Читать книгу Essays of a Biologist онлайн

17 страница из 50

The idea of Progress constitutes, as I hope to show, the most important element in the first part of our construction—that which attempts to synthesize the facts of Nature; and besides, no inconsiderable portion of the third, the interrelation of inner and outer.

Readers of Bury’s interesting book on the Idea of Progressssss1 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 progress 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 suffered many vicissitudes. Starting in the XVIIth century as little more than a consciousness of the superiority 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 XIXth century the dogma was questioned, and thinkers began to put it to the test—the test of comparing theory with historical fact. A new lease of life, however, 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 denial of any such inevitable law, but often to a questioning of the very existence of Progress in any shape or form.