The great task of mankind has been to create an organization which would enable men to realize their wishes. This organization we call civilization. In achieving this result man has very slowly at first, but more rapidly in recent times, established his control over external nature and over himself. He has done this in order that he might remake the world as he found it more after his own heart.
But the world which man has thus remade has in turn reacted back upon man and in doing so has made him human. Men build houses to protect them from the weather and as places of refuge. In the end these houses have become homes, and man has become a domesticated animal, endowed with the sentiments, virtues, and lasting affections that the home inevitably cultivates and maintains.
Men made for themselves clothing for ornament and for comfort, and men's, and especially women's, clothes have become so much a part of their personalities that without them they cease to be persons and have no status in human society. Except under very exceptional circumstances a man who appeared without clothing would be treated as a madman, and hunted like a wild animal.
Men have built cities for security and for trade, and cities have made necessary and possible a division of labor and an economic organization. This economic organization, on the other hand, has been the basis of a society and a social order which imposes standards of conduct and enforces minute regulations of the individual life. Out of the conditions of this common life there has grown a body of general and ruling ideas: liberty, equality, democracy, fate, providence, personal immortality, and progress.
J. B. Bury, who has written a history of the idea of progress, says that progress is "the animating and controlling idea of western civilization." But in defining progress he makes a distinction between ideas like progress, providence, and fate and ideas like liberty, toleration, and socialism. The latter are approved or condemned because they are good or bad. The former are not approved or condemned. They are matters of fact, they are true or false. He says:
When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive power in history, we are generally thinking of those ideas which express human aims and depend for their realisation on the human will, such as liberty, toleration, equality of opportunity, socialism. Some of these have been partly realised, and there is no reason why any of them should not be fully realised, in a society or in the world, if it were the united purpose of a society or of the world to realise it. They are approved or condemned because they are held to be good or bad, not because they are true or false. But there is another order of ideas that play a great part in determining and directing the course of man's conduct but do not depend on his will—ideas which bear upon the mystery of life, such as Fate, Providence, or personal immortality. Such ideas may operate in important ways on the forms of social action, but they involve a question of fact and they are accepted or rejected not because they are believed to be useful or injurious, but because they are believed to be true or false.
The idea of the progress of humanity is an idea of this kind, and it is important to be quite clear on the point.[328]
All of the ideas mentioned are of such a general nature, embody so much of the hopes, the strivings, and the sentiments of the modern world, that they have, or did have until very recently, something of the sanctity and authority of religious dogmas. All are expressions of wishes, but there is this difference: ideas, like liberty, toleration, etc., reflect the will of the people who accept them; ideas like providence and progress, on the contrary, represent their hopes. The question of the progress of humanity like that of personal immortality is, as Bury points out, a question of fact. "It is true or false but it cannot be proved whether true or false. Belief in it is an act of faith." When we hypostatize our hopes and wishes and treat them as matters of fact, even though they cannot be proved to be either true or false, they assume a form which Sorel describes as myth. The progress of humanity, as Herbert Spencer and the other Victorians understood it, is such a myth. Dean Inge calls it a "superstition" and adds: "To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy. The superstition of progress had the singular good fortune to enslave at least three philosophies—those of Hegel, of Comte, and of Darwin."[329]
The conception of progress, if a superstition, is one of recent origin. It was not until the eighteenth century that it gained general acceptance and became part of what Inge describes as the popular religion. The conception which it replaced was that of providence. But the Greeks and Romans knew nothing of providence. They were under the influence of another idea of a different character, the idea, namely, of nemesis and fate. And before them there were more primitive peoples who had no conception of man's destiny at all. In a paper, not yet published, Ellsworth Faris has sketched the natural history of the idea of progress and its predecessors and of a new conception, control, that is perhaps destined to take its place.