The Idea of Progressive Humanity
It happens that my circumstances, and perhaps my mental temperament, have brought my mind into almost dramatic opposition to that of Mr. Belloc. While his training was mainly in written history, the core of mine was the analytical exercises of comparative anatomy and palæontology. I was brought up upon the spectacle of life in the universe as a steadily changing system. My education was a modern one, upon material and questionings impossible a hundred years ago. Things that are fundamental and commonplaces to me have come, therefore, as belated, hostile, and extremely distressing challenges to the satisfactions and acceptances of Mr. Belloc.
Now, this picture of a fixed and unprogressive humanity working out an enormous multitude of individual lives from birth to either eternal beatitude or to something not beatitude, hell or destruction or whatever else it may be that Mr. Belloc fails to make clear is the alternative to beatitude—this picture, which seems to be necessary to the Catholic and probably to every form of Christian faith, and which is certainly necessary to the comfort of Mr. Belloc, has no validity whatever for my mind. It is no more possible in my thought as a picture of reality than that ancient cosmogony which made the round earth rest upon an elephant, which stood upon a tortoise, which stood upon God-knows-what.
I do not know how the universe originated, or what it is fundamentally; I do not know how material substance is related to consciousness and will; I doubt if any creature of my calibre is capable of knowing such things; but at least I know enough to judge the elephant story and the fixed humanity story absurd. I do not know any convincing proof that Progress must go on; I find no invincible imperative to progressive change in my universe; but I remark that progressive change does go on, and that it is the form into which life falls more and more manifestly as our analysis penetrates and our knowledge increases. I set about collecting what is known of life and the world in time and space, and I find the broad outline falls steadily and persistently into a story of life appearing and increasing in range, power, and co-operative unity of activity. I see knowledge increasing and human power increasing, I see ever-increasing possibilities before life, and I see no limits set to it all. Existence impresses me as a perpetual dawn. Our lives, as I apprehend them, swim in expectation. This is not an outline I have thrust upon the facts; it is the outline that came naturally as the facts were put in order.
And it seems to me that we are waking up to the realisation that the individual life does not stand alone, as people in the past have seemed to imagine it did, but that it is far truer to regard it as an episode in a greater life, which progresses and which need not die. The episode begins and ends, but life goes on.
Mr. Belloc is so far removed from me mentally that he is unable to believe that this, clearly and honestly, is how I see things; he is moved to explain it away by saying that I am trying to “get rid of a God,” that I am a rotten Protestant, that this is what comes of being born near London, that if I knew French and respected the Gentry all this would be different, and so on, as the attentive student of his great apology for Catholicism has been able to observe. But all the while he is uncomfortably on the verge of being aware that I am a mere reporter of a vast mass of gathered knowledge and lengthened perspectives that towers up behind and above his neat and jolly marionette show of the unchanging man and his sins and repentances and mercies, his astonishing punishments, and his preposterous eternal reward among the small eternities of the mediæval imagination. I strut to no such personal beatitude. I have no such eternity of individuation. The life to which I belong uses me and will pass on beyond me, and I am content.