rial upon human nature and progress is to call
attention to this fact. Progress is with most people an article of
faith, and men's faiths, as to their content, at least, are matters of
temperament. The conservative who perhaps takes a mild interest in
progress is usually "a sober and cautious" person, fairly content with
the present and not very sure about the future. The radical, on the
other hand, is usually a naturally hopeful and enthusiastic individual,
profoundly pessimistic about the present, but with a boundless
confidence in even the most impossible future.

Philosophy, like literature, is, in the final analysis, the expression
of a temperament, more or less modified by experience. The selections
from Schopenhauer and Bergson may be regarded, therefore, as the
characteristic reactions of two strikingly different temperaments to the
conception of progress and to life. The descriptions which they give of
the cosmic process are, considered formally, not unlike. Their
interpretations and the practical bearings of these interpretations are
profoundly different.

It is not necessary for the students of sociology to discuss the merits
of these different doctrines. We may accept them as human documents.
They throw light, at any rate, upon the idea of progress, and upon all
the other fundamental ideas in which men have sought to formulate their
common hopes and guide their common life.

II. MATERIALS

A. THE CONCEPT OF PROGRESS

1. The Earliest Conception of Progress[333]

The word "progress," like the word "humanity," is one of the most
significant. It is a Latin word, not used in its current abstract sense
until after the Roman incorporation of the Mediterranean world. The
first writer who expounds the notion with sufficient breadth of view and
sufficiently accurate and concrete observation to provide a preliminary
sketch was the great Roman poet, Lucretius.

He begins by describing a struggle for existence in which the less
well-adapted creatures died off, those who wanted either the power to
protect themselves or the means of adapting themselves to the purposes
of man. In this stage, however, man was a hardier creature than he
afterward became. He lived like the beasts of the field and was ignorant
of tillage or fire or clothes or houses. He had no laws or government or
marriage and, though he did not fear the dark, he feared the real danger
of fiercer beasts. Men often died a miserable death, but not in