34 
TRANSACTIONS OF THE TEXAS ACADEMY OF SCIENCE. 
crowded still. Institutions of charity and correction continue to make 
heavy drafts upon public treasuries and upon the pockets of the benevo¬ 
lent, and the poor are still with us. Yet withal, he is blind, or else has 
converged his vision upon a narrow spot in the whole field of view, who 
does not plainly see that we are living in a much better world than that 
of our ancestry. Here it is necessary to make a distinction. If indeed 
it is meant that human nature, with its instincts for good or evil, which . 
are a part of the animal man, has undergone no marked change, the 
proposition would have to be admitted at once. I suspect that the pro¬ 
portion of inborn congenital depravity on the one hand, and sense of 
justice and kindness on the other, is not very different at the present day 
from what it was in the days of Abraham, Job, or Augustus Cmsar. 
Possibly, though, there has been going on through the ages a slow pro¬ 
cess of modification by natural selection by which the hereditary animal 
instincts of man have been somewhat improved. But if so, the change 
has been so slight that it would be difficult to demonstrate it. Nor is 
there any valid ground of hope that in the next two thousand years the 
human animal will become materially better. Those who, like Henry 
George and Edward Bellamy, bewail the depravity of the present and 
picture a future society composed of angels, are only crying for the 
moon. 
But if moral progress means improvement in the conditions under 
which the passions and instincts of human nature are exercised, the 
proposition is wholly changed. From this point of view not only has 
there been progress, but immense progress. The fields, the opportunities, 
the incentives for the exercise of the nobler and better qualities of human 
nature have been vastly increased, those for the exercise of the baser 
qualities have been in many ways and along many lines restricted. 
Human nature indeed with its mixed propensities for good and evil is 
either unchanged or changed but little. But its fields of action have 
changed immensely. The external constraints away from wrong and to¬ 
wards the right have grown stronger through the centuries and are in¬ 
comparably more potent than they were a thousand or two thousand 
years ago. And this is the only kind of moral progress we can ever 
reasonably hope for. 
But there is another aspect of the subject under which both moral and 
material progress are included; and that is the progress of human 
knowledge. 
That the material progress of the world, which has become so swift 
during the present century, has come from increased knowledge of the 
laws of force and matter is sufficiently apparent to everyone. Nor is it 
less true that improvement in moral conditions has come from increased 
knowledge of the moral consequences of human actions. This statement 
