Page:Ethical Studies (reprint 1911).djvu/231

 to an endless sum? And, if so, is not progress the illusion of a journey in the direction of a figment? An infinite quantity we have seen to be a self-contradiction, and the advance towards it fallacious; so that ‘more’ does not come any nearer to ‘most.’ In comparison of infinity, all finite sums are equal. When you ask for the difference between each and the infinite, in order to compare these differences one with the other, you get in every case the same answer, Between the infinite and each finite alike there is a quantity, about which in no case can we say more than that it is not any finite sum. Thus against the infinite there is no difference between the finites, and we feel the full force of the objection. Progress in the sense of an advance towards the perfect seems to be a sheer illusion.

True, we can fall back on our thesis that the end is the true infinite, the complete identity of homogeneity and specification (p. 68). This we can insist is not a quantity, and may repeat that into the definition of perfection mere size does not enter at all. But still the difficulty remains. Within the process of evolution the higher is defined as that which is more intensely homogeneous in a greater specification, and it does seem as if higher and lower were in the end reducible to quantity, extensive or intensive, since the higher man is the man who has more of the truth of human nature. For take an example; suppose a man to be perfectly self-contained and homogeneous, and then to get what are called higher qualities, and so become less self-contained. Is not this an advance, and an advance because a getting more? Is not a wider and deeper truth a higher truth? And is it not higher because you have something beside what you had before, or more of something of which before you had less? And is not, once again, the conclusion from all this that progress is an illusory quantitative advance towards a fiction?

How can we escape? Will it do to say that the higher is such because it contains the lower as an element in a larger whole; and that the lower is such because, from the point of view of the higher, it is limited and narrow, and a position in which the higher would be in contradiction with itself? But is not the question here once more, If quantity is not to be considered, why is the more inclusive position higher?