e which life never had before. The
succession of discoveries and applications of discovery makes it seem as
if there were to be no end in this direction. From Rousseau to Spencer
men have elaborated the view that the historical process cannot really
issue in anything else than in ever higher stages of perfection and of
happiness. They postulate a continuous enhancement of energy and a
steady perfecting of intellectual and moral quality. As the goal of
evolution appears an ideal condition which is either indefinitely
remote, that is, which gives room for the bliss of infinite progress in
its direction, or else a definitely attainable condition, which would
have within itself the conditions of perpetuity.

The resistlessness with which this new view of the life of civilisation
has won acknowledgment from men of all classes is amazing. It rests upon
a belief in the self-sufficiency and the all-sufficiency of the life of
this world, of the bearings of which it may be assumed that few of its
votaries are aware. In reality this view cannot by any possibility be
described as the result of knowledge. On the contrary, it is a venture
of faith. It is the peculiar, the very characteristic and suggestive
form which the faith of our age takes. Men believe in this indefinite
progress of the world and of mankind, because without postulating such
progress they do not see how they can assume the absolute worth of an
activity which is yet the only thing which has any interest to most of
them. Under this view one can assign to the individual life a definite
significance, only upon the supposition that the individual is the organ
of realisation of a part of this progress of mankind. All happiness and
suffering, all changes in knowledge and manner of conduct, are supposed
to have no worth each for itself or for the sake of the individual, but
only for their relation to the movement as a whole. Surely this is an
illusion. Exactly that in which the characteristic quality of the world
and of life is found, the individual personalities, the single
generations, the concrete events--these lose, in this view, their own
particular worth. What can possibly be the worth of a whole of which the
parts have no worth? We have here but a parallel on a huge scale of that
deadly trait in our own private lives, according to which it makes no
difference what we are doing, so only that we are doing, or whither we
are going, so only that we cease not to go, or w