Undergrowth

“ It is just the progress-driven plough of God,
Tearing up the well-worn custom-bounded sod;
Shaping out each old tradition-trodden track
Into furrows, fertile furrows, rich and black.
Oh, what harvests they will yield
When they widen to a field.
They will widen, they will broaden, day by day,
As the Progress-driven plough keeps on its way. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Generation to generation, breeding ever anew; and when you die, the new stock goes on. That's the meaning of eternal life. What do you get out of it? An existence innocently and properly set towards all. ”

“ 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? ”

“ A slow growth at first, the slender roots beneath the soil having scarcely strength to take firm hold; but as they became stronger they became bolder, and were now winding themselves firmly and stoutly around the roots of the old institutions which, fixed as they had been for centuries, were in this audacious grasp beginning to show signs of weakness and decay. ”

“ I have called this book a study of Growth and Form, because in the most familiar illustrations of organic form, as in our own bodies for example, these two factors are inseparably associated, and because we are here justified in thinking of form as the direct resultant and consequence of growth: of growth, whose varying rate in one direction or another has produced, by its gradual and unequal increments, the successive stages of development and the final configuration of the whole material structure. ”

“ We acquire a lively idea of that wonderful combination, that luxuriant growth,—of that insular life which is based in boundless wealth and civil freedom, in universal monotony and manifold diversity; formal and capricious, active and torpid, energetic and dull, comfortable and tedious, the envy and the derision of the world. ”

“ With the advance of development the unit-life diminishes; but still, in plants, recommences where the disintegrating process which initiates generation shows the coercive power of the organization to have become small. ”

“ This law of growth, progress, evolution, unfoldment, by gradual and ever ascending stages, is absolute in every department of life, and in every human accomplishment, and where it is ignored, total failure will result. ”

“ Given a spark and growth means a conflagration that ruins a city. Given a gipsy-moth in the parks of New England and growth means the devastation of the forests of a State. Given a disease, and growth means death. Given any form of sin, and growth means the wreckage of character and destiny. (Text.) —N. D. Hillis.
(1320)
Growth in Educational Work—See Needs, Meeting Children’s.
GROWTH IN NATURE
Once, a half-century ago or more, a farmer and his men came down from the pastures, and for purposes of their own cut a ditch straight through the middle of the bog to the open water. ”

“ For normal development there must be both the growth principle and power within the individual, and the growth stimulus and materials supplied by the environment.
The rate and nature of growth and development are influenced by two factors: (1) heredity (race, family) ; (2) environment (climate, social status, economic resources, city or country, materialistic or idealistic atmosphere, commonplace or cultured, ugly or beautiful, expressive or repressive, guiding or neglectful) .
Growth and development are two different processes. Growth is increase in size ”

“ A growth of new vital force—which yet was not a growth—everything pointed the other way, let me say a stock, was to be grafted into the decaying and wasting organism, permanent in its character, constant, without flux or reflux. ”

“ I said.
"Yes, they will have grown; yet I think too they will not have grown. It is possible to grow and not to grow, to grow less and to grow bigger, both at once—yes, even to grow by means of not growing!" ”

“ And growth is all that matters. And for growth, tradition in some form or other is the first essential. For tradition, you see, is only another name for that principle of continuity without which the very idea of growth—let alone progress—is impossible. ”

“ On the contrary, there are long periods during which growth in some directions is [115] going hand in hand with decay in others; losses in one kind are being compensated, or more than compensated, by gains in another; during which a language changes, but only as the bud changes into the flower, and the flower into the fruit. A time indeed arrives when the growth and gains, becoming ever fewer, cease to constitute any longer a compensation for the losses and the decay; which are ever becoming more; when the forces of disorganization and death at work are stronger than those of life and order. ”

“ And thus we see how wonderfully man is provided with the essentials of growth. This tender germ of progress is preserved in hard shells and prickly coverings, which, when they have served their purpose, are thrown aside, as not only useless but detrimental to further development. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The progress of a wild plant to a beautiful garden flower, is perhaps more marked and striking, than anything that takes place among animals, yet even here, it would be the height of absurdity to assert, that the progress was unlimited or indefinite. ”

“ That unbuilding and rebuilding which would be needful were it laid down of its original size, will be made needless if from the beginning it is laid down of a larger size. Hence, in successive generations, the greater prosperity and multiplication of individuals in which this part is at the outset somewhat larger than usual, must eventually establish a marked excess in its development at an early stage. ”

“ To ascertain the effects of material progress upon the distribution of wealth, let us, therefore, consider the effects of increase of population apart from improvement in the arts, and then the effect of improvement in the arts apart from increase of population. ”

“ Take a primeval forest, cut down the old growth and another will spring up, not like the first, but a more solid, thicker growth. So it is with error; like an old growth, error is tall and porous with a great show. ”

“ All analogies point to a still increasing vigor in the growth of the kingdom of heaven. If the mustard tree is never seen growing, but only to have grown; yet the greater the tree, the greater its power of daily making large growth, without its growing being perceived. ”

“ To extend, as well as to make clearer, this conception of the Social Science, let me here set down a question which comes within its sphere. What is the relation in a society between structure and growth? Up to what point is structure necessary to growth? after what point does it retard growth? at what point does it arrest growth? There exists in the individual organism a duplex relation between growth and structure which it is difficult adequately to express. ”

“ This means growth—the gradual uplifting of mankind, the diffusion of knowledge, as well as of food—the growth of intellectuality. And as this comes, think you that man will not rise higher? A great reservoir is being tapped and from it will flow, in the future, rich streams to fertilize the whole world of humanity. ”

“ Is it not through the idea of growth? We are in a condition of process, of growth, of which our state on earth is but the preliminary condition. And this must mean that in one sense we know all that lies before us ”

“ But our growth has not been limited to territory, population and aggregate wealth, marvelous as it has been in each of those directions. The masses of our people are better fed, clothed, and housed than their fathers were. ”

“ But perhaps the whole phenomena of growth and decay furnish the best examples in illustration of the Heraclitean conception of Becoming. Growth is a continual change. The growing creature, whether animal or vegetable, is continually becoming different from what it is. The process never stops—never stops in such a way as to enable us to say, now the animal or the vegetable is, and has ceased to become. It never truly is, inasmuch as its state is never fixed and permanent. It is always passing on into another state, in which there is no rest or pause any more than there was to the preceding one. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We must, therefore, in considering the effects of the progress of industry, admit as a supposition, however greatly we deprecate as a fact, an increase of population as long-continued, as indefinite, and possibly even as rapid, as the increase of production and accumulation. ”

“ The term growth ought strictly to be confined to mere increase of size, and development to change of structure. [916] Now, a child is said to grow into a man, and a foal into a horse, but, as in these cases there is much change of structure, the process properly belongs to the order of development. ”

“ He might almost be described, politically, as a natural growth—a kind of tree which went through its destined changes of development and decay in accordance with a certain principle, but in obedience to no visible motive. ”

“ Each age has its own special method of existence; thus there are laws for growth, for maturity, for decay. There are the great facts of growth by exercise or use; the necessity of maintaining a just distribution of force amongst the various parts, lest one grow at the expense of another; the alternations of action and rest required in every part of the economy; the varied life of different functions which give to each its individuality and special rule ”

“ Its growth is as ‘a lump of leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal until the whole was leavened.’ When the path of prophet and believer is too easy the growth is slow. The sting of persecution is necessary to fructify the seed, to make ready the field; but there are occasional seasons of abundant harvest and never a failure. ”

“ To the day when the spirit of internal improvement shall have levelled the roads and converted [pg 189] the hidden wealth of the soil into a glorious medium of happiness and prosperity. Then the mental stores of our hardy settlers will rapidly develop, and civilization will prune down the rugged points of character, as the implements of the husbandman break up the clods. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ By increasing the pressure on the means of subsistence, a larger population again augments these results; seeing that each person is forced more and more to confine himself to that which he can do best, and by which he can gain most. This industrial progress, by aiding future production, opens the way for a further growth of population, which reacts as before: in all which the multiplication of effects is manifest. ”

“ Little is to be learnt from their names, the derivation of which is often doubtful. Several of them, however, show that the divinely mysterious process of growth, so all-important to an agricultural nation, had attracted attention. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The economy of creation is not regarded in this philosophy as a theory of development all in one direction; but as a cycle in which, after development, and as its fruit, the last term gives again the first. ”