human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus." And supposing we had the choice, it would be only in our weaker moments that we should choose to live among a people like the Athenians, who, splendid as were their gifts, were after all but gifted barbarians, rather than to take our share in the dull and monotonous life which ushers in a momentous revolution. Our predilections are at least no test: a succeeding age may again prefer the quiescence of settled government without great or illuminating ideas to the unrest of a time alive with the arts, with speculation, and with political freedom.

28. Another danger is that of imagining retrogression in ages where the more obvious social duties are relaxed in stringency. We have to take the whole of the institutions of an age together, and sometimes we shall find that it is actual progress which, by introducing fresh or modified ideals, may demand some sacrifice on the part of special observances. It would be folly to deny the Renaissance the title of a progressive movement because some of the institutions we regard as most important were treated then with a certain freedom. Partly, of course, our notion of such license may be exaggerated. There may have been a disproportionate amount of wickedness in that age, and because vice is always more striking, and lends itself more easily to rhetorical emphasis than virtue, we may be misled into supposing the standard of the age was much lower than it really was. In the Renaissance or the Elizabethan age, for instance, we cannot suppose that the general standard was that of Benvenuto Cellini or Kit Marlowe. We should have to take into account the doctrine and practice of the Church, and get an idea of how the mass of the people lived, before we could know what the real standard was. But when we have made allowance for exaggeration, we may see that something of common morality had to be lost in the satisfaction of

what was the most urgent need of the time, the assertion of civic, intellectual, and artistic freedom.1 A new ideal may be incompatible with retaining all the features of the old. The separation of the holy from the secular life undoubtedly involved evils, but these evils may have been the price which the world had to pay for the introduction of a beneficent religion among peoples whose characters were unable to realise its precepts in their simplicity. Just as on occasion a man may have to sacrifice a general duty, like filial affection, when it conflicts with some higher claim, so whole institutions may lose something in the effort to adapt themselves to a new order, while the total result is still not retrogression but progress.

III. THE LAW OF PROGRESS.

29. (a.) The Law of Differentiation.-Can the facts of progress be summed up under one comprehensive and single law of progress? Plainly all progress tends to produce a higher organisation, but this answer is a truism until we show in what higher organisation consists. The test which is usually given is that of increasing differentiation of parts with corresponding specialisation of functions. But before such a statement can be accepted we must indicate certain characteristics of human progress which must be borne in mind.

First, the main course of progress is not linear, or in one continuous direction. The comparison of history to a spiral applies to moral ideals as well as it does to all human development. Human history constantly exhibits the spectacle of an apparent reversion to a former type, but the reversion is only apparent. The new type resembles the old, but it stands at a higher level: and it runs its course parallel to the line of development of the former

1 An illustration due to an essay, 'The Sacrifice,' in Vernon Lee's Euphorion.

type, yet always preserving the essential differences. The stream of history, like the St. Gothard tunnel, performs the seemingly impossible feat of not merely remounting to the region whence it began, but to one vertically above. Philosophy in its history offers the readiest illustration of how the development of ideas repeats itself, so that at first sight the mind seems to be re-discovering its old ideas. The rationalistic writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth century bear an outward resemblance to the thinkers of the Greek enlightenment, and were succeeded by a movement of construction which insisted on the objective value of reason, much as Socrates and his successors insisted on the universal validity of moral and intellectual principles. The resemblance is only superficial, for these guiding ideas of individualism or absolutism had an entirely different significance in the different ages a significance which it is the business of the history of philosophy to formulate. Hence thought is always progressing, though a new thinker may seem only to be re-discovering a forgotten principle. In reality, his principle is the result of the development to which the other principle gave rise, and is a new creation. If the current doctrine of evolution should lead to a philosophy resembling the great constructive systems of the first quarter of this century, we shall have not a reversion, but a movement of thought to the next whorl of the spiral. The case is the same with moral institutions. The very emergence of human society from lower forms of life is an illustration; the earliest human societies are mere aggregations, which recall not the highest, but the lowest forms of animals, living in homogeneous colonies. Ages like our Elizabethan age recall in their features "the freshness of the early world." The Roman Empire establishes a great homogeneous order of institutions recalling the earlier empires, from which it differs toto caelo in the level of its political ideal. tionary movement of 1789 of peoples

The great revoluagainst authority

recalls the earlier struggles against the spiritual supremacy of Rome. In our own days we seem in our conception of the nation to be reverting to the idea of a state such as it is presented to us in small ancient societies. Perhaps the institution of property may revert to a form more primitive still. In all these cases, then, progress does not simply move on one single line, but retraces its own steps, though with wholly different principles. It is in this sense that human history may be said to move in cycles: each cycle not repeating the preceding, but reverting to similar forms in a similar order of succession, while breathing into these forms an entirely new spirit.1

30. Secondly, It follows from this that mere differentiation is insufficient to define progress. Along with differentiation goes a process of integration, not simply in the sense of increasing cohesion, or the growth of a principle of order to match the tendency of differences towards chaos, but in the sense that some idea is produced which reconciles distracting interests under some simplifying principle. While the differentiation really advances, yet its significance alters, or, let us say, the relative places of specialisation and of unity alter. Great revolutions simplify. Often a new idea seems to pass over a previous stage of life as with a sponge, and wipes out its characteristic features, introducing uniformity where before was diversity. Not that the results of the past are lost. As the forests of the coal-age are submerged, but are stored up to warm the hearths and colour the fogs of other ages,

1 Whether there is any such phenomenon of cycles in the organic world I do not know. It certainly seems to exist in the chemical world, and it is described in the so-called Periodic Law, to which a chemical friend has introduced me. This generalisation, which to a layman seems exquisite, may be stated thus. Arrange the elements in a line according to the gradual increase of the atomic weight: then they fall into groups, and the members of these groups go through a cycle of changes in their physical and chemical properties. The cycle is repeated in each group, but the properties become intensified as we pass from the earlier to the later groups. (See a popular account of the law in Wurtz' Atomic Theory, Internat. Scient. Series.)

so all the products of human life are preserved. But in the transformation they undergo they may be simplified. Thus when Greek and other civilisations are submerged in that of the Roman Empire, doubtless there is in the latter a higher complexity and differentiation than in a Greek state; but the individual subject of the Empire is far less differentiated than the individual subject of Athens. He occupies a relatively unimportant place. His own personal sphere of freedom is perhaps curtailed, though his value as an individual is higher because he participates in a higher unity. The case is the same with the growth of knowledge. While little departments of knowledge are considered and cultivated for themselves, the diversity of facts and laws is enormous. A great generalisation which combines all these facts under one single statement, while it produces a higher organisation of the facts, will alter the relative independence of each. Christianity itself, to revert to an example so often used, introduces a principle of life simpler than that which recognises duties of Greek to Greek, Roman to Roman, and the like, because it obliterates these national differIn so far, it decreases diversity, and its principle is one of homogeneity. From another point of view it gives. a surer individual status to each man, or the differentiation which its principle permits is of a higher order than that of the Greek or Roman state. In the same way the social and political movements of this century, which have thrown the individual on himself in every department of life, in politics, commerce, science, will assuredly be simplified by some principle of harmony, of which we trace even now the beginnings. With such an organisation the individual will still be independent, but he may become less capricious and arbitrary; and while his differentiation from others may be apparently limited in range, it will in reality be greater, but more nicely adjusted because regulated by a principle of harmony.

ences.

Increasing heterogeneity is therefore an insufficient