ith two friends in Oxford,
one a professor of philosophy, the other a lady. The professor of
philosophy declared that to him human progress must always mean
primarily the increase of knowledge; the editor urged the increase of
power as its most characteristic feature, but the lady added at once
that to her progress had always meant, and could only mean, increase in
our appreciation of the humanity of others.

The first two thoughts, harmonized and directed by the third, may be
taken to cover the whole field, and this volume to be merely a
commentary upon them. What we have to consider is, when and how this
idea of progress, as a general thing affecting mankind as a whole, first
appeared in the world, how far it has been realized in history, and how
far it gives us any guidance and hope for the future. In the midst of a
catastrophe which appears at first sight to be a deadly blow to the
ideal, such an inquiry has a special interest and may have some
permanent value.

Words are the thought of ages crystallized, or rather embodied with a
constantly growing soul. The word 'Progress', like the word 'Humanity',
is one of the most significant. It is a Latin word, not used in its
current abstract sense until after the Roman incorporation of the
Mediterranean world. It contains Greek thought summed up and applied by
Roman minds. Many of the earlier Greek thinkers, Xenophanes and
Empedocles as well as Plato and Aristotle, had thought and spoken of a
steady process in things, including man himself, from lower to higher
forms; but the first writer who expounds the notion with sufficient
breadth of view and sufficiently accurate and concrete observation to
provide a preliminary sketch, was the great Roman poet who attributed
all the best that was in him to the Greeks and yet has given us a highly
original picture of the upward tendency of the world and of human
society upon it. He, too, so far as one can discover, was the first to
use the word 'progress' in the sense of our inquiry. The passage in
Lucretius at the end of his fifth book on the Nature of Things is so
true and brilliant and anticipates so many points in later thought that
it is worth quoting at some length, and the poet's close relation with
Cicero, the typical Greco-Roman thinker, gives his ideas the more weight
as an historical document.

He begins by describing a struggle for existence in which the less
well-adapted creatures died off, those who wanted either the