Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/51

No. 1.] progress—perhaps in happiness, certainly in intellectual power, in æsthetic sensibility, in moral attainment. And this conception of progress important for all aspects of our nature—is so fundamental in our idea of the moral life that any theory of the time-process that robs it of its meaning fails to satisfy one of the most insistent demands of our being.

And with this I am content to leave the matter. I do not profess to have proved that my conception of the relation of the individual life to the time-process is correct. But it seems to me that I have shown that so far as we can at present see, we must either accept it or repudiate all those evaluations of life that give it its deepest significance for us. Some there may be who will still maintain that the belief in the compensatory power of the later stages is a mistaken one. But when we consider how intimately it is related to our sense of the value of life we may well refuse to condemn it without strong reasons. That the majority of thinkers are loath to repudiate it is shown by the fact that many who assert the phenomenal character of the time-process still try to justify, by some means or other, the conception of progress. With regard to this conception there are three questions that should be carefully distinguished, (1) Is progress possible? I.e., is reality of such a character that either in the whole or in some part the later stages might contain fuller realizations of value than the earlier? (2) Is progress in this sense actual? (3) If progress is possible, is it significant, desirable, valuable? Is it any better than retrogression? Of course if a progressive series, taken as a whole, contains more good than a regressive one, we should unhesitatingly declare it to be better. But what our third question means to ask is whether, given a certain amount of good in the series as a whole, progress is any more to be desired than retrogression. It is this question with which I have been concerned in the present discussion. For the purposes of this study I do not care to