Progress and History

by Unknown

So far we have found much argument to show that what we have hitherto called Progress is not and cannot be an ideal of action, or at least of our action. And now we must face another argument more plain and apparently fatal, indeed, specially or peculiarly fatal. For the very notion of Progress is of a process which continues without end, or we have the dilemma that it is either endless or runs to an end in which there is no longer Progress but something else. In either case it is not itself an end or the end, and whatever an ideal of action is, it must be an end—something beyond which there is nothing, which has no Beyond at all. To set before oneself as an ideal of action what one certainly knows to be incapable of attainment or accomplishment, incapable of coming to an end—that is surely futile and vain. Without a best, better or better-and-better has no meaning, and when the best is reached Progress is no more.

The objection may be put in various ways, as thus. What we seek or want or work for, is to be satisfied, and satisfaction is a state, not a process or a progress. Or again, acting is a process of seeking, seeking and striving for something, and surely the seeking cannot itself be the object of the search. Or once more, what we act for is, as we must conceive it, something complete, finished, perfect, but Progress is essentially something incomplete, unfinished, imperfect. We all feel this, and at times at least the thought that what we seek flies ever before, affrights and paralyses: recoiling from such a prospect, we set before our imaginations as the reward or result of our labours, not movement but rest, not creation or production but consumption and fruition. We dream of one day coming to participate in a life or experience so good that there is no change from less good to more good possible within it, and which, if it can be said to progress at all, only, in Milton's magnificent words, 'progresses the dateless and irrevoluble circle of its own perfections, joining inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over-measure for ever'. Once this ideal has presented itself to our hopes or desires, it degrades by comparison with it to a second-best, the former ideal of endless development from lower to higher. What we want and seek is to be there, to have done with getting there. 'Here is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the cup with the roses around it.' Compared with this, how disconsolate a prospect is that 'of the sea that hath no shore beyond it, set in all the sea'—the endless voyage or quest. Not Progress is or can be the end, but achievement and the enjoyment of it. The progress is towards and for the end; the end is the supreme good and the progress is only good because of it, because it is on the way that leads to it, the way we are content to travel only because it leads there. Once more, and on still surer grounds, we must pronounce what we have come to know as Progress to be no possible ideal of action. What draws us on is the hope of something to be attained in and by the progress. To take Progress, which on the one hand is a fact and on the other is an incomplete fact, to be the end of our striving and our doing is to acquiesce in a self-contradiction.

Yet the counter-ideal of a state in which we shall simply rest from our labours and sit down to enjoy the fruits of them does not promise satisfaction either, and so cannot be the end or ideal. Our desire and our endeavour is not for a moveless, changeless, undeveloping perfection. In fact, so often as the dream of such a state attained has presented itself, it has to thoughtful minds appeared anything but attractive or desirable. Our desire is to go on, and for that we are willing to pay a price—nay, it is for more than merely to go on, it is to advance and increase in perfection, so much so that the ideal itself once more slews round into its opposite and the search appears worth more than the attainment. It seems that we were not on the other view so wholly wrong, but must try so to frame our ideal of action as to unite both characters and satisfy both demands at once, so that it shall be at once a state and a movement or process, an achievement and a progress, a rest or quiet and a striving after it, a perfection and a perfecting. The combination at first sight appears impossible. Yet both characters it must combine. Here again, I must confess that the idea of mere Progress, even as achieved by our own efforts, seems to me to omit something essential to an ideal of action—of what is worth while our acting for. What is to be an ideal of action must have the character of a fulfilment—something to be consumed, not merely eternally added to. For this character of the (or any) ideal of action the best name is fruition or enjoyment. And the defect in the conception of it as Progress is that it seems to postpone this without a date.

Let us put this truth which we have discovered concerning Progress in a nutshell, hiding or disregarding the internal contradiction. What is the nature, what is the kind of reality, which we have learned to ascribe to Progress (for we did pronounce it real and essentially capable of being realized)? It is that it is fact, yet fact not made but in the making; it is just the name for what is real only through and in the process of becoming real or being realized. Now I have already elsewhere pointed out that while a realization which is also a reality, or a reality which is also a realization, is in nature or what is external to us a mystery and a puzzle, it is just when we look inwards the open secret of our being; in our life or action regarded from within, it appears as something which is only dark because it is so close and familiar to us that inspection of it is difficult, not because it is in itself opaque or unintelligible. To its exemplification or illustration there we must turn for light upon our problem.

Let us for the time disregard the pressure exercised upon us by the suggestions of physical science, or even, I may add, popular and imaginative or opinionative—which is Latin for 'dogmatic'—Religion, and examine how Progress takes place, or is realized and real, within our spirits, or that spirit which is within us. The inward process is one by which that spirit is or is real only in the act or fact of being or coming to be realized, or rather of realizing itself, and the way in which it so becomes or makes itself real is by acknowledging its own past, treating it as fact, recognizing its failures or imperfections therein, projecting on the future an idea or ideal of itself, suggested by those apprehended wants or defects, of what it might be, and using that to supply itself with both energy and guidance, drawing from its own past both strength and light. In all this it acts autonomously, out of itself, and creates both the requisite light and the indispensable force, making its very limitations into new sources and reservoirs of both.

We do not sufficiently note and hold and use the indubitable truth that, in contradistinction to what we call Nature, the forces of the spirit reinforce and re-create themselves in their use, are in their use not consumed but reinvigorated, not dissipated or degraded but recollected and elevated, not expended but enhanced. There is in the realm of spirit which is our nature and our world no law of either the conservation or the degradation of energy. We must not allow ourselves to be brow-beaten by arguments drawn from the obscurer region of physical and external nature. We know ourselves to be energies or energizing powers which increase and do not waste by exercise. That is what we ought to mean by saying that we are wills and not forces, spiritual not physical or natural beings. If need be to confirm ourselves in this knowledge, let us think of what takes place, has taken place in the advance of knowledge, and particularly of the most important kind of knowledge, viz. self-knowledge, how we make it by our reflection upon what we have already in respect of it achieved, recognize how it or we have fallen short or over-shot our mark, define what is required to make good its deficiencies, and find ourselves thereby already in actual possession of the preconceived supplement. The real, the fact, what is attained or accomplished in and by us, prescribes and facilitates, or rather supplies, its own missing complement of perfection. The process carries itself on, the progress realizes itself, the ideal translates itself into the fact or actuality: it accomplishes itself and yet it is the doing of our very self, of the spirit within us. All this is not merely our doing, it is our being, it is the process by which we make our minds, our souls, our very selves or self.

That man is essentially an, or rather the, ideal-forming animal (or rather spirit) has long been noted, and also that the formation of ideals is an indispensable factor in his progress, which is his life and very being. But all the same, this is sometimes put in such a way as to make action, or at least human action, a dispensable accident in the universe, an ineffective and unsubstantial unreality, while at the same time those who put it thus, profess to see through the illusion and to enjoy moments of insight which recognize its nullity. This way of putting it in my judgement intolerably misconceives and misrepresents the truth.

Our ideals of action must be self-made or self-begotten, but yet they must be congruent with known fact; but the manner of such congruence is hard to see, hard to express. Ideals cannot be themselves facts, and therefore cannot be known, but on the other hand they cannot be mere imaginations or suppositions or beliefs, still less, of course, illusions or delusions. They are not visionary, and the apprehension of them is a sort or degree of perception. They point beyond themselves to some higher fact which is not cognizable by our senses or perhaps our understanding, but which is yet genuinely cognizable and so in some high sense fact. Yet they are not, as we envisage them, the fact to which they point, but a substitute for or representative of that—an anticipation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'—a term I do not like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of a certain incumbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is that their reality—it seems a paradox that an ideal should possess 'reality'—consists in their suggestiveness of modes of action and their applicability to it, all this being supported by the conception of a state of affairs beyond and around us which makes it 'right'.

If all this is so, Progress as an ideal of action cannot be precisely identical with Progress as a fact or object of actual or possible knowledge. We can never know what we are aiming at. But though different, the two are and must be congruent, and this may be enough to justify us in using the one name for the two. Unless there were Progress as fact everywhere and always in the universe—outside us—in Nature and History, and unless we took ourselves genuinely to apprehend this, we could not form the practical ideal of Progress, or at least the ideal could not be right. But the difference remains, and we must be prepared for and allow for it; though we can use the knowledge we obtain of the fact of Progress to control and guide our formulation of the practical ideal, we cannot identify the one with the other. Our imagining and our supposing of what is best for or obligatory upon us to do or work for, must go on under conditions—the conditions of what we know as to the nature of ourselves and our surroundings—and yet under these conditions has a very large liberty or autonomy.

The Progress which is to serve as a practical ideal is not and cannot be the Progress that we know, but must be the result of imagination or supposition, and it is high and necessary wisdom to trust our imaginations and aspirations. The forms which it rightly takes cannot be determined by what we have learned in or from the past; it cometh not with observation, and the sources of experience cannot of themselves supply us with it, and though it comes in and with experience, it does not come from or out of it. Yet it is due to an impression made upon us by the Universe as we by our faculties apprehend it, and is not merely subjective or of subjective origin. Begotten of the imagination, it is appearance, not ultimate reality, and it cannot be thought out or wholly evacuated of mystery and perplexity. Is this not involved in the language we use of it, proclaiming it practical and therefore not theoretical?