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.