higher state, outside us
in the world, as well as within our own consciousness, which is ready to
expand if we will give it range.

On such lines we may sketch the historical aspect of progress on which
the personal is based; and it is of the utmost importance to keep the
two aspects before us concurrently, because reliance on the growing
fullness of the individual life to the neglect of the social evolution
is likely to empty that life itself of its true content, to leave the
self-centred visionary absorbed in the contemplation of some ideal
perfection within himself, while the world outside him from which he
ultimately derives his notions, is toiling and suffering from the want
of those very elements which he is best able to supply.

The succeeding chapters of this book will, it is hoped, supply some
evidence of the concrete reality of progress, as well as of the tendency
to greater coherence and purity in the ideal itself. It would have been
easy to accumulate evidence; some sides of life are hardly touched on at
all. The collective and the intellectual sides are fully dealt with both
in this and in the volume on _The Unity of Western Civilization_. But if
we make our survey over a sufficient space, coming down especially to
our own days, our conclusion as to the advance made in the physical and
moral well-being of mankind, will be hardly less emphatic. Our average
lives are longer and continue to lengthen, and they are unquestionably
spent with far less physical suffering than was generally the case at
any previous period. We are bound to give full weight to this, however
much we rightly deplore the deadening effect of monotonous and
mechanical toil on so large a part of the population. And even for these
the opportunities for a free and improving life are amazingly enlarged.
We groan and chafe at what remains to be done because of the unexampled
size of the modern industrial populations with which we have to deal.
But we know in some points very definitely what we want, and we are now
all persuaded with John Stuart Mill that the remedy is in our own hands,
'that all the great sources of human suffering are in a great degree,
many of them entirely, conquerable by human care and effort.' This
conviction is perhaps the greatest step of all that we have gained. In
morality some pertinent and necessary questions are raised in Chap. VI,
but the general progress would be doubted by very few who have had the
opportunity