ome again
insinuated itself into their affections, but with the new hope of its
becoming a place fit for reasonable beings to live in. We have seen how
the belief that our race is travelling towards earthly happiness was
propagated by some eminent thinkers, as well as by some "not very
fortunate persons who had a good deal of time on their hands." And
all these high-priests and incense-bearers to whom the creed owes its
success were rationalists, from the author of the Histoire des oracles
to the philosopher of the Unknowable.

EPILOGUE

In achieving its ascendency and unfolding its meaning, the Idea of
Progress had to overcome a psychological obstacle which may be described
as THE ILLUSION OF FINALITY.

It is quite easy to fancy a state of society, vastly different from
ours, existing in some unknown place like heaven; it is much more
difficult to realise as a fact that the order of things with which we
are familiar has so little stability that our actual descendants may
be born into a world as different from ours as ours is from that of our
ancestors of the pleistocene age.

The illusion of finality is strong. The men of the Middle Ages would
have found it hard to imagine that a time was not far off in which the
Last Judgement would have ceased to arouse any emotional interest.
In the sphere of speculation Hegel, and even Comte, illustrate this
psychological limitation: they did not recognise that their own
systems could not be final any more than the system of Aristotle or
of Descartes. It is science, perhaps, more than anything else--the
wonderful history of science in the last hundred years--that has helped
us to transcend this illusion.

But if we accept the reasonings on which the dogma of Progress is based,
must we not carry them to their full conclusion? In escaping from the
illusion of finality, is it legitimate to exempt that dogma itself?
Must not it, too, submit to its own negation of finality? Will not that
process of change, for which Progress is the optimistic name, compel
"Progress" too to fall from the commanding position in which it is now,
with apparent security, enthroned? [words in Greek]... A day will come,
in the revolution of centuries, when a new idea will usurp its place
as the directing idea of humanity. Another star, unnoticed now or
invisible, will climb up the intellectual heaven, and human emotions
will react to its influence, human plans respond to its guidance. It
will be the cri