William Ralph Inge

“ We have devastated the loveliness of the world; we have exterminated several species more beautiful and less vicious than ourselves; we have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form. If it is progress to turn the fields and woods of Essex into East and West Ham, we may be thankful that progress is a sporadic and transient phenomenon in history. ”

“ But the deepest thought of antiquity was neither optimistic nor pessimistic. It was that progress and retrogression are only the incoming and outgoing tide in an unchanging sea. The pulse of the universe beats in an alternate expansion and contraction. The result is a series of cycles, in which history repeats itself. Plato contemplates a world-cycle of 36,000 solar years, during which the Creator guides the course of events; after which he relaxes his hold of the machine, and a period of the same length follows, during which the world gradually degenerates. ”

“ The laws of Nature neither promise progress nor forbid it. We could do much to determine our own future; but there has been no consistency about our aspirations, and we have frequently followed false lights, and been disillusioned as much by success as by failure. The well-known law that all institutions carry with them the seeds of their own dissolution is not so much an illustration of the law of cyclical revolution, as a proof that we have been carried to and fro by every wind of doctrine. ”

“ If time as well as space is infinite, worlds must be born and die innumerable times, however few and far between their periods of activity may be. Of progress, in such a system taken as a whole, there cannot be a trace. Nor can there be any doubt about the fate of our own planet. Man and all his achievements will one day be obliterated like a child's sand-castle when the next tide comes in. ”

“ It is no answer to say that all values are relative and ought to change. Some values are not relative but absolute. Spiritual progress must be within the sphere of a reality which is progressing, or for which, in Milton’s grand words, 'progresses the dateless and irrevoluble circle of its own perfection, joining inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over-measure for ever'. Assuredly there must be advance in our apprehension of the ideal, which can never be fully realized because it belongs to the eternal world. ”

“ The votaries of progress mistake the flowing tide for the river of eternity, and when the tide turns they are likely to be left stranded like the corks and scraps of seaweed which mark the high-water line. This has already happened, though few realize it. The praises of Liberty are mainly left to Conservatives, who couple it with Property as something to be defended, and to conscientious objectors, who dissociate it from their country, which is not to be defended. ”

“ The Renaissance was a conscious recovery from the longest and dreariest set-back that humanity has ever experienced within the historical period—a veritable glacial age of the spirit. At this time men were too full of admiration for the newly recovered treasures of antiquity to look forward to the future. In the seventeenth century a doctrine of progress was already in the air, and a long literary battle was waged between the Ancients and the Moderns. ”

“ If they had read Herder, they would have quoted with approval his prediction that 'the flower of humanity, captive still in its germ, will blossom out one day into the true form of man like unto God, in a state which no man on earth can imagine the greatness and the majesty'. Determinism was much in vogue by this time; but why should determinism be a depressing creed? The law which we cannot escape is the blessed law of progress—'that kind of improvement that can be measured by statistics'. ”

“ Cosmic nature is no school of virtue, but the head-quarters of the enemy of ethical nature. Nature is the realm of tiger-rights; it has no morals and no ought-to-be; its only rights are brutal powers. Morality exists only in the 'artificial' world: man is a glorious rebel, a Prometheus defying Zeus. This strange rebound into Manicheism sounded like a blasphemy against all the gods whom the lecturer was believed to worship, and half-scandalized even the clerics in his audience. It was bound to raise the question whether this titanic revolt against the cosmic process has any chance of success. ”

“ The philosophy of naturalism always makes the mistake of leaving human nature out. The climbing instinct of humanity, and our discontent with things as they are, are facts accounted for no less than the stable instincts of nearly all other species. We all desire to make progress, and our ambitions are not limited to our own lives or our own lifetimes. It is part of our nature to aspire and hope ”

“ Thus the superstition of progress was firmly established. 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, Comte, and of Darwin. The strange thing is that none of these philosophies is really favourable to the belief which it was supposed to support. ”

“ The ancient Pagans, we are told, put their golden age in the past; we put ours in the future. The Greeks prided themselves on being the degenerate descendants of gods, we on being the very creditable descendants of monkeys. The Romans endeavoured to preserve the wisdom and virtue of the past, we to anticipate the wisdom and virtue of the future. This, however, is an exaggeration. The theory of progress and the theory of decadence are equally natural, and have in fact been held concurrently wherever men have speculated about their origin, their present condition, and their future prospects. ”

“ If we take the so-called doctrine of evolution in Nature as a metaphysics of existence, which Darwin never intended it to be, 'there is in the world nothing like value, or good, or evil. Anything evolution, in the ordinary sense of development or progress, is wholly rejected.' The survival of the fittest does not mean that the most virtuous or the most useful or the most beautiful or even the most complex survive ”

“ It was one of the great ages of the world; and its greatness was bound up with that very idea of progress which, in the crude forms which it usually assume, we have seen to be an illusion. It was a strenuous, not a self-indulgent age. The profits of industry were not squandered, but turned into new capital, providing new markets and employment for more labour. The nation, as an aggregate, increased in wealth, numbers, and power every day ”

“ They will not merely repeat the triumphs of the past but will add new varieties to the achievements of the human mind.
Whether the human type itself is capable of further physical, intellectual, or moral improvement, we do not know. It is safe to predict that we shall go on hoping, though our recent hopes have ended in disappointment. Our lower ambitions partly succeed and partly fail, and never wholly satisfy us; of our more worthy visions for our race we may perhaps cherish the faith that no pure hope can ever wither, except that a purer may grow out of its roots. ”

“ Man always desires to know better what he knows, and to love more what he loves; and the whole world is not sufficient for him, because it does not satisfy his craving for knowledge.' But since our object is to enter within the realm of unchanging perfection, finite and relative progress cannot be our ultimate aim, and such progress, like everything else most worth having, must not be aimed at too directly. Our ultimate aim is to live in the knowledge and enjoyment of the absolute values, Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. ”

“ What is man to do? The God who exists is evil; the God whom we can worship is the creation of our own conscience, and has no existence outside it. The 'free man' will worhsip the latter; and, like John Stuart Mill, 'to hell he will go'.
If I wished to criticize this defiant pronouncement, which is not without a touch of bravado, I should say that so complete a separation of the real from the ideal is impossible, and that the choice which the writer offers us, of worshipping a Devil who exists or a God who does not is no real choice, since we cannot worship either. ”

“ I believe that the accumulated experience of mankind, and his wonderful discoveries, are of great value. I only point out that they do not constitute real progress in human nature itself, and that in the absence of any real progress these gains are external, precarious, and liable to be turned to our own destruction, as new discoveries in chemistry may easily be. ”

“ We have, then, been driven to the conclusion that neither science nor history gives us any warrant for believing that humanity has advanced, except by accumulating knowledge and experience and the instruments of living. The value of these accumulations is not beyond dispute. Attacks upon civilization have been frequent, from Crates, Pherecrates, Antisthenes, and Lucretius in antiquity to Rousseau, Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Ruskin, Morris, and Edward Carpenter in modern times. ”

“ The racial life of the species to which we happen to belong is a brief episode even in the brief life of the planet. And what we call civilization or culture, though much older than we used to suppose, is a brief episode in the life of our race. ”

“ For individuals, then, the path of progress is always open; but, as Hesiod told us long before the Sermon on the Mount, it is a narrow path, steep and difficult, especially at first. There will never be a crowd gathered round this gate; 'few there be that find it'. For this reason, we must cut down our hopes for our nation, for Europe, and for humanity at large, to a very modest and humble aspiration. We have no millennium to look forward to; but neither need we fear any protracted or widespread retrogression. There will be new types of achievement which will enrich the experience of the race ”

“ He lectures the vanquished for their wilfulness and want of foresight, sometimes rather prematurely, as when Seeley, looking about for an example of perverse refusal to recognize facts, exclaims, 'Sedet, aeternumque sedebit unhappy Poland!' The nineteenth-century historian was so loath to admit retrogression that he liked to fancy the river of progress flowing underground all through the Dark Ages, and endowed the German barbarians who overthrew Mediterranean civilization with all its manly virtues. ”

“ Bradley goes on to say, 'often recommends itself because it is confused with a doctrine of evolution which is radically different. Humanity is taken in that doctrine as a real being, or even as the one real being; and humanity (it is said) advances continuously. Its history is development and progress towards a goal, because the type and character in which its reality consists is gradually brought more and more into fact. That which is strongest on the whole must therefore be good, and the ideas which come to prevail must therefore be true. ”

“ We count not ourselves to have apprehended in aspiration any more than in practice. As Nicolas of Cusa says: 'To be able to know ever more and more without end, this is our likeness to the eternal Wisdom. ”

“ It may be that there is an immanent teleology which is shaping the life of the human race towards some completed development which has not yet been reached. To advocate such a theory seems like going back from Darwin to Lamarck, but 'vitalism', if it be a heresy, is a very vigorous and obstinate one; we can hardly dismiss it as unscientific. The possibility that such a development is going on is not disproved by the slowness of the change within the historical period. Progress in the recent millennia seems to us to have been external, precarious, and disappointing. ”