CHAPTER XXVII 



HUMAN PROGRESS : PAST AND FUTURE 



THE word progress, as used above, has two distinct 

 meanings, not always recognized, whence has arisen some 

 confusion of ideas. It may mean either an advance in 

 material civilization, or in the mental and moral nature of 

 man, and these are far from being synonymous. Material 

 civilization is essentially cumulative. Each generation 

 benefits by the trials and failures of the preceding 

 generation ; and since the discovery of printing has 

 facilitated the preservation and circulation of all new 

 knowledge, progress of this kind has gone on at an ever 

 accelerated pace. But this does not imply any general 

 increase of mental power. Step by step the science of 

 mathematics has advanced immensely since the time of 

 Newton, but the advance does not prove that the mathema- 

 ticians of to-day have a greater genius for mathematics- 

 are really greater mathematicians than Newton and his 

 contemporaries, or even than the Greeks of the time of 

 Euclid and Archimedes. Our modern steam engines and 

 locomotives far surpass those of Watt and Robert Stephen- 

 son, but of the hundreds who have laboured to improve 

 them perhaps none have surpassed those great men in 

 mechanical genius. And so it is with every item which 

 goes to form that which we term our civilization. We 

 have risen, step by step, on the ladders and scaffolds 

 erected by our predecessors, and if we can now mount 

 higher and see further than they could, it does not in the 

 least prove that we are, on the average, greater men, 



