pick up the
swing of that pendulum only in recent times, we note that out of the
social solidarity of the feudal system man swung over to the individual
liberty of the free cities; then from the individual liberty of the
free cities to the social solidarity of the absolute monarchies; then
back again into the individual liberty of the democratic states. We
see that now we are clearly swinging over to some new form of social
solidarity, of which tendency federalism and socialism are expressions,
and doubtless from that we shall recoil toward individual liberty once
more. It is a safe generalization that whenever human thought shows
some decided trend, a corrective movement is not far away. However
enthusiastic we may be, therefore, about the idea of progress and the
positive contributions which it can make to our understanding and
mastery of life, we may be certain that there are in it the faults of
its qualities. If we take it without salt, our children will rise up,
not to applaud our far-seeing wisdom, but to blame our easy-going
credulity. We have already seen that the very idea of progress sprang
up in recent times in consequence of a few factors which predisposed
men's minds to social hopefulness. Fortunately, some of these factors,
such as the scientific control of life through the knowledge of law,
seem permanent, and we are confident that the idea of progress will
have abiding meaning for human thought and life. But no study of the
matter could be complete without an endeavour to discern the perils in
this modern mode of thought and to guard ourselves against accepting as
an unmixed blessing what is certainly, like all things human, a blend
of good and evil.

One peril involved in the popular acceptance of the idea of progress
has been the creation of a superficial, ill-considered optimism which
has largely lost sight of the terrific obstacles in human nature
against which any real moral advance on earth must win its way. Too
often we have taken for granted what a recent book calls "a goal of
racial perfection and nobility the splendour of which it is beyond our
powers to conceive," and we have dreamed about this earthly paradise
like a saint having visions of heaven and counting it as won already
because he is predestined to obtain it. Belief in inevitable progress
has thus acted as an opiate on many minds, lulling them into an elysium
where all things come by wishing and where human ignorance and foll