sing, and the sum of evil
diminishing, in the same measure as the sum of truth increases and the
sum of ignorance diminishes."

In 1867 Emerson delivered an address at Harvard on the "Progress
of Culture" (printed in his Letters and Social Aims), in which he
enumerates optimistically the indications of social advance: "the new
scope of social science; the abolition of capital punishment and of
imprisonment for debt: the improvement of prisons; the efforts for the
suppression of intemperance, vice, etc.," and asks: "Who would live in
the stone age, or the bronze, or the iron, or the lacustrine? Who does
not prefer the age of steel, of gold, of coal, petroleum, cotton, steam,
electricity, and the spectroscope?"

The discursive Thoughts on the Future of the Human Race, published in
1866, by W. Ellis (1800-81), a disciple of J. S. Mill, would have been
remarkable if it had appeared half a century earlier. He is untouched
by the theory of evolution, and argues on common-sense grounds that
Progress is inevitable.]

CHAPTER XIX. PROGRESS IN THE LIGHT OF EVOLUTION

1.

In the sixties of the nineteenth century the idea of Progress entered
upon the third period of its history. During the FIRST period, up to the
French Revolution, it had been treated rather casually; it was taken for
granted and received no searching examination either from philosophers
or from historians. In the SECOND period its immense significance was
apprehended, and a search began for a general law which would define and
establish it. The study of sociology was founded, and at the same time
the impressive results of science, applied to the conveniences of life,
advertised the idea. It harmonised with the notion of "development"
which had become current both in natural science and in metaphysics.
Socialists and other political reformers appealed to it as a gospel.

By 1850 it was a familiar idea in Europe, but was not yet universally
accepted as obviously true. The notion of social Progress had been
growing in the atmosphere of the notion of biological development,
but this development still seemed a highly precarious speculation.
The fixity of species and the creation of man, defended by powerful
interests and prejudices, were attacked but were not shaken. The
hypothesis of organic evolution was much in the same position as the
Copernican hypothesis in the sixteenth century. Then in 1859 Darwin
intervened, like Galileo. The appearance of the ORIGI