PROGRESS, BIOLOGICAL AND OTHER 57 



fortunate individuals, has obviously increased; but 

 there are the slums, there are the drab lives of thou- 

 sands in great cities, there are poverty, degeneracy, 

 and crime. All that we can say is that to many at 

 least it seems theoretically possible that man should 

 be able to reduce the amount of degeneration, waste, 

 and pain, to increase the changes to be summed up 

 as progressive. 



The future Golden Age of Millenniarism is as im- 

 possible a notion as the past Golden Age of My- 

 thology, and more demoralizing. Bury, with pardon- 

 able sarcasm, speaks of the result hoped for in it as 

 "a menagerie of happy men ... in which the dy- 

 namic character of history disappears." But once 

 we have accepted (as the great majority accept) life 

 as somehow worth living, the belief in progress as- 

 serts only (though there is much in that "only") that 

 life may be made more worth living to a larger pro- 

 portion of people, although effort and failure always 

 will and always must be conditions of its operation. 

 As Goethe said, "Let humanity last as long as it will, 

 there will always be hindrances in its way, and all 

 kinds of distress, to make it develop its powers." 



It is important to remember, what we have already 

 noted, that the history of mankind is largely the 

 history of competition between group-units or com- 

 munities. When rare communities have been able 

 to escape from this race of competition and have 

 deliberately devoted the energy and resources thus 

 set free to better community-regulation and an im- 



