PROGRESS, BIOLOGICAL AND OTHER 9 



Progress * will perhaps, with me, have been surprised 

 at the modernity of that conception. He shows how, 

 in antiquity, the idea was never a dominant one, and 

 further that the adumbrations made of it all lacked 

 some element without which it cannot be styled prog- 

 ress in the sense in which that word is used to-day. 



Not indeed till the late Renaissance can we say 

 that the idea of Progress became in any real sense 

 incorporated with the common thought of Western 

 civilization. From then to the present it has suf- 

 fered many vicissitudes. Starting in the XVIIth cen- 

 tury as little more than a consciousness of the supe- 

 riority of the present over the past, in the XVIIIth it 

 changed to a dogma, its adherents claiming that 

 there existed a ''Law of Progress" leading inevitably 

 to the perfectioning of humanity. In the XlXth 

 century the dogma was questioned, and thinkers be- 

 gan to put it to the test — the test of comparing the- 

 ory with historical fact. A new lease of life, how- 

 ever, was given to the idea of a law of progress by 

 the evolution theory; but finally, of late years, there 

 has been a marked reaction, leading not only to a de- 

 nial of any such inevitable law, but often to a ques- 

 tioning of the very existence of Progress in any shape 

 or form. 



It is the business of the philosopher and of the 

 biologist to see whether this scepticism be justified, 

 and to find out by a more scientific approach how 

 much of the doctrine of Progress is valid. To the 



* Bury, '20. 



