Philosophy, like literature, is, in the final analysis, the expression of a temperament, more or less modified by experience. The selections from Schopenhauer and Bergson may be regarded, therefore, as the characteristic reactions of two strikingly different temperaments to the conception of progress and to life. The descriptions which they give of the cosmic process are, considered formally, not unlike. Their interpretations and the practical bearings of these interpretations are profoundly different.
It is not necessary for the students of sociology to discuss the merits of these different doctrines. We may accept them as human documents. They throw light, at any rate, upon the idea of progress, and upon all the other fundamental ideas in which men have sought to formulate their common hopes and guide their common life.
II. MATERIALS
A. THE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS
1. The Earliest Conception of Progress[333]
The word "progress," like the word "humanity," is one of the most significant. It is a Latin word, not used in its current abstract sense until after the Roman incorporation of the Mediterranean world. The first writer who expounds the notion with sufficient breadth of view and sufficiently accurate and concrete observation to provide a preliminary sketch was the great Roman poet, Lucretius.
He begins by describing a struggle for existence in which the less well-adapted creatures died off, those who wanted either the power to protect themselves or the means of adapting themselves to the purposes of man. In this stage, however, man was a hardier creature than he afterward became. He lived like the beasts of the field and was ignorant of tillage or fire or clothes or houses. He had no laws or government or marriage and, though he did not fear the dark, he feared the real danger of fiercer beasts. Men often died a miserable death, but not in multitudes on a single day as they do now by battle or shipwreck.
The next stage sees huts and skins and fire which softened their bodies, and marriage and the ties of family which softened their tempers. And tribes began to make treaties of alliance with other tribes. Speech arose from the need which all creatures feel to exercise their natural powers, just as the calf will butt before his horns protrude. Men began to apply different sounds to denote different things, just as brute beasts will do to express different passions, as anyone must have noticed in the cases of dogs and horses and birds. No one man set out to invent speech.
Fire was first learned from lightning and the friction of trees, and cooking from the softening and ripening of things by the sun. Then men of genius invented improved methods of life, the building of cities and private property in lands and cattle. But gold gave power to the wealthy and destroyed the sense of contentment in simple happiness. It must always be so whenever men allow themselves to become the slaves of things which should be their dependents and instruments.
They began to believe in and worship gods, because they saw in dreams shapes of preterhuman strength and beauty and deemed them immortal; and as they noted the changes of the seasons and all the wonders of the heavens they placed their gods there and feared them when they spoke in the thunder.