The Idea Of Progress | Page 3

the world, or exercise a decisive power in
history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human
aims and depend for their realisation on the human will, such as liberty,
toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism. Some of these have been
partly realised, and there is no reason why any of them should not be
fully realised, in a society or in the world, if it were the united purpose
of a society or of the world to realise it. They are approved or
condemned because they are held to be good or bad, not because they
are true or false. But there is another order of ideas that play a great
part in determining and directing the course of man's conduct but do
not depend on his will--ideas which bear upon the mystery of life, such
as Fate, Providence, or personal immortality. Such ideas may operate in
important ways on the forms of social action, but they involve a

question of fact and they are accepted or rejected not because they are
believed to be useful or injurious, but because they are believed to be
true or false.
The idea of the progress of humanity is an idea of this kind, and it is
important to be quite clear on the point. We now take it so much for
granted, we are so conscious of constantly progressing in knowledge,
arts, organising capacity, utilities of all sorts, that it is easy to look upon
Progress as an aim, like liberty or a world- federation, which it only
depends on our own efforts and good-will to achieve. But though all
increases of power and knowledge depend on human effort, the idea of
the Progress of humanity, from which all these particular progresses
derive their value, raises a definite question of fact, which man's wishes
or labours cannot affect any more than his wishes or labours can
prolong life beyond the grave.
This idea means that civilisation has moved, is moving, and will move
in a desirable direction. But in order to judge that we are moving in a
desirable direction we should have to know precisely what the
destination is. To the minds of most people the desirable outcome of
human development would be a condition of society in which all the
inhabitants of the planet would enjoy a perfectly happy existence. But it
is impossible to be sure that civilisation is moving in the right direction
to realise this aim. Certain features of our "progress" may be urged as
presumptions in its favour, but there are always offsets, and it has
always been easy to make out a case that, from the point of view of
increasing happiness, the tendencies of our progressive civilisation are
far from desirable. In short, it cannot be proved that the unknown
destination towards which man is advancing is desirable. The
movement may be Progress, or it may be in an undesirable direction
and therefore not Progress. This is a question of fact, and one which is
at present as insoluble as the question of personal immortality. It is a
problem which bears on the mystery of life.
Moreover, even if it is admitted to be probable that the course of
civilisation has so far been in a desirable direction, and such as would
lead to general felicity if the direction were followed far enough, it
cannot be proved that ultimate attainment depends entirely on the
human will. For the advance might at some point be arrested by an
insuperable wall. Take the particular case of knowledge, as to which it

is generally taken for granted that the continuity of progress in the
future depends altogether on the continuity of human effort (assuming
that human brains do not degenerate). This assumption is based on a
strictly limited experience. Science has been advancing without
interruption during the last three or four hundred years; every new
discovery has led to new problems and new methods of solution, and
opened up new fields for exploration. Hitherto men of science have not
been compelled to halt, they have always found means to advance
further. But what assurance have we that they will not one day come up
against impassable barriers? The experience of four hundred years, in
which the surface of nature has been successfully tapped, can hardly be
said to warrant conclusions as to the prospect of operations extending
over four hundred or four thousand centuries. Take biology or
astronomy. How can we be sure that some day progress may not come
to a dead pause, not because knowledge is exhausted, but because our
resources for investigation are exhausted--because, for instance,
scientific instruments have reached the limit of perfection beyond
which it is demonstrably impossible to improve them, or because (in
the case of astronomy) we come into the