is founded on the agonies of the past. Is it
therefore unjust that we also should suffer for the benefit of those
who are to come?" But if it is held that each generation can by its own
deliberate acts determine for good or evil the destinies of the race,
then our duties towards others reach out through time as well as through
space, and our contemporaries are only a negligible fraction of the
"neighbours" to whom we owe obligations. The ethical end may still be
formulated, with the Utilitarians, as the greatest happiness of the
greatest number; only the greatest number includes, as Kidd observed,
"the members of generations yet unborn or unthought of." This extension
of the moral code, if it is not yet conspicuous in treatises on Ethics,
has in late years been obtaining recognition in practice.

5.

Within the last forty years nearly every civilised country has produced
a large literature on social science, in which indefinite Progress is
generally assumed as an axiom. But the "law" whose investigation Kant
designated as the task for a Newton, which Saint-Simon and Comte did
not find, and to which Spencer's evolutionary formula would stand in
the same relation as it stands to the law of gravitation, remains
still undiscovered. To examine or even glance at this literature, or
to speculate how theories of Progress may be modified by recent
philosophical speculation, lies beyond the scope of this volume, which
is only concerned with tracing the origin of the idea and its growth up
to the time when it became a current creed.

Looking back on the course of the inquiry, we note how the history of
the idea has been connected with the growth of modern science, with the
growth of rationalism, and with the struggle for political and religious
liberty. The precursors (Bodin and Bacon) lived at a time when the world
was consciously emancipating itself from the authority of tradition and
it was being discovered that liberty is a difficult theoretical problem.
The idea took definite shape in France when the old scheme of the
universe had been shattered by the victory of the new astronomy and the
prestige of Providence, CUNCTA SUPERCILIO MOUENTIS, was paling before
the majesty of the immutable laws of nature. There began a slow but
steady reinstatement of the kingdom of this world. The otherworldly
dreams of theologians,

ceux qui reniaient la terre pour patrie,

which had ruled so long lost their power, and men's earthly h