Rake's Progress

“ Let me repeat, therefore, with all possible emphasis, that the problem of progress is not primarily one of increasing light-heartedness, pure and simple, nor yet a problem of racial unification or of political centralization; it is rather a problem of so developing the structure of society that the individual may have the fullest opportunity for development. ”

“ Object as much as you will, science, or rather technical progress, is eternal revolution and the only genuine reform of human conditions. Nothing can hinder this development that has begun. It is constant, eternal progress, yes, progress itself."
"It is the human intellect," said Frederick, "which throughout the centuries has been lying passive and has suddenly turned active. ”

“ You may think my division wrong; the point is that it is not wrong in being a division. All this fallacy of false progress tends to obscure the old common sense of all mankind, which is still the common sense of every man in his own daily dealings: that everything has its place and proportion and proper use, and that it is rational to trust its use and distrust its abuse. Progress, in the good sense, does not consist in looking for a direction in which one can go on indefinitely. ”

“ Lastly, and in the full truth of development, progress is seen to be not merely a sudden recoil from one abstraction to another, nor merely a continual reference to an underlying correlative, but the movement of one totality which advances by self-opposition, self-reconciliation, and self-reconstruction. In this stage, the weight and bulk of unity keeps the contradiction in its place of due subordination. ”

“ Now, if any one wishes to realize the full mischief which this uniformity works, let him think of what would be the result of a uniform method being established everywhere—in religion, art, science, or any trade or profession. Let him remember that canon of Mr. Herbert Spencer, so pregnant with meaning, that progress is difference. Therefore, if you desire progress, you must not make it difficult for men to think and act differently; you must not dull their senses with routine, or stamp their imagination with the official pattern of some great department. ”

“ To such a final position do we come in following out the development of the idea of progress. The early assurance and dogmatic confidence which marked the early years of the century are followed by a complete abandonment of the idea of a guaranteed or assured progress, whether based on the operations of a Divine Providence, or on faith in the ultimate triumph of reason, or on merely a fatalistic determinism. Progress is only a possibility, and its realisation depends on ‘humanity’s own actions. ”

“ How easy to believe that you rule railroads by "divine right," or walk in "higher spheres," when the whole unexpressed consciousness of a hundred million people assigns you just such hieratic appurtenances and privileges. How doubt in the face of all this evidence? They identified themselves with Progress, and Progress was what ruled the world. If you have faith and if you are fortified with the faith of others, self-identification with one of the larger forces is not difficult. ”

“ It is to be observed that in these socialist theories the conception of Progress as indefinite tends to vanish or to lose its significance. If the millennium can be brought about at a stroke by a certain arrangement of society, the goal of development is achieved; we shall have reached the term, and shall have only to live in and enjoy the ideal state—a menagerie of happy men. There will be room for further, perhaps indefinite, advance in knowledge, but civilisation in its social character becomes stable and rigid. ”

“ 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'. ”

“ Among philosophical politicians, there has been spreading the perception that the progress of society is an evolution: the truth that "constitutions are not made but grow," is seen to be a part of the more general truth that societies are not made but grow. ”

“ Conservatism and radicalism, then, are the two half-truths into which the principle of progress is divided by the propensity of every human activity to override the mark, and by the confusion of mind that cannot fail to attend so venturesome and bewildering an undertaking as civilization.
IV I have said that it is possible to measure progress because of the persistence throughout the whole course of human history of certain identical interests and purposes. When such an interest or purpose is sufficiently broad in its scope, and gets itself permanently embodied, it is called an institution. ”

“ It will not be able, in the long run, to lean upon mere theories and maxims; it will be forced by the actual development to undergo changes, to reform and to remodel itself in correspondence with the great laws of historical progress. ”

“ Thus the Progress which Herder sees is, to use his own geometrical illustration, a sequence of unequal and broken curves, corresponding to different maxima and minima. Each curve has its own equation, the history of each people is subject to the laws of its own environment; but there is no general law controlling the whole career of humanity. ”

“ There is no power, he reminds us, keeping humanity right and in the line of desirable progress. All is change, but that is not to say that all changes are desirable or progressive. Here we arrive at a point far removed from the rosy optimism of the earlier thinkers. Progress as a comfortable doctrine, confidently accepted and dogmatically asserted, no longer holds ground ”

“ He observes that some, intoxicated by the spectacle of the material improvements of modern civilisation and the results of science, set no limits to man's power or his hopes; while others, unable to deny the facts, say that this progress serves only the lower part of human nature, and refuse to look with complacency on a movement which means, they assert, a continuous decadence of the nobler part. ”

“ The belief in a law of progress, which I have criticized so unmercifully, is one of these forms; and if I am not mistaken, it is nearly worn out. Disraeli in his detached way said, 'The European talks of progress because by the aid of a few scientific discoveries he has established a society which has mistaken comfort for civilization'. It would not be easy to sum up better the achievements of the nineteenth century, which will be always remembered as the century of accumulation and expansion. ”

“ The other is, that every explanation is only provisional, and liable to be superseded in the course of the progress of knowledge, and of the historical growth of social and economic structure. This will also be admitted, and it is no peculiarity of political economy. There is no science whose [Pg 205] conclusions are not modified by the advance of knowledge; and there are many sciences besides political economy whose phenomena change their type in lapse of time. ”

“ In political science the corruption of the scientific spirit by the superstition of progress has been flagrant. It enables the disputant to overbear questions of right and wrong by confident prediction, a method which has the double advantage of being peculiarly irritating and incapable of refutation. On the theory of progress, what is 'coming' must be right. ”

“ He speaks repeatedly of the world as a universal state, and suggests that the various races, by their peculiar aptitudes and qualities, contribute to the common good of the whole. This idea of the "solidarity" of peoples was to be an important element in the growth of the doctrine of Progress. ”

“ But that it would take us too far out of our track, we should prelude this inquiry by illustrating at some length a certain general law of progress;—the law that alike in occupations, sciences, arts, the divisions that had a common root, but by continual divergence have become distinct, and are now being separately developed, are not truly independent, but severally act and react on each other to their mutual advancement. ”

“ This idea, which in the Roman Empire and in the Middle Ages took the form of a universal State and a universal Church, passed afterwards into the conception of the intercohesion of peoples as contributors to a common pool of civilisation—a principle which, when the idea of Progress at last made its appearance in the world, was to be one of the elements in its growth. ”

“ The only obvious respect in which all kinds of Progress are alike, is, that they are modes of change; and hence, in some characteristic of changes in general, the desired solution will probably be found. We may suspect à priori that in some law of change lies the explanation of this universal transformation of the homogeneous into the heterogeneous. 32 Thus much premised, we pass at once to the statement of the law, which is this:—Every active force produces more than one change—every cause produces more than one effect. ”

“ Indeed, as this observation suggests, it will be well, before tracing the mode in which exact science finally emerges from the merely approximate judgments of the senses, and showing the non-serial evolution of its divisions, to note the non-serial character of those preliminary processes of which all after development is a continuation. On re-considering them it will be seen that not only are they divergent growths from a common root,—not only are they simultaneous in their progress ”

“ While by our introduction of new ideas and of greater material progress we have rendered the old laws more and more obsolete, we have at the same time stopped all evolution of these laws, and killed any capacity they had for accommodating themselves to change. ”

“ Moreover, it is natural for any stage of progress gained to be a bar to further progress. Each stage has to be sharply and definitely conceived in order to be reached, but that in turn makes it a bar to further development. ”

“ In France, as we saw, the theory of Progress was generally associated with ethical views which could find a metaphysical basis in the sensationalism of Locke. A moral system which might be built on sensation, as the primary mental fact, was worked out by Helvetius. But the principle that the supreme law of conduct is to obey nature had come down as a practical philosophy from Rabelais and Montaigne through Moliere to the eighteenth century. It was reinforced by the theory of the natural goodness of man. ”

“ The laws which Political Economy discovers, like the facts and relations of physical nature, harmonize with what seems to be the law of mental development—not a necessary and involuntary progress, but a progress in which the human will is an initiatory force. But in life, as we are cognizant of it, mental development can go but a little way. ”

“ It is true that social condition can be improved by men of purpose and character under despotism, but this does not prove that despotism is desirable, since it can make itself at will an effectual obstacle to progress, and as a rule does so. The policy of seeking the best political condition in which social progress can be made, is Radicalism. ”

“ Along with differentiation goes a process of integration. Great revolutions simplify. The result of greater and greater heterogeneity is to produce a new principle, which combines the warring elements. The definition of progress by increased differentiation is lacking in two ways: It tells us nothing of the forces by which progress is produced, and it gives no connected view of the actual facts of historical development. A general statement of progress in its formal sense is found in the conception of a struggle of ideals. ”

“ He regards all the race's actual experiences as the indispensable mechanism of Progress, and does not regret its mistakes and calamities. Many changes and revolutions, he observes, may seem to have had most mischievous effects; yet every change has brought some advantage, for it has been a new experience and therefore has been instructive. Man advances by committing errors. The history of science shows (as Fontenelle had pointed out) that truth is reached over the ruins of false hypotheses. ”

“ The considerations connected with these truths teach us that reform is generally a wiser remedy than revolution. Still it must be recollected that the progress of things is not always in the right direction. Artificial and selfish combinations frequently supplant the natural tendency to improvement, and a people, by waiting the course of events, might sometimes be the supine observers of the process of forging their own chains. ”

“ Among the competing theories of the time, and sharply opposed to the views of Comte, was the idea, derived from the Revolution, that the world is moving towards universal equality and the obliteration of class distinctions, that this is the true direction of Progress. This view, represented by leaders of the popular movement against the bourgeois ascendency, derived powerful reinforcement from one of the most enlightened political thinkers of the day. ”