Page:Philosophical Review Volume 30.djvu/544

530 very antithesis of progressive development" (pp. 17 and 19). Here Professor Bury confuses two entirely different questions: (1) Did the Greeks believe that civilization is advancing? and (2) Did they have an idea of what is meant by progress? The fact that the Greeks advanced a theory of degeneration proves that they had some idea of what is meant by progress. For how could anyone think that civilization is going backward without having some idea of what going forward means? Professor Bury later devotes a whole chapter to the question, "Was Civilization a Mistake?" in which he discusses Rousseau's theory of regression, simply taking it for granted that a theory of regression belongs to the history of the idea of progress. Is it not pertinent to ask why the degeneration and cycle theories of the ancients do not belong to its history for the same reason that the theory of regression belongs to it?

In any case, Professor Bury has here raised an interesting question of fact about ancient thought which can not be adequately answered in the short space allotted to it in his book. Harnack's suggestion that the Platonic notion of a demiurge, and its later development into the Philonic and Neo-Platonic idea of divine powers intermediary between God and man, is an idea which functioned for the idea of progress in ancient thought, and really anticipates the later conception, seems to me to show far more philosophical insight than Professor Bury's very brief discussion of this fascinating historical problem. It may well be that in its groping after truth the human mind reached the idea of a progressive temporal development of civilization by bringing this type of speculation down from heaven to earth, so that these intermediary powers and ultimately even God himself (I think of Dr. Alexander's new theory of Deity and of the conception of God of Pragmatism) are far-off stages in the unfolding of Time, and are really future stages in the development of human beings and their institutions. If something like this has taken place, it would seem that a logical conception of progress must underlie, after all, every idea of a purely temporal development.

Professor Bury, however, is not friendly to religious conceptions and regards the idea of providence as a superstition to be eradicated before the idea of progress could gain recognition. "The undermining of the theory of providence is very intimately connected with our subject; for it was just the theory of an active providence that the theory of progress was to replace; and it was not till men felt independent of providence that they could organize a theory of progress" (p. 73). However, he nowhere examines the question of the relation between the idea of providence and that of progress. He does not even attempt a demonstration of the incompatibility of the two conceptions, but simply assumes it to be a fact. This anti-theological bias makes it difficult for the author to be fair to writers having a religious conception of the world.