Progress and History. Various

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СКАЧАТЬ definitely what we want, and we are now all persuaded with John Stuart Mill that the remedy is in our own hands, 'that all the great sources of human suffering are in a great degree, many of them entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.' This conviction is perhaps the greatest step of all that we have gained. In morality some pertinent and necessary questions are raised in Chap. VI, but the general progress would be doubted by very few who have had the opportunity of comparing the evidence as to any previous state of morals, say in the Middle Ages or in the Elizabethan age—the crown of the Renascence in England—with that of the present day. The capital advance in morality, which by itself would be sufficient to justify our thesis, is the increase in the consciousness and the obligation of the 'common weal', that conception of which Government, increasingly better organized, is the most striking practical realization. It has its drawback in the spread of what we feel as a debasing 'vulgarity', but the general balance is overwhelmingly on the side of good. And in all such discussions we are apt to allow far too little weight to the change which the New World, and especially the United States, has brought about. In matters of personal prosperity and a high general standard of intellectual and moral competence, what has been achieved there would outweigh a good deal of our Old World defects when we come to drawing up a world's balance-sheet.

      It will be seen therefore that we dismiss altogether any doctrine of an 'illusion of progress' as a necessary decoy to progressive action. Progress is a fact as well as an ideal, and the ideal, though it springs from an objective reality, will always be in advance of it. So it is with all man's activities when he comes to man's estate. In science he has always an ideal of a more perfect knowledge before him though he becomes scientific by experience. In art he is always striving to idealize fresh things, though he first becomes an artist from the pure spontaneous pleasure of expressing what is in him. The deliberate projection of the ideal into the future, seeing how far it will take us and whether we are journeying in the right direction, is a late stage. As to progress, the largest general ideal which can affect man's action, it is only recently that mankind as a whole has been brought to grips with the conception, also enlarged to the full. He was standing, somewhat bewildered, somewhat dazzled, before it, when the war, like an eclipse of the sun, came suddenly and darkened the view. But an eclipse has been found an invaluable time for studying some of the problems of the sun's nature and of light itself.

      One of the most acute critics of the mid-Victorian prophets of progress, Dr. John Grote, did very well in disentangling the ideal element which is inherent in every sound doctrine of progress as a guide to conduct. He took the theory of a continuous inevitable progress in human affairs, and showed how this by itself might lead to a weakening of the will, on which alone in his view progress in the proper sense depends. He took the mechanical theory of utilitarianism and subjected it to a similar analysis. We cannot evaluate progress as an increase in a sum-total of happiness. This is incapable of calculation, and if we aim directly at it, we are likely to lose the higher things on which it depends, and which are capable of being made the objects of that direct striving which is essential to progress. Dr. Grote's analysis has long since passed into current philosophical teaching, but he will always be well worth reading for his fresh and vigorous reasoning and for the way in which he builds up his own position without denying the solid contributions of those whom he criticizes. Complete truth in the matter seems to us to involve a larger share for the historical element than Dr. Grote explicitly allows. We grant fully the paramount necessity for an ideal of progress and for constantly revising, purifying, and strengthening it. But in its formation we should trace more than he does to the collective forces of mankind as expressed in history. These have given us the ideal and will carry us on towards it by a force which is greater than, and in one sense independent of, any individual will. This is the cardinal truth of sociology, and is obvious if we consider how in matters of everyday experience we are all compelled by some social force not ourselves, as for instance in actions tending to maintain the family or in a national crisis such, as the war. This general will is not, of course, independent of all the wills concerned, but it acts more or less as an outside compelling force in the case of every one. Moreover our selves are composite as well as wholes, and parts of us are active in forming the general will, parts acquiesce and parts are overborne. Thus it is clear that a general tendency to progress in the human race may be well established—as we hold it to be—and yet go on in ways capable of infinite variation and at very various speed. We are all, let us suppose, being carried onward by one mighty and irresistible stream. We may combine our strength and skill and make the best use of the surrounding forces. This is working and steering to the chosen goal. Or we may rest on our oars and let the stream take us where it will. This is drifting, and we shall certainly be carried on somewhere; but we may be badly bruised or even shipwrecked in the process, and in any case we shall have contributed nothing to the advance. Some few may even waste their strength in trying to work backwards against the stream. We seem to have reached the point in history when for the first time we are really conscious of our position, and the problem is now a possible and an urgent one to mark the goal clearly and unitedly and bend our common efforts to attaining it.

      If this be so, the work of synthesis may be thought to have a higher practical value for the moment than the analysis which has prevailed in European thought for the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part of the nineteenth century the great formative ideas which had been gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary period, took shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth—Kant, Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by a period of criticism which has left none of them whole, but on the other hand has produced a mass of contradictions and specialisms highly confusing and even hopeless to the public mind and veiling the more important and profound agreements which have been growing all the time beneath. There are now abundant signs of a reaction towards unity and construction of a broad and solid kind. In no respect is such a knitting up more desirable than in this idea of progress itself. Are we to say that there is no such thing as all-round continuous progress, but only progress in definite branches of thought and activity, progress in science or in particular arts, social progress, physical progress, progress in popular education and the like, but that any two or more branches only coincide occasionally and by accident, and that when working at one we can and should have no thought of working at them all? This is no doubt a prevalent view and we may hope that some things said in this book may modify it. Another school of critical thinkers, approaching the question from the point of view of the ultimate object of action, asks what is the one thing for which all others are to be pursued as means? Is increase of knowledge the absolute good or increase of happiness? Or if it is increase of love, is it quite indifferent what we love? A few words on this may fitly conclude this chapter.

      The task of mankind, and of every one of us so far as he is able to enter into it, is to bring together these various aspects of human excellence, to see them as parts of one ideal and labour to approach it. This approach is progress, and if you say 'progress of what, and to what end', the answer can only be, the progress of humanity, and the end further progress. Some of the writers in this book will indicate the point at which in their view this progress is in contact with the infinite, with something not given in history; but, whatever our view of the transcendental problem may be, it is of the utmost importance for all of us to realize that we have given to us in the actual process of time, in concrete history, a development of humanity, a growth from a lower to a higher state of being, which may be most perfectly realized in the individual consciousness, fully awake and fully socialized, but is also clearly traceable in the doings of the human race as a whole. Such is in fact the uniting thread of these essays, and when we proceed to the converse of this truth and apply this ideal which we have shown to be the course of realization, as a governing motive in our lives, it is even more imperative to strive constantly to keep the whole together, and not to regard either knowledge or power or beauty or even love as an ultimate and supreme thing to which all other ends are merely means. The end is a more perfect man, developed by the perfecting of all mankind.

      Such a conception embraces all the separate aspects of our nature each in its place, and each from its own angle supreme. Love and knowledge inseparable and fundamental, freedom and happiness essential conditions of healthy growth, personality developed with the development of the greater personality in which we all live and grow. This greater personality is at its highest СКАЧАТЬ