names of the thriving families in England have yet to be learnt, and the conditions under which they have arisen. We cannot hope to make much advance in the science of Eugenics without a careful study of facts that are now accessible with difficulty, if at all. The definition of a thriving family, such as will pass muster for the moment at least, is one in which the children have gained distinctly superior positions to those who were their classmates in early life. Families may be considered "large" that contain not less than three adult male children. The point to be ascertained is the status of the two parents at the time of their marriage, whence its more or less eugenic character might have been predicted, if the larger knowledge that we now hope to obtain had then existed. Some account would, of course, be wanted of their race, profession, and residence; also of their own respective parentages, and of their brothers and sisters. Finally, the reasons would be required why the children deserved to be entitled a "thriving" family, to distinguish worthy from unworthy success. This manuscript collection might hereafter develop into a "golden book" of thriving families. The Chinese, whose customs have often much sound sense, make their honours retrospective. We might learn from them to show that respect to the parents of noteworthy children, which the contributors of such valuable assets to the national wealth richly deserve.

4. Influences affecting Marriage. The passion of love seems so overpowering that it may be thought folly to try to direct its course. But plain facts do not confirm this view. Social influences of all kinds have immense power in the end, and they are very various. If unsuitable marriages from the eugenic point of view were banned socially, or even regarded with the unreasonable disfavour which some attach to cousin marriages, very few would be made. The multitude of marriage restrictions that have proved prohibitive among uncivilised people would require a volume to describe.

5. Persistence in setting forth the national importance of Eugenics. There are three stages to be passed through. Firstly, it must be made familiar as an academic question, until its exact importance has been understood and accepted as a fact; secondly, it must be recognised as a subject whose practical development deserves serious consideration; and thirdly, it must be introduced into the national conscience, like, a new religion. It has, indeed, strong claims to become an orthodox religious tenet of the future, for Eugenics cooperates with the workings of Nature by securing that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly. I see no impossibility in Eugenics becoming a religious dogma among mankind, but its details must first be worked out sedulously in the study. The first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study. Then let its principles work into the heart of the nation, who will gradually give practical effect to them in ways that we may not wholly foresee.

C. PROGRESS AND HUMAN NATURE

1. The Nature of Man[341]

Man is certainly an animal that, when he lives at all, lives for ideals. Something must be found to occupy his imagination, to raise pleasure and pain into love and hatred, and change the prosaic alternative between comfort and discomfort into the tragic one between happiness and sorrow. Now that the hue of daily adventure is so dull, when religion for the most part is so vague and accommodating, when even war is a vast impersonal business, nationality seems to have slipped into the place of honor. It has become the one eloquent, public, intrepid illusion—illusion, I mean, when it is taken for an ultimate good or a mystical essence, for of course nationality is a fact. It is natural for a man to like to live at home, and to live long elsewhere without a sense of exile is not good for his moral integrity. It is right to feel a greater kinship and affection for what lies nearest to one's self. But this necessary fact and even duty of nationality is accidental; like age or sex it is a physical fatality which can be made the basis of specific and comely virtues; but it is not an end to pursue or a flag to flaunt or a privilege not balanced by a thousand incapacities. Yet of this distinction our contemporaries tend to make an idol, perhaps because it is the only distinction they feel they have left.

Everywhere in the nineteenth century we find a double preoccupation with the past and with the future, a longing to know what all experience might have been hitherto, and on the other hand to hasten to some wholly different experience, to be contrived immediately with a beating heart and with flying banners. The imagination of the age was intent on history; its conscience was intent on reform.

2. Progress and the Mores[342]

What now are some of the leading features in the mores of civilized society at the present time? Undoubtedly they are monogamy, anti-slavery, and democracy. All people now are more nervous than anybody used to be. Social ambition is great and is prevalent in all classes. The idea of class is unpopular and is not understood. There is a superstitious yearning for equality. There is a decided preference for city life, and a stream of population from the country into big cities. These are facts of the mores of the time. Our societies are almost unanimous in their response if there is any question raised on these matters.

Medieval people conceived of society under forms of status as generally as we think of it under forms of individual liberty. The mores of the Orient and Occident differ from each other now, as they apparently always have differed. The Orient is a region where time, faith, tradition, and patience rule. The Occident forms ideals and plans, and spends energy and enterprise to make new things with thoughts of progress. All details of life follow the leading ways of thought of each group. We can compare and judge ours and theirs, but independent judgment of our own, without comparison with other times or other places, is possible only within narrow limits.

Let us first take up the nervous desire and exertion which mark the men of our time in the western civilized societies. There is a wide popular belief in what is called progress. The masses in all civilized states strain toward success in some adopted line. Struggling and striving are passionate tendencies which take possession of groups from time to time. The newspapers, the popular literature, and the popular speakers show this current and popular tendency. This is what makes the mores.

3. War and Progress[343]

Let us see what progress means. It is a term which covers several quite different things.

There is material progress, by which I understand an increase in wealth, that is, in the commodities useful to man, which give him health, strength, and longer life, and make his life easier, providing more comfort and more leisure, and thus enabling him to be more physically efficient, and to escape from that pressure of want which hampers the development of his whole nature.

There is intellectual progress—an increase in knowledge, a greater abundance of ideas, the training to think, and to think correctly, the growth in capacity for dealing with practical problems, the cultivation of the power to enjoy the exercise of thought and the pleasures of letters and art.

There is moral progress—a thing harder to define, but which includes the development of those emotions and habits which make for happiness—contentment and tranquility of mind; the absence of the more purely animal and therefore degrading vices (such as intemperance and sensuality in all its other forms); the control of the violent passions; good will and kindliness toward others—all the things which fall within the philosophical conception of a life guided by right reason. People have different ideas of what constitutes happiness and virtue, but these things are at any rate included in every such conception.

A further preliminary question arises. Is human progress to be estimated in respect to the point to which it raises the few who have high mental gifts and the opportunity of obtaining an education fitting them for intellectual enjoyment and intellectual vocations, or is it to be measured by the amount of its extension to and diffusion through each nation, meaning the nation as a whole—the average man as well as the superior spirits? You may sacrifice either the many to the few—as was done by slavery—or the few to the many, or the advance may be general and proportionate in all classes.

Again, when we think of progress, are we to think of the world as a whole, or only of the stronger and more capable races and states? If the stronger rise upon the prostrate bodies of the weaker, is this clear gain to the world, because the stronger will ultimately do more for the world, or is the loss and suffering of the weaker to be brought into the account? I do not attempt to discuss these questions; it is enough to note them as fit to be remembered; for perhaps all three kinds of progress ought to be differently judged if a few leading nations only are to be regarded, or if we are to think of all mankind.

It is undeniable that war has often been accompanied by an advance in civilization. If we were to look for progress only in time of peace there would have been little progress to discover, for mankind has lived in a state of practically permanent warfare. The Egyptian and Assyrian monarchs were always fighting. The author of the Book of Kings speaks of spring as the time when kings go forth to war, much as we should speak of autumn as the time when men go forth to shoot deer. "War is the natural relation of states to one another," said Plato. The fact has been hardly less true since his day, though latterly men have become accustomed to think of peace as the normal, war as the abnormal or exceptional, relation of states to one another. In the ancient world, as late as the days of Roman conquest, a state of peace was the rare exception among civilized states as well as barbarous tribes. But Carthage, like her Phoenician mother-city, went on building up a mighty commerce till Rome smote her down, and the Hellenic people, in its many warring cities, went on producing noble poems and profound philosophical speculations, and rearing majestic temples and adorning them with incomparable works of sculpture, in the intervals of their fighting with their neighbors of the same or other races. The case of the Greeks proves that war and progress are compatible.

The capital instance of the association of war with the growth and greatness of a state is found in Prussia. One may say that her history is the source of the whole thesis and the basis of the whole argument. It is a case of what, in the days when I learned logic at the University of Oxford, we used to call the induction from a single instance. Prussia, then a small state, began her upward march under the warlike and successful prince whom her people call the Great Elector. Her next long step to greatness was taken by Frederick II, again by favor of successful warfare, though doubtless also by means of a highly organized, and for those days very efficient, administration. Voltaire said of Frederick's Prussia that its trade was war. Another war added to her territory in 1814-15. Three successful wars—those of 1864, 1866, and 1870-71—made her the nucleus of a united German nation and the leading military power of the Old World.

Ever since those victories her industrial production, her commerce, and her wealth have rapidly increased, while at the same time scientific research has been prosecuted with the greatest vigor and on a scale unprecedentedly large. These things were no doubt achieved during a peace of forty-three years. But it was what one may call a belligerent peace, full of thoughts of war and preparations for war. There is no denying that the national spirit has been carried to a high point of pride, energy, and self-confidence, which have stimulated effort in all directions and secured extraordinary efficiency in civil as well as in military administration. Here, then, is an instance in which a state has grown by war and a people has been energized by war.

Next, let us take the cases which show that there have been in many countries long periods of incessant war with no corresponding progress in the things that make civilization. I will not speak of semi-barbarous tribes, among the more advanced of which may be placed the Albanians and the Pathans and the Turkomans, while among the more backward were the North American Indians and the Zulus. But one may cite the case of the civilized regions of Asia under the successors of Alexander, when civilized peoples, distracted by incessant strife, did little for the progress of arts or letters or government, from the death of the great conqueror till they were united under the dominion of Rome and received from her a time of comparative tranquillity.

The Thirty Years' War is an example of long-continued fighting which, far from bringing progress in its train, inflicted injuries on Germany from which she did not recover for nearly two centuries. In recent times there has been more fighting in South and Central America, since the wars of independence, than in any other civilized countries. Yet can anyone say that anything has been gained by the unending civil wars and revolutions, or those scarcely less frequent wars between the several republics, like that terrible one thirty years ago in which Peru was overcome by Chile? Or look at Mexico. Except during the years when the stern dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz kept order and equipped the country with roads and railways, her people have made no perceptible advance and stand hardly higher today than when they were left to work out their own salvation a hundred years ago. Social and economic conditions have doubtless been against her. All that need be remembered is that warfare has not bettered those conditions or improved the national character.

If this hasty historical survey has, as I frankly admit, given us few positive and definite results, the reason is plain. Human progress is affected by so many conditions besides the presence or absence of fighting that it is impossible in any given case to pronounce that it has been chiefly due either to war or to peace. Two conclusions, however, we may claim to have reached, though they are rather negative than positive. One is that war does not necessarily arrest progress. Peoples may advance in thought, literature, and art while they are fighting. The other is that war cannot be shown to have been a cause of progress in anything except the wealth or power of a state which extends its dominions by conquest or draws tribute from the vanquished.

What, then, are the causes to which the progress of mankind is due? It is due partly, no doubt, if not to strife, to competition. But chiefly to thought, which is more often hindered than helped by war. It is the races that know how to think, rather than the far more numerous races that excel in fighting rather than in thinking, that have led the world. Thought, in the form of invention and inquiry, has given us those improvements in the arts of life and in the knowledge of nature by which material progress and comfort have been obtained. Thought has produced literature, philosophy, art, and (when intensified by emotion) religion—all the things that make life worth living. Now the thought of any people is most active when it is brought into contact with the thought of another, because each is apt to lose its variety and freedom of play when it has worked too long upon familiar lines and flowed too long in the channels it has deepened. Hence isolation retards progress, while intercourse quickens it.

The great creative epochs have been those in which one people of natural vigor received an intellectual impulse from the ideas of another, as happened when Greek culture began to penetrate Italy, and thirteen centuries later, when the literature of the ancients began to work on the nations of the medieval world.

Such contact, with the process of learning which follows from it, may happen in or through war, but it happens far oftener in peace; and it is in peace that men have the time and the taste to profit fully by it. A study of history will show that we may, with an easy conscience, dismiss the theory of Treitschke—that war is a health-giving tonic which Providence must be expected constantly to offer to the human race for its own good.

The future progress of mankind is to be sought, not through the strifes and hatreds of the nations, but rather by their friendly co-operation in the healing and enlightening works of peace and in the growth of a spirit of friendship and mutual confidence which may remove the causes of war.

4. Progress and the Cosmic Urge

a. The "Elan Vitale"[344]

All life, animal and vegetable, seems in its essence like an effort to accumulate energy and then to let it flow into flexible channels, changeable in shape, at the end of which it will accomplish infinitely varied kinds of work. That is what the vital impetus, passing through matter, would fain do all at once. It would succeed, no doubt, if its power were unlimited, or if some reinforcement could come to it from without. But the impetus is finite, and it has been given once for all. It cannot overcome all obstacles. The movement it starts is sometimes turned aside, sometimes divided, always opposed; and the evolution of the organized world is the unrolling of this conflict. The first great scission that had to be effected was that of the two kingdoms, vegetable and animal, which thus happen to be mutually complementary, without, however, any agreement having been made between them. To this scission there succeeded many others. Hence the diverging lines of evolution, at least what is essential in them. But we must take into account retrogressions, arrests, accidents of every kind. And we must remember, above all, that each species behaves as if the general movement of life stopped at it instead of passing through it. It thinks only of itself, it lives only for itself. Hence the numberless struggles that we behold in nature. Hence a discord, striking and terrible, but for which the original principle of life must not be held responsible.

It is therefore conceivable that life might have assumed a totally different outward appearance and designed forms very different from those we know. With another chemical substratum, in other physical conditions, the impulsion would have remained the same, but it would have split up very differently in course of progress; and the whole would have traveled another road—whether shorter or longer who can tell? In any case, in the entire series of living beings no term would have been what it now is.

There are numerous cases in which nature seems to hesitate between the two forms, and to ask herself if she shall make a society or an individual. The slightest push is enough, then, to make the balance weigh on one side or the other. If we take an infusorian sufficiently large, such as the Stentor, and cut it into two halves each containing a part of the nucleus, each of the two halves will generate an independent Stentor; but if we divide it incompletely, so that a protoplasmic communication is left between the two halves, we shall see them execute, each from its side, corresponding movements; so that in this case it is enough that a thread should be maintained or cut in order that life should affect the social or the individual form. Thus, in rudimentary organisms consisting of a single cell, we already find that the apparent individuality of the whole is the composition of an undefined number of potential individualities potentially associated. But, from top to bottom of the series of living beings, the same law is manifested. And it is this that we express when we say that unity and multiplicity are categories of inert matter, that the vital impetus is neither pure unity nor pure multiplicity, and that if the matter to which it communicates itself compels it to choose one of the two, its choice will never be definitive: it will leap from one to the other indefinitely. The evolution of life in the double direction of individuality and association has therefore nothing accidental about it: it is due to the very nature of life.

Essential also is the progress to reflexion. If our analysis is correct, it is consciousness, or rather supra-consciousness, that is at the origin of life. Consciousness, or supra-consciousness, is the name for the rocket whose extinguished fragments fall back as matter; consciousness, again, is the name for that which subsists of the rocket itself, passing through the fragments and lighting them up into organisms. But this consciousness, which is a need of creation, is made manifest to itself only where creation is possible. It lies dormant when life is condemned to automatism; it wakens as soon as the possibility of a choice is restored. That is why, in organisms unprovided with a nervous system, it varies according to the power of locomotion and of deformation of which the organism disposes. And in animals with a nervous system, it is proportional to the complexity of the switchboard on which the paths called sensory and the paths called motor intersect—that is, of the brain.

Consciousness corresponds exactly to the living being's power of choice; it is coextensive with the fringe of possible action that surrounds the real action: consciousness is synonymous with invention and with freedom. Now, in the animal, invention is never anything but a variation on the theme of routine. Shut up in the habits of the species, it succeeds, no doubt, in enlarging them by its individual initiative; but it escapes automatism only for an instant, for just the time to create a new automatism. The gates of its prison close as soon as they are opened; by pulling at its chain it succeeds only in stretching it. With man, consciousness breaks the chain. In man, and in man alone, it sets itself free. The whole history of life until man has been that of the effort of consciousness to raise matter, and of the more or less complete overwhelming of consciousness by the matter which has fallen back on it. The enterprise was paradoxical, if, indeed, we may speak here otherwise than by metaphor of enterprise and of effort. It was to create with matter, which is necessity itself, an instrument of freedom, to make a machine which should triumph over mechanism, and to use determinism of nature to pass through the meshes of the net which this very determinism had spread. But, everywhere except in man, consciousness has let itself be caught in the net whose meshes it tried to pass through: it has remained the captive of the mechanisms it has set up. Automatism, which it tries to draw in the direction of freedom, winds about it and drags it down. It has not the power to escape, because the energy it has provided for acts is almost all employed in maintaining the infinitely subtle and essentially unstable equilibrium into which it has brought matter. But man not only maintains his machine, he succeeds in using it as he pleases. Doubtless he owes this to the superiority of his brain, which enables him to build an unlimited number of motor mechanisms, to oppose new habits to the old ones unceasingly, and, by dividing automatism against itself, to rule it. He owes it to his language, which furnishes consciousness with an immaterial body in which to incarnate itself and thus exempts it from dwelling exclusively on material bodies, whose flux would soon drag it along and finally swallow it up. He owes it to social life, which stores and preserves efforts as language stores thought, fixes thereby a mean level to which individuals must raise themselves at the outset, and by this initial stimulation prevents the average man from slumbering and drives the superior man to mount still higher. But our brain, our society, and our language are only the external and various signs of one and the same internal superiority. They tell, each after its manner, the unique, exceptional success which life has won at a given moment of its evolution. They express the difference of kind, and not only of degree, which separates man from the rest of the animal world. They let us guess that, while at the end of the vast springboard from which life has taken its leap, all the others have stepped down, finding the cord stretched too high, man alone has cleared the obstacle.

It is in this quite special sense that man is the "term" and the "end" of evolution. Life, we have said, transcends finality as it transcends the other categories. It is essentially a current sent through matter, drawing from it what it can. There has not, therefore, properly speaking, been any project or plan. On the other hand, it is abundantly evident that the rest of nature is not for the sake of man: we struggle like the other species, we have struggled against other species. Moreover, if the evolution of life had encountered other accidents in its course, if, thereby, the current of life had been otherwise divided, we should have been, physically and morally, far different from what we are. For these various reasons it would be wrong to regard humanity, such as we have it before our eyes, as prefigured in the evolutionary movement. It cannot even be said to be the outcome of the whole of evolution, for evolution has been accomplished on several divergent lines, and while the human species is at the end of one of them, other lines have been followed with other species at their end. It is in a quite different sense that we hold humanity to be the ground of evolution.

From our point of view, life appears in its entirety as an immense wave which, starting from a centre, spreads outwards, and which on almost the whole of its circumference is stopped and converted into oscillation: at one single point the obstacle has been forced, the impulsion has passed freely. It is this freedom that the human form registers. Everywhere but in man, consciousness has had to come to a stand; in man alone it has kept on its way. Man, then, continues the vital movement indefinitely, although he does not draw along with him all that life carries in itself. On other lines of evolution there have traveled other tendencies which life implied, and of which, since everything interpenetrates, man has, doubtless, kept something, but of which he has kept only very little. It is as if a vague and formless being, whom we may call, as we will, man or superman, had sought to realize himself, and had succeeded only by abandoning a part of himself on the way. The losses are represented by the rest of the animal world, and even by the vegetable world, at least in what these have that is positive and above the accidents of evolution.

From this point of view, the discordances of which nature offers us the spectacle are singularly weakened. The organized world as a whole becomes as the soil on which was to grow either man himself or a being who morally must resemble him. The animals, however distant they may be from our species, however hostile to it, have none the less been useful traveling companions, on whom consciousness has unloaded whatever encumbrances it was dragging along, and who have enabled it to rise, in man, to heights from which it sees an unlimited horizon open again before it.

Consciousness is distinct from the organism it animates, although it must undergo its vicissitudes. As the possible actions which a state of consciousness indicates are at every instant beginning to be carried out in the nervous centres, the brain underlies at every instant the motor indications of the state of consciousness; but the interdependency of consciousness and brain is limited to this; the destiny of consciousness is not bound up on that account with the destiny of cerebral matter. Finally, consciousness is essentially free; it is freedom itself; but it cannot pass through matter without settling on it, without adapting itself to it: this adaptation is what we call intellectuality; and the intellect, turning itself back towards active, that is to say, free, consciousness, naturally makes it enter into the conceptual forms into which it is accustomed to see matter fit. It will therefore always perceive freedom in the form of necessity; it will always neglect the part of novelty or of creation inherent in the free act; it will always substitute for action itself an imitation artificial, approximative, obtained by compounding the old with the old and the same with the same. Thus, to the eyes of a philosophy that attempts to reabsorb intellect in intuition, many difficulties vanish or become light. But such a doctrine does not only facilitate speculation; it gives us also more power to act and to live. For, with it, we feel ourselves no longer isolated in humanity, humanity no longer seems isolated in the nature that it dominates. As the smallest grain of dust is bound up with our entire solar system, drawn along with it in that undivided movement of descent which is materiality itself, so all organized beings, from the humblest to the highest, from the first origins of life to the time in which we are, and in all places, as in all times, do but evidence a single impulsion, the inverse of the movement of matter, and in itself indivisible. All the living hold together, and all yield to the same tremendous push. The animal takes its stand on the plant, man bestrides animality, and the whole of humanity, in space and in time, is one immense army galloping beside and before and behind each of us in an overwhelming charge able to beat down every resistance and clear the most formidable obstacles, perhaps even death.

b. The "Dunkler Drang"[345]

Every glance at the world, to explain which is the task of the philosopher, confirms and proves that will to live, far from being an arbitrary hypostasis or an empty word, is the only true expression of its inmost nature. Everything presses and strives towards existence, if possible organized existence, i.e., life, and after that to the highest possible grade of it. In animal nature it then becomes apparent that will to live is the keynote of its being, its one unchangeable and unconditioned quality. Let anyone consider this universal desire for life, let him see the infinite willingness, facility, and exuberance with which the will to live pressed impetuously into existence under a million forms everywhere and at every moment, by means of fructification and of germs, nay, when these are wanting, by means of generatio aequivoca, seizing every opportunity, eagerly grasping for itself every material capable of life: and then again let him cast a glance at its fearful alarm and wild rebellion when in any particular phenomenon it must pass out of existence; especially when this takes place with distinct consciousness. Then it is precisely the same as if in this single phenomenon the whole world would be annihilated forever, and the whole being of this threatened living thing is at once transformed into the most desperate struggle against death and resistance to it. Look, for example, at the incredible anxiety of a man in danger of his life, the rapid and serious participation in this of every witness of it, and the boundless rejoicing at his deliverance. Look at the rigid terror with which a sentence of death is heard, the profound awe with which we regard the preparations for carrying it out, and the heartrending compassion which seizes us at the execution itself. We would then suppose there was something quite different in question than a few less years of an empty, sad existence, embittered by troubles of every kind, and always uncertain: we would rather be amazed that it was a matter of any consequence whether one attained a few years earlier to the place where after an ephemeral existence he has billions of years to be. In such phenomena, then, it becomes visible that I am right in declaring that the will to live is that which cannot be further explained, but lies at the foundation of all explanations, and that this, far from being an empty word, like the absolute, the infinite, the idea, and similar expressions, is the most real thing we know, nay, the kernel of reality itself.

But if now, abstracting for a while from this interpretation drawn from our inner being, we place ourselves as strangers over against nature, in order to comprehend it objectively, we find that from the grade of organized life upwards it has only one intention—that of the maintenance of the species. To this end it works, through the immense superfluity of germs, through the urgent vehemence of the sexual instinct, through its willingness to adapt itself to all circumstances and opportunities, even to the production of bastards, and through the instinctive maternal affection, the strength of which is so great that in many kinds of animals it even outweighs self-love, so that the mother sacrifices her life in order to preserve that of the young. The individual, on the contrary, has for nature only an indirect value, only so far as it is the means of maintaining the species. Apart from this, its existence is to nature a matter of indifference; indeed nature even leads it to destruction as soon as it has ceased to be useful for this end. Why the individual exists would thus be clear; but why does the species itself exist? That is a question which nature when considered merely objectively cannot answer. For in vain do we seek by contemplating her for an end of this restless striving, this ceaseless pressing into existence, this anxious care for the maintenance of the species. The strength and the time of the individuals are consumed in the effort to procure sustenance for themselves and their young, and are only just sufficient, sometimes even not sufficient, for this. The whole thing, when regarded thus purely objectively, and indeed as extraneous to us, looks as if nature was only concerned that of all her (Platonic) Ideas, i.e., permanent forms, none should be lost. For the individuals are fleeting as the water in the brook; and Ideas, on the contrary, are permanent, like its eddies: but the exhaustion of the water would also do away with the eddies. We would have to stop at this unintelligible view if nature were known to us only from without, thus were given us merely objectively, and we accepted it as it is comprehended by knowledge, and also as sprung from knowledge, i.e., in the sphere of the idea, and were therefore obliged to confine ourselves to this province in solving it. But the case is otherwise, and a glance at any rate is afforded us into the interior of nature; inasmuch as this is nothing else than our own inner being, which is precisely where nature, arrived at the highest grade to which its striving could work itself up, is now by the light of knowledge found directly in self-consciousness. Thus the subjective here gives the key for the exposition of the objective. In order to recognize, as something original and unconditioned, that exceedingly strong tendency of all animals and men to retain life and carry it on as long as possible—a tendency which was set forth above as characteristic of the subjective, or of the will—it is necessary to make clear to ourselves that this is by no means the result of any objective knowledge of the worth of life, but is independent of all knowledge; or, in other words, that those beings exhibit themselves, not as drawn from in front, but as impelled from behind.