mental
condition of one of our most distant ancestors with yours or mine, by no
means to our disadvantage, concludes with these words: 'And after all he
was probably as happy as we are; it is not saying much.'[5]

But, if not happier, are we nobler? If I may venture to speak as a
philosopher, I should reply, confidently, 'Yes.' It comes to this, that
we have and enjoy more soul. On the intellectual side, we see farther
afield. On the moral side, our sympathies are correspondingly wider.
Imaginatively, and even to no small extent practically, we are in touch
with myriads of men, present and past. We participate in a world-soul;
and by so doing are advanced in the scale of spiritual worth and dignity
as members of the human race. Yet this common soul of mankind we know
largely and even chiefly as something divided against itself. Not only
do human ideals contradict each other; but the ideal in any and all of
its forms is contradicted by the actual. So it is the discontent of the
human world-soul that is mainly borne in upon him who shares in it most
fully. A possibility of completed good may glimmer at the far end of the
quest; but the quest itself is experienced as a bitter striving. Bitter
though it may be, however, it is likewise ennobling. Here, then, I find
the philosophic, that is, the ultimate and truest, touchstone of human
progress, namely, in the capacity for that ennobling form of experience
whereby we become conscious co-workers and co-helpers in an age-long,
world-wide striving after the good.

But to-day I come before you, not primarily as a philosopher, but rather
as an anthropologist, a student of prehistoric man. I must therefore
define progress, not in the philosophic or ultimate way, but simply as
may serve the strictly limited aims of my special science. As an
anthropologist, I want a workable definition--one that will set me
working and keep me working on promising lines. I do not ask ultimate
truth of my anthropological definition. For my science deals with but a
single aspect of reality; and the other aspects of the real must
likewise be considered on their merits before a final account can be
rendered of it.

Now anthropology is just the scientific history of man; and I suppose
that there could be a history of man that did without the idea of human
progress altogether. Progress means, in some sense, change for the
better. But, strictly, history as such deals with fact; and is not
concerned with