civilization." But in defining progress he makes a distinction between
ideas like progress, providence, and fate and ideas like liberty,
toleration, and socialism. The latter are approved or condemned because
they are good or bad. The former are not approved or condemned. They are
matters of fact, they are true or false. He says:

When we say that ideas rule the world, or exercise a decisive
power in history, we are generally thinking of those ideas
which express human aims and depend for their realisation on
the human will, such as liberty, toleration, equality of
opportunity, socialism. Some of these have been partly
realised, and there is no reason why any of them should not be
fully realised, in a society or in the world, if it were the
united purpose of a society or of the world to realise it. They
are approved or condemned because they are held to be good or
bad, not because they are true or false. But there is another
order of ideas that play a great part in determining and
directing the course of man's conduct but do not depend on his
will--ideas which bear upon the mystery of life, such as Fate,
Providence, or personal immortality. Such ideas may operate in
important ways on the forms of social action, but they involve
a question of fact and they are accepted or rejected not
because they are believed to be useful or injurious, but
because they are believed to be true or false.

The idea of the progress of humanity is an idea of this kind,
and it is important to be quite clear on the point.[328]

All of the ideas mentioned are of such a general nature, embody so much
of the hopes, the strivings, and the sentiments of the modern world,
that they have, or did have until very recently, something of the
sanctity and authority of religious dogmas. All are expressions of
wishes, but there is this difference: ideas, like liberty, toleration,
etc., reflect the will of the people who accept them; ideas like
providence and progress, on the contrary, represent their hopes. The
question of the progress of humanity like that of personal immortality
is, as Bury points out, a question of fact. "It is true or false but it
cannot be proved whether true or false. Belief in it is an act of
faith." When we hypostatize our hopes and wishes and treat them as
matters of fact, even though they cannot be proved to be either true or
f