Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/245

 244 A. w. BENN : never cared to examine the works of thinkers so well known as Auguste Comte and Mr. Herbert Spencer. However, to make up for the deficiency, he offers us as his own definition " the continued production of new ideas " (p. 191). But this seems at once too wide and too narrow. Too wide ; for to constitute a step in advance an idea ought surely to be true as well as new. Too narrow ; for certain changes not involving any new idea are universally admitted to be elements of progress. For example, ' the gratifying diminution of crime,' about which we hear so much, is, if real, an unquestionable social advance, although it does not in the least enlarge our intellectual horizon. On the whole w T e may fairly assume that whatever contributes to the increase of happiness is an element of progress ; and that the totality of such contributions constitutes the sum of social pro- gress. Experience shows that the specific means to this para- mount end are increase of knowledge, increase of power and increase of goodness ; including of course under the notion of increase the decrease of their opposites, ignorance, weakness and vice, and measuring it by the degree of diffusion no less than by the degree of accumulation. Now, if the philosophy of evolu- tion proves anything at all, it proves that progress so defined has been continuous either in part or whole throughout the entire duration of human history, and, in a wider but still an analogous sense, throughout the history of organised life since its first appearance on the globe ; while continuous change of some kind, whether or not it should be called progress, is equally charac- teristic of the inorganic universe. At any rate, the burden of proof is not on those who assert but on those who deny the existence and perpetuity of such a process. Furthermore, so far as organised structures are concerned, the Darwinian theory comes in to prove that this great law is no mere empirical generalisation, but a necessary consequence of simpler laws. For, granting there to be no inherent tendency to improvement in the various forms of life, individual or associated, the forms enjoying some accidental superiority multiply at the expense of the less favoured, which they eventually supplant. Nor is this all. The age in which we live is remarkable not more for the number and variety of advances, scientific, me- chanical, social and moral, that it has seen achieved, than for the fact that in it the process of universal evolution has, so to speak, become conscious of itself; and this self-discovery has excited to the utmost men's hopes of future development. For not only is it expected that the agencies to which we owe so much will continue in operation for an incalculable time, but also that, by being understood and artificially stimulated, their rate of operation may be indefinitely accelerated. Thus what Sir H. Maine considers an unreasoned, if not an unreasonable, enthusiasm for change as such and only in the direction of political revolution is really enthusiasm for change in the right direction throughout every order of human activity. If reformers