riotism, beauty, or brute pleasure with the alternative ideal of
progress--that is to say, we meet every proposal of getting something
that we know about, with an alternative proposal of getting a great
deal more of nobody knows what. Progress, properly understood, has,
indeed, a most dignified and legitimate meaning. But as used in
opposition to precise moral ideals, it is ludicrous. So far from it
being the truth that the ideal of progress is to be set against that of
ethical or religious finality, the reverse is the truth. Nobody has any
business to use the word "progress" unless he has a definite creed and
a cast-iron code of morals. Nobody can be progressive without being
doctrinal; I might almost say that nobody can be progressive without
being infallible--at any rate, without believing in some infallibility.
For progress by its very name indicates a direction; and the moment we
are in the least doubtful about the direction, we become in the same
degree doubtful about the progress. Never perhaps since the beginning
of the world has there been an age that had less right to use the word
"progress" than we. In the Catholic twelfth century, in the philosophic
eighteenth century, the direction may have been a good or a bad one,
men may have differed more or less about how far they went, and in what
direction, but about the direction they did in the main agree, and
consequently they had the genuine sensation of progress. But it is
precisely about the direction that we disagree. Whether the future
excellence lies in more law or less law, in more liberty or less
liberty; whether property will be finally concentrated or finally cut
up; whether sexual passion will reach its sanest in an almost virgin
intellectualism or in a full animal freedom; whether we should love
everybody with Tolstoy, or spare nobody with Nietzsche;--these are the
things about which we are actually fighting most. It is not merely
true that the age which has settled least what is progress is this
"progressive" age. It is, moreover, true that the people who have
settled least what is progress are the most "progressive" people in it.
The ordinary mass, the men who have never troubled about progress,
might be trusted perhaps to progress. The particular individuals who
talk about progress would certainly fly to the four winds of heaven
when the pistol-shot started the race. I do not, therefore, say that
the word "progress" is unmeaning; I say it is unme