Page:The Religious Aspect of Philosophy (1885).djvu/273

248 is the meaning of endless progress toward perfection? For we are an outcome of this infinite progress. Another infinity of progress is not certain then to remove such imperfections. Here is progress put to the simple test. Is it the removal of evil? Then can infinite progress, as facts show us, pass by with evil yet unremoved. And if progress is not the removal of evil, then what means progress? Is not the temporary removal of evil more probably a mere occasional event in the history of the world?

It is surprising that we ever think of talking about universal progress as an essential fact of the popularly conceived external world. If nothing certain can be made out about it, still the world as a whole seems, as far as we can judge by the above considerations, so indifferent to progress, that it is marvelous to behold the religious comfort that, in their shallow optimistic faith, so many amiable people take, while they wax fervent over the thought of progress. Let us have clear ideas about the matter. What is in the true nature of reality is as eternal as reality itself. Then progress is either an unessential, insignificant aspect of reality, or it is eternal. If progress has been eternal, then either the world was in the beginning infinitely bad, or else infinite progress has been unable to remove from the world the finite quantity of evil that was always in it. For here in the empirical world is evil now—if indeed there is any empirical world at all—plenty of evil unremoved.

If you found a man shoveling sand on the sea-