the materialist is confounded and science rendered dumb, who else is prepared with a solution? To whom has this arm of the Lord been revealed? Let us lower our heads and acknowledge our ignorance, priest and philosopher, one and all. Perhaps the mystery may resolve itself into knowledge at some future day. The process of things upon this earth has been one of amelioration. It is a long way from the Iguanodon and his contemporaries to the President and the Members of the British Association. And whether we regard the improvement from the scientific or from the theological point of view, as the result of progressive development, or as the result of successive exhibitions of creative energy, neither view entitles us to assume that man's present faculties end the series that the process of amelioration stops at him. A time may therefore come when this ultra-scientific region by which we are now enfolded may offer itself to terrestrial, if not human, investigation. Two thirds of the rays emitted by the sun fail to arouse in the eye the sense of vision. The rays exist, but the visual organ requisite for their translation into light does not exist. And so from this region of darkness and mystery which surrounds us rays may now be darting which require but the development of the proper intellectual organs to translate them into knowledge as far surpassing ours as ours surpasses that of the wallowing reptiles which once held possession of this planet. Meanwhile the mystery is not without its uses. It certainly may be made a power in the human soul; but it is a power which has feeling, not knowledge, for its base. It may be, and will be, and we hope is turned to account, both in steadying and strengthening the intellect, and in rescuing man from that littleness to which in the struggle for existence or for precedence in the world he is continually prone. PROGRESS1 JOHN DEWEY SOME persons will see only irony in a discussion of progress at the present time. Never was pessimism easier. Others will recognize in it a fine exhibition of courage and faith, and find the manifestation heartening. There is indeed every cause for discouragement. But discouragement affords just the occasion for a more intelligent courage. If our optimism was too complacent, it is because it was too thoughtless, too sentimental. Never was there a time when it was more necessary to search for the conditions upon which progress depends, until we can reaffirm our faith in its possibility upon grounds better than those upon which we have too blindly relied. If we have been living in a fool's paradise, in a dream of automatic uninterrupted progress, it is well to be awakened. If we have been putting our trust in false gods, it is a good thing to have our confidence shaken, even rudely.. We may be moved to find truer gods. If the reeds upon which we relied have broken, it is well for us to have discovered their frailty. If we have been looking in the wrong direction, we now have a sufficiently strong stimulus to direct our attention elsewhere. We can hardly welcome the war merely because it has made us think, and has made us realize how many of the things we called thoughts were asylums for laziness. But since the war has come, we may welcome whatever revelations of our stupidity and carelessness it brings with it; and set about the institution of a more manly and more responsible faith in progress than that in which we have indulged in the past. 1 Copyright. Reprinted from The International Journal of Ethics by permission of the publishers and of the author. For there can be no blinking the fact that much of that faith was childish and irresponsible. We confused rapidity of change with advance, and we took certain gains in our own comfort and ease as signs that cosmic forces were working inevitably to improve the whole state of human affairs. Having reaped where we had not sown, our undisciplined imaginations installed in the heart of history forces which were to carry on progress whether or no, and whose advantages we were progressively to enjoy. It is easy to understand why our minds were taken captive by the spectacle of change, and why we should have confused progress with change. It is not necessary to rehearse an account of the barriers which for thousands of years kept human society static. Nor is it necessary to do more than allude to the various inventions which, by facilitating migration and travel, communication and circulation of ideas and reciprocal criticism, and the production and distribution of goods in a worldwide market, have broken down those barriers. The release of energies has gone on for a century and a half to a degree which we are still impotent to realize. Persons and things have been endlessly redistributed and mingled. The fixed has given way to the mobile; the settled to the free. It was doubtless inevitable that, in its contrast with static conditions and ideals, this mobility and freedom should be taken for progSuch it doubtless is in some respects. But the present crisis is in vain, so far as our intelligence is concerned, if it does not make us see that in the main this rapid change of conditions affords an opportunity for progress, but is not itself progress. ress. We have confused, I repeat, rapidity of change with progress. We have confused the breaking down of barriers by which advance is made possible with advance itself. Except with respect to the conservatives who have continuously bemoaned all change as destructive these statements seem to me to sum up fairly well the intellectual history of the epoch that is closing. The economic situation, the problem of poverty by the side of great wealth, of ignorance and absence of a fair chance in life by the side of culture and unlimited opportunity, have, indeed, always served to remind us that after all we were dealing with an opportunity for progress rather than with an accomplished fact. It reminded us that the forces which were revolutionizing society might be turned in two ways: that they actually were employed for two diverse and opposed ends. But the display was not dramatic enough, not sensational enough, to force the lesson home. The war stages the lesson in a sufficiently striking way. We had been told that the development of industry and commerce had brought about such an interdependence of peoples that war was henceforth out of the question at least upon a vast scale. There are men now fighting who had written and lectured to that effect. But it is now clear that commerce also creates jealousies and rivalries and suspicions which are potent for war. We were told that nations could not long finance a war under modern conditions: economists had demonstrated that to the satisfaction of themselves and others. We see now that they had underrated both the production of wealth and the extent to which it could be mobilized for destructive purposes. We were told that the advance of science had made war practically impossible. We now know that science has not only rendered the enginery of war more deadly, but has also increased the powers of resistance and endurance when war comes. If all this does not demonstrate that the forces which have brought about complicated and extensive changes in the fabric of society do not of themselves generate progress, I do not know what a demonstration would be. Has man subjugated physical nature only to release forces beyond his control? Two things are apparent. First, progress depends not on the existence of social change but on the direction which human beings deliberately give that change. Secondly, ease of social change is a condition of progress. Side by side with the fact that the mere substitution of a dynamic or readily changing social structure for a static society does not accomplish progress, stands the fact that this substitution furnishes the opportunity for progress. We cannot too much insist upon the fact that until men got control of natural forces civilization was a local accident. It depended upon the ability of a small number of men to command, with assurance, the labor and services of other men. Any civilization based mainly upon ability to exploit the energies of men is precarious; it is at the mercy of internal revolt and external overflow. By exploring the heaps of rubbish scattered over the face of the earth, we are just beginning to learn how many civilizations have arisen in the past only to sink into rubbish heaps. The dominion of man over the labor of other men is a shaky basis for civilization. And civilization never attained stability upon such a basis. The scientific conquest of nature has at least given us another basis. We have now a sure method. Wholesale permanent decays of civilization are impossible. As long as there exists a group of men who understand the methods of physical science and are expert in their use, recovery, under the worst of circumstances, of the material basis of culture is sure and relatively speedy. While the modern man was deceived about the amount of progress he had made, and especially deceived about the automatic certainty of progress, he was right in thinking that for the first time in history mankind is in command of the possibility of progress. The rest is for us to say. I might almost as well stop here. For it seems to me that about all which I can say about the future of progress at the present time is that it depends upon man to say whether he wants it or not. If we want it, we can have it if we are willing to pay the price in effort, especially in effort of intelligence. The conditions are at hand. We do not of course wholly control the energies of nature; we shall never wholly do so. But we are in possession of a method which enables us to forecast desirable physical changes and to set about securing them. So much is the secure result of the scientific revolution of the last three hundred years. We also know that it is not |