shall certainly be carried on somewhere; but we may
be badly bruised or even shipwrecked in the process, and in any case we
shall have contributed nothing to the advance. Some few may even waste
their strength in trying to work backwards against the stream. We seem
to have reached the point in history when for the first time we are
really conscious of our position, and the problem is now a possible and
an urgent one to mark the goal clearly and unitedly and bend our common
efforts to attaining it.

If this be so, the work of synthesis may be thought to have a higher
practical value for the moment than the analysis which has prevailed in
European thought for the last forty or fifty years. In the earlier part
of the nineteenth century the great formative ideas which had been
gathering volume and enthusiasm during the revolutionary period, took
shape in complete systems of religious and philosophic truth--Kant,
Hegel, Spencer, Comte. They have been followed by a period of criticism
which has left none of them whole, but on the other hand has produced a
mass of contradictions and specialisms highly confusing and even
hopeless to the public mind and veiling the more important and profound
agreements which have been growing all the time beneath. There are now
abundant signs of a reaction towards unity and construction of a broad
and solid kind. In no respect is such a knitting up more desirable than
in this idea of progress itself. Are we to say that there is no such
thing as all-round continuous progress, but only progress in definite
branches of thought and activity, progress in science or in particular
arts, social progress, physical progress, progress in popular education
and the like, but that any two or more branches only coincide
occasionally and by accident, and that when working at one we can and
should have no thought of working at them all? This is no doubt a
prevalent view and we may hope that some things said in this book may
modify it. Another school of critical thinkers, approaching the question
from the point of view of the ultimate object of action, asks what is
the one thing for which all others are to be pursued as means? Is
increase of knowledge the absolute good or increase of happiness? Or if
it is increase of love, is it quite indifferent what we love? A few
words on this may fitly conclude this chapter.

The task of mankind, and of every one of us so far as he is able to
enter into it, is to bring tog