once collectively come to realize it as the great
underlying purpose toward which they have always been more or less
obscurely groping, great clearness would be shed over many of their
problems; and, as for their influence in the midst of our social system,
it would embark upon a new career of strength.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 43: First published in 1908. Reprinted by permission from
_Memories and Studies_, 1911. (Messrs. Longmans, Green and Co.)]

THE LAW OF HUMAN PROGRESS[44]

HENRY GEORGE

What, then, is the law of human progress--the law under which
civilization advances?

It must explain clearly and definitely, and not by vague generalities or
superficial analogies, why, though mankind started presumably with the
same capacities and at the same time, there now exist such wide
differences in social development. It must account for the arrested
civilizations and for the decayed and destroyed civilizations; for the
general facts as to the rise of civilization, and for the petrifying or
enervating force which the progress of civilization has heretofore
always evolved. It must account for retrogression a well as for
progression; for the differences in general character between Asiatic
and European civilizations; for the difference between classical and
modern civilizations; for the different rates at which progress goes on;
and for those bursts, and starts, and halts of progress which are so
marked as minor phenomena. And, thus, it must show us what are the
essential conditions of progress, and what social adjustments advance
and what retard it.

It is not difficult to discover such a law. We have but to look and we
may see it. I do not pretend to give it scientific precision, but merely
to point it out.

The incentives to progress are the desires inherent in human nature--the
desire to gratify the wants of the animal nature, the wants of the
intellectual nature, and the wants of the sympathetic nature; the desire
to be, to know, and to do--desires that short of infinity can never be
satisfied, as they grow by what they feed on.

Mind is the instrument by which man advances, and by which each advance
is secured and made the vantage ground for new advances. Though he may
not by taking thought add a cubit to his stature, man may by taking
thought extend his knowledge of the universe and his power over it, in
what, so far as we can see, is an infinite degree. The narrow span of
human life allows the indi