Page:Philosophical Review Volume 24.djvu/52

36 know whether progress is actual or not. What I have tried to show is that as progress it can have no value unless the later stages can compensate for the earlier as the earlier cannot for the later. I.e., unless there is such one-sided compensation, it can make no difference—given a certain amount of value in the whole of a particular life—whether that life in its course pro- gresses or retrogrades. And thus even if there were progress, it would be, qua progress, of no significance.

Now if one declares that change is phenomenal it is not easy to see how one can assert the possibility of progress at all. But even if we waived this difficulty and assumed that one might reconcile the two doctrines of the unreality of time and the possibility of progress, we should still be unable to see how the later stages of a life could in any way compensate for the earlier. And in this case, though we might be willing to grant that progress is possible in the life of an individual, we should have no ground for regarding it as significant, as any better than retrogression. If however we accept the reality of change and if further we conceive the temporal aspect of human life in the way that I have proposed, we have a theory that implies the desirability of progress and thus furnishes an adequate basis for our most fundamental judgments as to the value of life.