you could not call them "all chairs."

Akin to these is the false theory of progress, which maintains
that we alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.
We often hear it said, for instance, "What is right in one age
is wrong in another." This is quite reasonable, if it means that
there is a fixed aim, and that certain methods attain at certain
times and not at other times. If women, say, desire to be elegant,
it may be that they are improved at one time by growing fatter and
at another time by growing thinner. But you cannot say that they
are improved by ceasing to wish to be elegant and beginning to wish
to be oblong. If the standard changes, how can there be improvement,
which implies a standard? Nietzsche started a nonsensical idea that
men had once sought as good what we now call evil; if it were so,
we could not talk of surpassing or even falling short of them.
How can you overtake Jones if you walk in the other direction?
You cannot discuss whether one people has succeeded more in being
miserable than another succeeded in being happy. It would be
like discussing whether Milton was more puritanical than a pig
is fat.

It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his
object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable.
If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must
be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt
gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress.
It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather
weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society,
he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium.
He wrote--