ut we never want to lose them,
any more than we could bear to lose our old friends, though we may
desire to make new ones. Of all the divine Ideas, said Plato, Beauty is
the one that shows itself most plainly in the world of sense and speaks
to us most plainly of the eternal realities.

This, however, is perhaps trenching on the subject of Progress in Art,
and I should like to return to the general Greek conception of the
tendency in all nature towards the Good, the perfect realization of
perfect types.

Plato does not expressly insist that this tendency is of the nature of
effort, though I think that is involved in his view. But Aristotle does.
Following Plato in essentials, he makes bold to say outright that every
natural thing in its own way longs for the divine and desires to share
in the divine life, so far as it can.[11] Every such thing in this world
of space and time has to cope with difficulties and is imperfect, but
everything struggles towards the good. That good is in the life of God,
a thinking life, an activity of thought, existing in some sense beyond
this imperfect world; and this life is so supremely desirable that it
makes everything else struggle to reach it. It moves the whole world,
Aristotle says, in a famous passage, because it is loved. It is the
world's desire.[12]

Now this idea of effort--or of something analogous to
effort--constituting the inner nature of every natural thing reappears,
with pregnant consequences, in modern thought, though seldom with these
vast theological consequences. The idea of an upward effort through
nature lies at the base of our most hopeful theories of evolution, and
forms the true support of our modern faith in progress. Broadly
speaking, our evolutionists are now divided into two schools: the
adherents of the one believe that variations are purely accidental, and
may occur in any direction whatsoever, the useful ones being preserved
only because they happen to be useful for the life of the species, while
the adherents of the other--the school that I would call the school of
hope--believe that accident, even with natural selection to aid it, is
utterly inadequate to account for the ordered beauty and harmony that we
do see in natural things. They admit, as Plato and Aristotle admit,
imperfection and difficulty in the world, but they insist on a movement
towards value: in short, they conceive an order emerging that is brought
about, to quote a modern writer, both