“Well done, Mary. You are a worse conservative than I am. But do you really think that modern civilization, as it is called, has its uses?”
“By modern civilization, Jane, I conclude you really mean material improvements. Civilization is a term which is so misused that it has become hardly safe to use it at all. It ought to mean something much higher than increased railway facilities, more looking-glasses and buhl, hundreds of daily newspapers, and a French cook.”
“Oh! of course. Civilization ought to mean the intellectual and spiritual development of mankind from out of the rough block of his animal nature and his uneducated mind. If you add to this the refinement which self-respect and a perpetual inner consciousness of a Being greater and higher than ourselves, keeping all the man's actions in harmony with himself and with a higher law, you have a really civilized man as distinct from a savage.”
“That is not a bad description of what civilization ought to be. But that is very different from the idea most people have in their minds when they use the term.”
“In point of fact, Mary, I mean material progress. How far is it useful?”
“How people would stare at you, Jane, for that query!—people who think there is nothing more glorious than to have invented a new machine or a fresh adjunct to luxury.”
“Yes, those are just the people who would not the least know what I meant by my implied doubts about the value of material progress. But you know what I mean and why I question its nature and deprecate its increase.”
“It is a difficult question to solve. But I have long since come to the conclusion that there is never any very great and generally diffused advance made by mankind in any one direction without its having [pg 350] some definite purpose in the Eternal Mind for the ultimate good of his creation. The progress of science is only second in importance to the progress of religion; and after these two comes the progress of the useful arts, which are the offspring of science, and often seem only to pander to luxury, but are really subsidiary aids in that march, in the accomplishment of which man is to fulfil his destiny of possessing the earth and filling it. Mankind is in no way benefited by the discovery, for instance, of a new perfume, whereby some silly woman may add to the already exaggerated expenses of her toilet; but the process by which that perfume has been produced is, in itself, of the utmost value, and exhibits mechanical invention and scientific principles that are of the last importance to mankind. The perfume is an accident—a little of the golden dust scattered by the wheels of material progress.”
“Just so; and dust, albeit golden, is not a good atmosphere to breathe in.”
“Decidedly not.”