Aggrandizement

“ We should also probably better understand the conditions of successful growth or reform, and have less toleration for schemes of social reconstruction.
Civilization has been of slow and painful growth. ”

“ Or again, if the political structure be rigid, incapable of responding to the changes demanded by growth, the expansive forces of social and economic transformation may rend it in some catastrophe like that of the French Revolution. ”

“ Our augmentation is by growth, not by acquisition; by internal development, not by external accession. No schemes can be suggested to us so magnificent as the prospects which a sober contemplation of our own condition, unaided by projects, uninfluenced by ambition, fairly spreads before us. ”

“ Civilisation has been organised here and there, now and then, up to a certain point; there have been eras of rapid progress, but how can we be sure that these are not episodes, themselves also fortuitous? For growth has been followed by decay, progress by regress; can it be said that history, authorises the conclusion that reason will ever gain such an ascendancy that the play of chance will no longer be able to thwart her will? Is such a conclusion more than a hope, unsanctioned by the data of past experience, merely one of the characteristics of the age of illumination? ”

“ That with social organisms, as with individual organisms, structure up to a certain point is needful for growth is obvious. That in the one case, as in the other, continued growth implies unbuilding and rebuilding of structure, which therefore becomes in so far an impediment, seems also obvious. Whether it is true in the one case, as in the other, that completion of structure involves arrest of growth, and fixes the society to the type it has then reached, is a question to be considered. ”

“ But without soaring to the stars, the moment that this theory of progression, which seems so natural to us amid an advancing civilization, looks around the world, it comes against an enormous fact—the fixed, petrified civilizations. ”

“ Change, and the thing men call growth, was in the air. Perhaps in its own way revolution was in the air, the silent, the real revolution that grew with the growth of the towns. In the stirring, bustling town of Bidwell that quiet summer night something happened that startled men. ”

“ The first effect is to divert Nature’s force from the consolidation of faculties already fully formed, and, second, to injure the substantial growth of the later faculty, which is thus prematurely brought forward. ”

“ In our natural, necessary, irrepressible expansion, we are come here into contact with the progress of another great people, the law of whose being has impressed upon it a principle of growth which has wrought mightily in the past, and in the present is visible by recurring manifestations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fibre and structure of society. ”

“ This confusion between the contemporaneous stage of development and the historic rôle of certain qualities, is intensified by our custom of referring to social evolution as if it were a force and not a process. ”

“ Social progression is a gradual change from rudimentary, homogeneous and anthropomorphic conditions to civilization, heterogeneity and to definite conceptions of the external world; and at the same time from nomadic characteristics, with aggressive purposes, to inhabitative propensities and individual industrial pursuits. ”

“ That end, as it was natural for one to feel who had swept such a wide range of comparative studies, was the reconstruction of a past national life, or of the processes of a long organic development, and the estimate of their part in the great competitive struggle of races and peoples and institutions, in which our present civilization and its complex problems have been evolved. ”

“ I knew that there is a manifest, marked distinction, which ill men with ill designs, or weak men incapable of any design, will constantly be confounding, that is, a marked distinction between change and reformation. ”

“ If, on the one hand, further growth implies more complex structure, on the other hand changeableness of structure is a condition to further growth; and, conversely, unchangeableness of structure is a concomitant of arrested growth. ”

“ The study of expansion reveals to us the fact that expansion and contraction furnish the many elements of all human action, but that expansion is first, that expansion expresses joy, exhilaration, animation in life, and that contraction, aside from its co-ordination with expansion in causing control in intensity, expresses antagonism, hate, anger, pain. ”

“ The great division of history into phases by Turgot and Comte first affirmed this law in its outlines by asserting the unity of progress, for a mere phase interrupts no growth, and nature shows innumerable such phases. ”

“ It was the beginning of a gradual transformation which with every century, with every generation, takes some new form, and is sometimes called progress, sometimes revolution, but which moves on with the same relentless persistence as the laws that govern the earth. ”

“ For the time, adaptation of political structure may be incomplete or concealed. Old organs will be utilized to express new forces, and so gradual and subtle will be the change that it may hardly be recognized. ”

“ But the type of each society is continually being modified by two causes—by growth, and by the actions, warlike or other, of adjacent societies. Increase in the bulk of a society inevitably leads to change of structure; as also does any alteration in the ratio of the predatory to the industrial activities. Hence continual social metamorphosis, involving continual alteration of the conditions under which the citizen lives, produces in him an adaptation of character which, tending toward completeness, is ever made incomplete by further social metamorphosis. ”

“ While few radical changes have been made due to the present political development of the country and the social and economic repercussions that a drastic reorganization en­tails, it must be stated that the prime objectives of efficiency, simplicity, and economy have weighed heavily in the de­termination of the changes effected. ”

“ It was impossible not to wonder which of the two forces—the growth of population and the increase of the needs of the growing population on the one side, and the growth of invention and mechanical power in supplying human wants on the other side—would gain as time went on. ”

“ Small aggregates only can hold together while the cohesion is feeble, and successively larger aggregates become possible only as the greater strains implied are met by that greater cohesion which results from an adapted human nature, and a resulting development of social organization. ”

“ It might be more instructive to trace the growth of thought among the masses, or to indicate the progress of civil and political freedom; yet, not only do the materials not exist for such a task, but those we possess all tend to show that there has been no growth to describe, no progress to be indicated, during these comparatively recent centuries. ”

“ Psychologists also tell us that habit, one of the phenomena of consolidation, indicates downward growth. With the race, as with the individual, habit, or what Bagehot calls "the solid cake of custom," has been one of the impediments to progress. Yet, governments have progressed from generation to generation. ”

“ Each civilization has been built around one or more urban nuclei which accepted and practiced expansion as the primary law of their beings.
Expansion takes many forms. It may be peaceful, as travel is peaceful. It may be competitive, as trade is competitive. ”

“ For two hundred years there had been no great changes in political or legal methods and pretensions, the utmost change had been a certain shifting of boundaries and slight readjustment of procedure, while in nearly every other aspect of life there had been fundamental revolutions, gigantic releases, and an enormous enlargement of scope and outlook. ”

“ The extent to which an organization resists reorganization we shall not fully appreciate until we observe that its resistance increases in a compound progression. For, while each new part is an additional obstacle to change, the formation of it implies a deduction from the forces causing change. ”

“ Material progress, as commonly understood, consists of those three elements or directions of progression, in all of which the progressive nations have for some time past been advancing, though in different degrees. ”

“ And all this time, we are in an epoch of expansion; [72] and the essence of an epoch of expansion is a movement of ideas, and the one salvation of an epoch of expansion is a harmony of ideas. The very principle of the authority which we are seeking as a defence against anarchy is right reason, ideas, light. ”

“ The occurrence of rapid changes in the structure of an old and stable society implies either some radical revolution in the basis of economic life, or some great change in men’s conception of social expediency, or, what is most likely, an economic and a spiritual change occurring together. ”

“ Those who, like Malthus, sounded a note of warning, showing that population increases, unlike the supply of food, by geometrical progression, were answered that compound interest follows the same admirable law. ”

“ It will be seen, by a glance at the above table, that the three great divisions of society, namely, High Life, Low Life, and Middle Life, are subdivided, or more properly, sub-classed, into the Superior, Transition, and Metamorphic classes. ”

“ Once more, change in the average mode of life pursued by a society, now increasingly warlike and now increasingly industrial, initiates metamorphoses: changed activities generate changes of structures. Hence, there have to be distinguished those progressive rearrangements which belong to the further development of one social type, from those caused by the commencing development of another social type. ”

“ The sort of institutional and economic reorganization suggested in the preceding chapters is not, consequently, to be conceived merely as a more or less dubious proposal to improve human nature by laws. ”

“ "Reform won't catch up to the needs of civilization unless it's made to. ”

“ As social integration advances, the increasing aggregates exercise increasing restraints over their units—a truth which is the obverse of the one just set forth, that the maintenance of its integrity by a larger aggregate implies greater cohesion. ”

“ Had it been restrained still more, and the same improvements taken place, there would have been a larger dividend than there now is, for the nation or the species at large. The new ground wrung from nature by the improvements would not have been all used up in the support of mere numbers. ”

“ I shall now give another example, of a very natural augmentation upon the intrinsic value of work, which does not proceed from the increase of population, but from the progress of industry itself; which implies no internal vice in a state, but which is the necessary consequence of the reformation of a very great one. This augmentation must be felt less or more in every country, in proportion as industry becomes extended. ”

“ It seems to have been, when properly regarded, a revulsion in the midst of a great expansion of industrial power, which expansion produced modifications of the industrial organization which could not well take place without some greater or lesser catastrophes. ”

“ The others will for a time keep on expanding—in fact, for the moment, the tendency278 will be to quicker expansion, for the vital force which is refused scope on the ground layer will strive to find vent in those above—until, at length, there is a decided overbalance and a sudden crumbling along all the faces of the pyramid. ”

“ Without considerable financial resources such enlargement has hitherto been absolutely impracticable, and even where practicable has rarely been carried into effect without a long period of makeshift, discomfort, and disorganisation, for which the enlargement itself affords only a temporary remedy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The edge of all contrasts, so to speak, should be as soft as is consistent with decisive effect. We mean, that a gradual change is better than instantaneous transfiguration; for, though always less effective, it is more agreeable. ”

“ The nineteenth century—in the life of the wage-earning multitudes—was a century of disturbance. The twentieth promises to be a century of consolidation. What completed product will emerge from its city aggregation, the children of the crowd? ”

“ Every more circumscribed example of development according to a plan, this view regards as a single case in which, out of the general course of nature, and fully accounted for by it, single groups of its elements are arranged into a totality whose cohering unity consists only in the reciprocal actions of the combined elements themselves. ”