Progress and History Part 16

Throughout this course of lectures, now come to its close, we have together been engaged in a theoretical inquiry. We have been looking mainly towards the past, to something therefore for ever and in its very nature set beyond the possibility of alteration by us or indeed at all.

'What is done not even G.o.d can make to be undone.' Were it otherwise it could not be fact or reality and so not capable of being theorized or studied. In the words of our programme we have a.n.a.lysed what is involved in the conception of Progress, shown when it became prominent in the consciousness of mankind and how far the idea has been realized--that is has become fact--in the different departments of life. We have taken Progress as a fact, something accomplished, and have attempted so taking it to explain or understand it. We have not indeed a.s.sumed that it is confined to the past, but have at times enlarged our consideration so as to recognize its continuance in the present and to justify the hope of its persistence in the future. Some of us would perhaps go further and hold that it has, by these and similar reflections, come to be part of our a.s.sured knowledge that it must so continue and persist. But however we have widened our purview, what we call Progress has remained to us a course or movement which still presents the appearance of a fact which is largely, if not wholly, independent of us--a fact because independent of us--to which we can occupy no other att.i.tude than that of interested spectators, interested and concerned, moved or conditioned by it but not active or co-operative in it. So far as it is in process of realization in the vast theatre of nature, inorganic or organic, dead or living, that surrounds us, it pursues its course in virtue of powers not ours and unamenable to our control. And even when we view it within the closer environment of human history its current seems to carry us irresistibly with it. Its existence is indeed of very practical concern to us, but apparently all we can do is to come to know it, and knowing it to allow for it as or among the set conditions of our self-originated or self-governed actions if such actions there be.

The clearer we have become as to the nature of Progress, the more it would appear that it must be for us, because it is in itself, a fact to be recognized in theory, taken into account and reckoned with. It is or it is not, comes to be or does not come to be, and what we have first and foremost to seek, is light upon its existence and character as it is or occurs. Light, we hope, has been cast upon it. We have learned that in its inmost essence and to its utmost bounds Reality--what lies outside and around us--is not fixed, rigid, immobile, was not and is not and cannot be as the ancient or mediaeval mind feigned or fabled, something beyond the reach of time and change--static or stationary--but is itself a process of ceaseless alteration. We have learned also to be dissatisfied with the compromise which, while acknowledging such alteration, all but withdraws it in effect by a.s.serting it to be either in gross or in detail a process of mere repet.i.tion. The system of laws which science had taught us to consider as the truth of nature is itself now known to be caught in the evolutionary process, and to be undergoing a constant modification. As in the modern state, so in Nature, the legislative power is not exhausted but incessantly embodies itself in novel forms. Nature itself--_natura naturans_--is now conceived, and rightly conceived, as a power not bound to laws other than those which it makes for or imposes on itself, and as in its operations at least a.n.a.logous to a will self-determined, self-governing, creative of the ways and means by which its purpose or purposes are achieved. What that purpose is we have begun to apprehend, and to see its various processes as converging or co-operating towards its fulfilment. In the mythological language which even Science is still obliged to use, we now speak of Nature as 'selecting' or 'devising', and we ascribe to it a large freedom of choice wisely used. We can already at least define the process as guided towards a greater variety and fullness and harmony of life, or (with a larger courage) as pointed towards a heightening or potentiation of life. So defining its goal we can sympathize with and welcome the successful efforts made toward it, and so feel ourselves at heart one with the power that carries on the process in its aspirations and its efforts. But still, we cannot help feeling, it and all its ways lie outside us, and to us it remains an alien or foreign power. I venture to repeat my contention that this is so just because, however much we come to learn of its ways, we do not feel that we are coming to understand it any better, getting inside it, as we do get inside and understand human nature. Its progress is a change, perhaps a betterment, in our environment--in externals--and takes place very largely whether we will and act or no. The larger our acquaintance with it, the more does its action seem to encroach upon the domain within which our volitions and acts can make any difference. Even in social life we seem in the grip and grasp of forces which carry us towards evil or good whether we will or no. _Duc.u.n.t volentem fata, nolentem trahunt._ The whole known universe outside and around us presents to us the spectacle of what has been called a _de facto_ teleology, and just because it is so, and so widely and deeply so, it leaves little or no room for us to set up our ideals within it and to work for their realization. The fact that the laws which prevail in it are modifiable and modified makes no difference; they modify themselves, and in their different forms still constrain us. And no matter how increasingly beneficent they may in their action appear, they are still despotic and we unfree. The rule of laws which Science discovers encroaches upon our liberties and privacies. What we had hitherto thought our very own, the movement of our impulses and desires and imaginations, are reported by science to be subject to 'laws of a.s.sociation', and we are borne onwards even if also at times upwards on an irresistible flood. We remain bound by the iron necessity of a fate that invades our inmost being--which will not let us anywhere securely alone. I repeat that it matters not how certainly the trend of the tide, which sets everywhere around and outside us, is towards what is good or best for us, it still is the case that it presents itself as neither asking for from us nor permitting to us the formation of any ideals of ours nor any prospect of securing them by our efforts. Were the fact of Progress established and conclusively shown to be all-pervasive and eternal, it still would bear to us the aspect of a paternal government which did good to and for us, but all the more left less and less to ourselves.

This will doubtless be p.r.o.nounced an exaggeration, and we may weakly refuse to face the impression naturally consequent upon the progress we have made in the ascertainment of the facts concerning the world in which we live. But does not the impression exist? The hateful and desolating impression made on us earlier by the thought of a 'block'

universe, once for all and rigidly fixed in unalterable and uniform subjection to eternal and omnipresent law, has dissolved like the baseless fabric of a vision. And why? Just because being found intolerable it was faced and put to the question. Now that there has been subst.i.tuted for it the spectacle of a universe necessarily or fatally evolving--or, as we have said, progressing--does it not, while still evoking the old awe or reverence, do anything but still daunt and dishearten us? What is our part, we ask, our very own part within all this? What can we within it do? And the answer, that it is ours, if we will, to enter into and live in the contemplation of all this no longer appeals to us. In such a progressive universe we can no longer feel ourselves 'at home'. In it our active nature would seem to exist only to be disappointed and rebuffed.

The only progress which we can care for is the progress which we ourselves bring about, or can believe that we bring about, in ourselves or our fellows or in the world immediately around us. So long as what is so named is something devised and executed by a power not our own--not the same as our own--it may call out from us grat.i.tude and reverence, but the spectacle of the reality of such Progress cannot exercise the attractive force nor, so far as it is realized, beget that creative joy which accompanies even humble acts in which we set an ideal of our own before ourselves, and see it through our efforts emerge into actual existence. A practical ideal must be through and through of our own making. It must be devised by us and set to ourselves for our pursuit, and its coming to be, or be real, must be our doing. The very idea of it must be our own, not given or prescribed, still less imposed, and the process towards it must be our doing too. That there should, on their view of it, ever be protest and rebellion against its tyrannous demands appears to me reasonable and right, and those who make it to be guarding the immediate jewel of man's nature. We should, we might say, if this were the whole truth about the universe, acknowledge ourselves as its sons bound to grat.i.tude and obedience because of the fatherly care for us, but it would be an essential complement to our family loyalty that we should insist upon and make good our claims to be grown-up sons and fellow citizens, declining to p.r.o.nounce it wholly good, if those claims were denied to us. Now all these conditions seem to make straight against the possibility of regarding Progress, in the view of it we have hitherto taken, as an ideal of our action.

In view of this character of the known fact of Progress, so discouraging and disabling to our active or practical nature, certain suggestions have been made which are thought to relieve us from these effects. It is said sometimes that this fatal--if beneficent or beneficial, still fatal--progress leaves as it were certain interstices in the universe within which it loses its constraining force, petty provinces but sufficient, where man is master and determines all events, from which even, it is sometimes conceded, some obscure but important influences are permitted to flow, modifying his immediate surroundings, little sanctuaries where the spirit that is in him and is his devises and realizes ideals of its own. But the notion of such sacrosanct and inviolable autonomies is being steadily undermined, and they are felt, as science becomes more dominant over our imaginations and emotions, to be no more than eddies in the universal stream, only apparently distinct and self-maintained, means made and broken for its purpose, really products and instruments of the world-progress. At any rate, it has been denied that they can rightfully be thought to stand outside it or themselves to exercise any effect upon their fortunes and their fate, still less upon their environment. Another suggestion fully and frankly acknowledges this, but though denying to us any power to affect either the form or the direction of the currents on which we are borne along, declares still open to us the possibility of affecting their speed, and bids us find satisfaction in the thought that by taking thought or resolve we can hasten or delay their and the universal movement. Still another view, abandoning even that hope, proclaims one last choice open to us, namely, that of sullen submission to, or glad and loyal acquiescence in, its irresistible sway. But surely all these suggestions are idle, and but for a moment conceal or postpone the inevitable conclusion that if Progress was, is and must or will be, that is, is necessary, what we think or do makes no difference, and can make no difference to or in it. Whether or no we convert the fact into an ideal, whether or no we set it before as our aim and exert ourselves to work for it, it goes on its way all the same. Either then it is not a fact, never was, and never will be a fact, or it is no possible ideal for which we can act. To be or become a fact, it must be independent of our action or our consent or our liking; if it is not all these it is not an ideal of action, or at any rate not so for us. I must repeat that what is or can be an ideal of action for us must be wholly and solely of our making, the very thought of it self-begotten in our mind, every step to its actual existence the self-created deed of our will. Not that either idea or act comes into being in a void or without suggestion and a.s.sistance from without us, but still so that the initiative lies in what we think or do, and so that without us it is unreal and impossible.

It is enough, indeed, that we should be contributory, but the ideal must be such that without our irreplaceable co-operation it must fail. The only Progress in which we can take an active interest or make an ideal of action, is one which we conceive and execute, and that the fact we call Progress is not.

So far we have found much argument to show that what we have hitherto called Progress is not and cannot be an ideal of action, or at least of our action. And now we must face another argument more plain and apparently fatal, indeed, specially or peculiarly fatal. For the very notion of Progress is of a process which continues without end, or we have the dilemma that it is either endless or runs to an end in which there is no longer Progress but something else. In either case it is not itself an end or the end, and whatever an ideal of action is, it must be an end--something beyond which there is nothing, which has no Beyond at all. To set before oneself as an ideal of action what one certainly knows to be incapable of attainment or accomplishment, incapable of coming to an end--that is surely futile and vain. Without a best, better or better-and-better has no meaning, and when the best is reached Progress is no more.

The objection may be put in various ways, as thus. What we seek or want or work for, is to be satisfied, and satisfaction is a state, not a process or a progress. Or again, acting is a process of seeking, seeking and striving for something, and surely the seeking cannot itself be the object of the search. Or once more, what we act for is, as we must conceive it, something complete, finished, perfect, but Progress is essentially something incomplete, unfinished, imperfect. We all feel this, and at times at least the thought that what we seek flies ever before, affrights and paralyses: recoiling from such a prospect, we set before our imaginations as the reward or result of our labours, not movement but rest, not creation or production but consumption and fruition. We dream of one day coming to partic.i.p.ate in a life or experience so good that there is no change from less good to more good possible within it, and which, if it can be said to progress at all, only, in Milton's magnificent words, 'progresses the dateless and irrevoluble circle of its own perfections, joining inseparable hands with joy and bliss in over-measure for ever'. Once this ideal has presented itself to our hopes or desires, it degrades by comparison with it to a second-best, the former ideal of endless development from lower to higher. What we want and seek is to be there, to have done with getting there. 'Here is the house of fulfilment of craving, this is the cup with the roses around it.' Compared with this, how disconsolate a prospect is that 'of the sea that hath no sh.o.r.e beyond it, set in all the sea'--the endless voyage or quest. Not Progress is or can be the end, but achievement and the enjoyment of it. The progress is towards and for the end; the end is the supreme good and the progress is only good because of it, because it is on the way that leads to it, the way we are content to travel only because it leads there. Once more, and on still surer grounds, we must p.r.o.nounce what we have come to know as Progress to be no possible ideal of action. What draws us on is the hope of something to be attained in and by the progress. To take Progress, which on the one hand is a fact and on the other is an incomplete fact, to be the end of our striving and our doing is to acquiesce in a self-contradiction.

Yet the counter-ideal of a state in which we shall simply rest from our labours and sit down to enjoy the fruits of them does not promise satisfaction either, and so cannot be the end or ideal. Our desire and our endeavour is not for a moveless, changeless, undeveloping perfection. In fact, so often as the dream of such a state attained has presented itself, it has to thoughtful minds appeared anything but attractive or desirable. Our desire is to go on, and for that we are willing to pay a price--nay, it is for more than merely to go on, it is to advance and increase in perfection, so much so that the ideal itself once more slews round into its opposite and the search appears worth more than the attainment. It seems that we were not on the other view so wholly wrong, but must try so to frame our ideal of action as to unite both characters and satisfy both demands at once, so that it shall be at once a state and a movement or process, an achievement and a progress, a rest or quiet and a striving after it, a perfection and a perfecting.

The combination at first sight appears impossible. Yet both characters it must combine. Here again, I must confess that the idea of mere Progress, even as achieved by our own efforts, seems to me to omit something essential to an ideal of action--of what is worth while our acting for. What is to be an ideal of action must have the character of a fulfilment--something to be consumed, not merely eternally added to.

For this character of the (or any) ideal of action the best name is fruition or enjoyment. And the defect in the conception of it as Progress is that it seems to postpone this without a date.

Let us put this truth which we have discovered concerning Progress in a nutsh.e.l.l, hiding or disregarding the internal contradiction. What is the nature, what is the kind of reality, which we have learned to ascribe to Progress (for we did p.r.o.nounce it real and essentially capable of being realized)? It is that it is fact, yet fact not made but in the making; it is just the name for what is real only through and in the process of becoming real or being realized. Now I have already elsewhere pointed out that while a realization which is also a reality, or a reality which is also a realization, is in nature or what is external to us a mystery and a puzzle, it is just when we look inwards the open secret of our being; in our life or action regarded from within, it appears as something which is only dark because it is so close and familiar to us that inspection of it is difficult, not because it is in itself opaque or unintelligible. To its exemplification or ill.u.s.tration there we must turn for light upon our problem.

Let us for the time disregard the pressure exercised upon us by the suggestions of physical science, or even, I may add, popular and imaginative or opinionative--which is Latin for 'dogmatic'--Religion, and examine how Progress takes place, or is realized and real, within our spirits, or that spirit which is within us. The inward process is one by which that spirit is or is real only in the act or fact of being or coming to be realized, or rather of realizing itself, and the way in which it so becomes or makes itself real is by acknowledging its own past, treating it as fact, recognizing its failures or imperfections therein, projecting on the future an idea or ideal of itself, suggested by those apprehended wants or defects, of what it might be, and using that to supply itself with both energy and guidance, drawing from its own past both strength and light. In all this it acts autonomously, out of itself, and creates both the requisite light and the indispensable force, making its very limitations into new sources and reservoirs of both.

We do not sufficiently note and hold and use the indubitable truth that, in contradistinction to what we call Nature, the forces of the spirit reinforce and re-create themselves in their use, are in their use not consumed but reinvigorated, not dissipated or degraded but recollected and elevated, not expended but enhanced. There is in the realm of spirit which is our nature and our world no law of either the conservation or the degradation of energy. We must not allow ourselves to be brow-beaten by arguments drawn from the obscurer region of physical and external nature. We know ourselves to be energies or energizing powers which increase and do not waste by exercise. That is what we ought to mean by saying that we are wills and not forces, spiritual not physical or natural beings. If need be to confirm ourselves in this knowledge, let us think of what takes place, has taken place in the advance of knowledge, and particularly of the most important kind of knowledge, viz. self-knowledge, how we make it by our reflection upon what we have already in respect of it achieved, recognize how it or we have fallen short or over-shot our mark, define what is required to make good its deficiencies, and find ourselves thereby already in actual possession of the preconceived supplement. The real, the fact, what is attained or accomplished in and by us, prescribes and facilitates, or rather supplies, its own missing complement of perfection. The process carries itself on, the progress realizes itself, the ideal translates itself into the fact or actuality: it accomplishes itself and yet it is the doing of our very self, of the spirit within us. All this is not merely our doing, it is our being, it is the process by which we make our minds, our souls, our very selves or self.

That man is essentially an, or rather the, ideal-forming animal (or rather spirit) has long been noted, and also that the formation of ideals is an indispensable factor in his progress, which is his life and very being. But all the same, this is sometimes put in such a way as to make action, or at least human action, a dispensable accident in the universe, an ineffective and unsubstantial unreality, while at the same time those who put it thus, profess to see through the illusion and to enjoy moments of insight which recognize its nullity. This way of putting it in my judgement intolerably misconceives and misrepresents the truth.

Our ideals of action must be self-made or self-begotten, but yet they must be congruent with known fact; but the manner of such congruence is hard to see, hard to express. Ideals cannot be themselves facts, and therefore cannot be known, but on the other hand they cannot be mere imaginations or suppositions or beliefs, still less, of course, illusions or delusions. They are not visionary, and the apprehension of them is a sort or degree of perception. They point beyond themselves to some higher fact which is not cognizable by our senses or perhaps our understanding, but which is yet genuinely cognizable and so in some high sense fact. Yet they are not, as we envisage them, the fact to which they point, but a subst.i.tute for or representative of that--an antic.i.p.ation of or prevision of it, a symbol of a fact. Their own kind or degree of reality is sometimes called 'validity'--a term I do not like: it might be more simply named 'rightness' with the connotation of a certain inc.u.mbency and imperativeness as well as of an appeal or adjustment to our nature as we know it; or perhaps all we can say is that their reality--it seems a paradox that an ideal should possess 'reality'--consists in their suggestiveness of modes of action and their applicability to it, all this being supported by the conception of a state of affairs beyond and around us which makes it 'right'.

If all this is so, Progress as an ideal of action cannot be precisely identical with Progress as a fact or object of actual or possible knowledge. We can never know what we are aiming at. But though different, the two are and must be congruent, and this may be enough to justify us in using the one name for the two. Unless there were Progress as fact everywhere and always in the universe--outside us--in Nature and History, and unless we took ourselves genuinely to apprehend this, we could not form the practical ideal of Progress, or at least the ideal could not be right. But the difference remains, and we must be prepared for and allow for it; though we can use the knowledge we obtain of the fact of Progress to control and guide our formulation of the practical ideal, we cannot identify the one with the other. Our imagining and our supposing of what is best for or obligatory upon us to do or work for, must go on under conditions--the conditions of what we know as to the nature of ourselves and our surroundings--and yet under these conditions has a very large liberty or autonomy.

The Progress which is to serve as a practical ideal is not and cannot be the Progress that we know, but must be the result of imagination or supposition, and it is high and necessary wisdom to trust our imaginations and aspirations. The forms which it rightly takes cannot be determined by what we have learned in or from the past; it cometh not with observation, and the sources of experience cannot of themselves supply us with it, and though it comes in and with experience, it does not come from or out of it. Yet it is due to an impression made upon us by the Universe as we by our faculties apprehend it, and is not merely subjective or of subjective origin. Begotten of the imagination, it is appearance, not ultimate reality, and it cannot be thought out or wholly evacuated of mystery and perplexity. Is this not involved in the language we use of it, proclaiming it practical and therefore not theoretical?

Nevertheless, while I must acknowledge this insuperable difference between the Progress we can make our end or ideal and the Progress we believe that in ourselves and around us we apprehend, I still would lay renewed stress upon the congruence and affinity of the two, and urge that the perception of the one--the Progress without us--and the pursuit of the other--the Progress within us--support and fertilize each the other. The more we know or can learn of the one the more effectively do we pursue the other, and conversely. The light and the fruits are bound together: the theory and the practice of Progress cannot be dissevered without the ruin of both.

The ideal of Progress which we present to ourselves is and must be one which is partly determined or limited by past achievement and partly enlarged by the study of what powers higher than our own have accomplished and are accomplis.h.i.+ng. The formation of it must move constantly between a respect for what has been achieved and a wors.h.i.+p, so to speak, for what is far better than anything that yet has been or become fact, and therefore inc.u.mbent or imperative upon us.

The mode and manner of the Progress which is achieved in the Universe has become in various ways clearer to us and opens out undreamt-of possibilities, and our a.s.surance of its reality is ever more and more confirmed, while on the other hand its actual or past results at the lower level of nature have grown and are growing more familiar. We see that Progress is the essential and therefore eternal form of life and spiritual being, which endows it everywhere with worth and substance.

With this comes the conviction that the source of all this lies inward, in that inwardness where our true selves lie and springs from the very nature of that. The spirit which is within us is not other than the spirit which upholds and maintains the whole Universe and works after the same fas.h.i.+on. And with regard to this its manner of working, we have learned that it proceeds by taking account of its own past achievements, imagining or conceiving for itself tasks relevant to these but not limited by them, and finds in that the conditions and stimulus to their actualization. It is our business to imitate this procedure and so to contribute to the advance of the whole. No work so done is or can be lost. We are justified in supposing that in so doing we are leagued together in effective co-operation with one another and with all other forces at work in the whole. In and through us, though not in and through us only, Progress goes on, drawing us along with it. Inner and outer Progress, free allegiance and loyal subjection concur and do not clash, and the world in which we live and act appears to us as it is--a city of G.o.d which is also a self-governed and self-administered city of free men.

But above all, what it prescribes to us is the duty--another name for 'the ideal of action'--to seek first light as to the true nature of our world and ourselves, dismissing and disregarding all appearance, however charming or seductive. Unless we learn to see Progress as universal and omnipresent and omnipotent, we shall set before ourselves ideals of action which are false and treacherous. We must exert ourselves not merely to apprehend, but to dwell in the apprehension and vision of it.

And if there were no other reason, we should know it for the right ideal--this command first to seek light--because it is the hardest thing that can be asked of us or that we can ask of ourselves. But what is thus asked is not mere Faith and Hope, but a loyal adherence to the knowledge which is within us.

Is this not the hardest? To-day, when over there in France and Flanders, and indeed almost all over Europe, as in a sort of Devil's smithy, men are busied in the most horrid self-destruction. The acc.u.mulated stores of age-long and patient industry are being consumed and annihilated; the works and monuments of civilized life are laid low: all physical and intellectual energies are bent to the service of destruction. The very surface of the kindly and fertile earth is seamed and scarred and wasted. And the human beings who live and move in this inferno, are jerked like puppets. .h.i.ther and thither by the operation of pa.s.sions to which we dare not venture to give names, lest we be found either not condemning what defiles and imbrutes our nature or denying our meed of praise and grat.i.tude to what enn.o.bles it. All this portentous activity and business flows from no other fount and is fed by no other spring than the spirit which is within us, that spirit which has created that wealth, material, artistic, spiritual, which it is so busily engaged in wrecking and undoing. It is still as of old, making History, making it in the old fas.h.i.+on with the old ends in view and by the exercise of its old familiar powers. And if in this tragic scene or episode we cannot still read the features of Progress, our theory is a baseless dream, and we can frame no valid or 'right' ideal of action. For except to an environment known to be still, because always, the work and self-expression of a spirit akin to, and indeed identical with our own, and except as knowing ourselves to be still, because always, in all our ways of working its vehicles and instruments, we can neither define nor realize any ideals of action at all. This war is not an accident, nor an outburst of subterranean natural forces, but the act and deed of human will, and being so it cannot be merely evil.

What, then, can we read not into, but out of, the tragic spectacle now being enacted, not merely before but in, through, and by us? Unless we have all along been mistaken, the victims of mere delusion and error, here, too, there has been and still is Progress. Primarily and princ.i.p.ally what is taking place, is a tremendous revelation of the potencies which in our nature--in that which makes us men--have escaped our notice and therefore, because unseen or ignored, working in the dark, have not yet been drawn upon and utilized. There has been and still is going on, an enormous increase of self-knowledge. At first sight this seems wholly an opening up of undreamt-of evil. Side by side there has come to us a parallel revelation of undreamt-of good. I must bear witness to my conviction that we are beholding a tremendous inrush or uprush of good into man and his world. But what I wish to dwell upon is the growing and ever-confirmed revelation of an intimate relation or connexion between the two which is the very spring of Progress, viz.

that the supply of good is not only adequate and more than adequate to the utmost demand made upon it, in the combating of the evil, and that for this reason, that while on the one hand the evil that impedes or counter-works the good is itself of spiritual origin, its existence and power is conditioned by the law that it must evoke and stimulate the very power which it attempts to crush and defeat. This is, as I have said, the now discovered and known spring of Progress both within and without us, that whatsoever is evil, evil just because it is enacted and does not merely occur, pa.s.ses within the reach of knowledge and understanding, and in the measure that it pa.s.ses into the light, not merely loses its sting and its force, but is convertible and converted into a strengthening condition of that which in its first appearance it seemed merely to thwart. Even regress is seen to be a necessary incident in progress, and the seasons which we call periods of decadence to be occasions in which the spirit progresses in secret, recruiting itself not by idleness or rest, but genuinely refres.h.i.+ng and recreating itself.

The view here suggested is no sentimental optimism. The drama of the universe is no comedy or even melodrama, but a tragedy or epic of heroism, and more especially is this the character of the history of the spirit which is in Man and is Man. The evil we enact is real evil, the only real evil, the checks which our disobedience or disloyalty imposes upon the course of good, are genuine r.e.t.a.r.dations or frustrations; nevertheless they are not wholly evil, for nothing is such, but are the means which the spirit that has begotten them, utilizes in its eternal Progress and wins out of them a richness, a complex and varied harmony to which they are compelled to contribute. Our ideal of action must therefore in principle acknowledge as essential, what I have called the 'tragic' character suggested by the spectacle of the war, the fear and agony which we imagine in Nature and comprehendingly discern in human history. The Progress which we can achieve or contribute to--which we can make our ideal of action--is one which cannot rightly be conceived otherwise than in its essence a victory over evil, and that it may be evil, it must come and be done in the dark. For the spirit in progressing deposits what, being abandoned by it, corrupts into venomous evil, but except in meeting and combating that, it cannot progress. And it can only combat it by getting to know it, for in darkness and ignorance it can make no secure advance.

It has been profoundly said that to know all is to forgive all. Let us rather say that in coming to know its own past, the Spirit which is in Man can without undoing it--that it cannot--make it contributory to its own wealth of being, can, as I have said, utilize it for its own purposes, which are summed up in the knowing of itself. There is and can be nothing in its deeds which it cannot know, and so digest and a.s.similate and absorb into its own substance.

In this interpretation of the meaning--the veiled but not hidden meaning of what has taken place and is taking place in the world--or rather in us and enacted by us, I seem to myself not to be expressing any private imagination or supposition which may or may not be so, but a certainty that it must be so. Either it is so or 'the pillared firmament is rottenness and earth's base built on stubble'. And this means that everywhere and always, but most specially and centrally and potently in man's spirit, there is Progress, in spite of checks and hindrances which come from within it, a constant if chequered advance in true worth or value. And that knowledge I build on grounded and reasoned hope that it will and must continue--how, I do not know, but can only surmise and conjecture and imagine.

To the question, What, then, ought we to do? I can only reply first and foremost, Labour to retain this truth, fostering and developing it, verifying it as we have been doing in all the varied departments of human experience, exercising our imaginations while at the same time sobering and controlling them by the light that comes from it. If we are true to it and do not through slackness forget and lose it, we shall find arising spontaneously out of the depths of our self worthy and feasible ideals of action, the pursuit of which will not betray us or leave us without an ever-growing a.s.surance that in bending and directing all our powers to their realization we are the agents of that Progress which is the source of all being and all worth whatsoever. If we will to learn from our own past, we can convert anything that is evil in it into an occasion, an opportunity, a means to good which without it were not possible. Thus we can even do what seems utterly impossible, for we can without forgetting or ignoring or denying, forgive ourselves even the evil which we have done. Yes, even the darkest and worst evil, the disloyalty to ourselves, to the best and deepest within us, which all but achieved the impossibility of finally defeating the march of Progress. For the basis and ground of our belief in the reality, and therefore the eternity, of Progress lies in this, that the now known nature of the Spirit which is in Man and not in Man alone, is that it can heal any wounds that it can inflict upon itself, can find in its own errors and failures, in its own mistakes and misdeeds, if it only will, the materials of richer and fuller and worthier life.