Emile Souvestre - "An Attic Philosopher, v3"

Henry Van Dyke - "The Lost Word"

Jens Peter Jacobsen - "Mogens and Other Stories"

John William Draper - "History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science"

New Philadelphia Book Publisher Highlights Local Talent
Book and Publishing News from Publishers Newswire(tm)

Looking for Child to be on Cover of a New Book, 'The Model Child'
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. -- The Philadelphia literary world will celebrate the launch of two new players today, April 10th: Kay Square Press, a new publishing company focused on Philadelphia-area artists, their stories, and their art; and Kay Square's first release, 'With the Rich and Mighty: Emlen Etting of Philadelphia' (ISBN: 978-0-9815129-0-7), a critical biography by Kenneth C. Kaleta.

FlatSigned Press Alleges Don Imus Remarks Damage Legacy of President Gerald R. Ford
NEW YORK, N.Y. -- Nathan Yungerberg, an accomplished model scout and professional child photographer is launching a nation-wide casting call to find the cover model for his highly anticipated book release, 'The Model Child: A Parents Guide to the Child Modeling Industry' (ISBN: 978-0-9817018-0-6).

Books: The Idea of Progress

J >> J.B. Bury >> The Idea of Progress




Thus in the seventies and eighties of the last century the idea of
Progress was becoming a general article of faith. Some might hold it
in the fatalistic form that humanity moves in a desirable direction,
whatever men do or may leave undone; others might believe that the
future will depend largely on our own conscious efforts, but that
there is nothing in the nature of things to disappoint the prospect
of steady and indefinite advance. The majority did not inquire too
curiously into such points of doctrine, but received it in a vague
sense as a comfortable addition to their convictions. But it became
a part of the general mental outlook of educated people.

When Mr. Frederic Harrison delivered in 1889 at Manchester an
eloquent discourse on the "New Era," in which the dominant note is
"the faith in human progress in lieu of celestial rewards of the
separate soul," his general argument could appeal to immensely wider
circles than the Positivists whom he was specially addressing.

The dogma--for a dogma it remains, in spite of the confidence of
Comte or of Spencer that he had made it a scientific hypothesis--has
produced an important ethical principle. Consideration for posterity
has throughout history operated as a motive of conduct, but feebly,
occasionally, and in a very limited sense. With the doctrine of
Progress it assumes, logically, a preponderating importance; for the
centre of interest is transferred to the life of future generations
who are to enjoy conditions of happiness denied to us, but which our
labours and sufferings are to help to bring about. If the doctrine
is held in an extreme fatalistic form, then our duty is to resign
ourselves cheerfully to sacrifices for the sake of unknown
descendants, just as ordinary altruism enjoins the cheerful
acceptance of sacrifices for the sake of living fellow-creatures.
Winwood Reade indicated this when he wrote, "Our own prosperity is
founded on the agonies of the past. Is it therefore unjust that we
also should suffer for the benefit of those who are to come?" But if
it is held that each generation can by its own deliberate acts
determine for good or evil the destinies of the race, then our
duties towards others reach out through time as well as through
space, and our contemporaries are only a negligible fraction of the
"neighbours" to whom we owe obligations. The ethical end may still
be formulated, with the Utilitarians, as the greatest happiness of
the greatest number; only the greatest number includes, as Kidd
observed, "the members of generations yet unborn or unthought of."
This extension of the moral code, if it is not yet conspicuous in
treatises on Ethics, has in late years been obtaining recognition in
practice.

5.

Within the last forty years nearly every civilised country has
produced a large literature on social science, in which indefinite
Progress is generally assumed as an axiom. But the "law" whose
investigation Kant designated as the task for a Newton, which Saint-
Simon and Comte did not find, and to which Spencer's evolutionary
formula would stand in the same relation as it stands to the law of
gravitation, remains still undiscovered. To examine or even glance
at this literature, or to speculate how theories of Progress may be
modified by recent philosophical speculation, lies beyond the scope
of this volume, which is only concerned with tracing the origin of
the idea and its growth up to the time when it became a current
creed.

Looking back on the course of the inquiry, we note how the history
of the idea has been connected with the growth of modern science,
with the growth of rationalism, and with the struggle for political
and religious liberty. The precursors (Bodin and Bacon) lived at a
time when the world was consciously emancipating itself from the
authority of tradition and it was being discovered that liberty is a
difficult theoretical problem. The idea took definite shape in
France when the old scheme of the universe had been shattered by the
victory of the new astronomy and the prestige of Providence, CUNCTA
SUPERCILIO MOUENTIS, was paling before the majesty of the immutable
laws of nature. There began a slow but steady reinstatement of the
kingdom of this world. The otherworldly dreams of theologians,

ceux qui reniaient la terre pour patrie,

which had ruled so long lost their power, and men's earthly home
again insinuated itself into their affections, but with the new hope
of its becoming a place fit for reasonable beings to live in. We
have seen how the belief that our race is travelling towards earthly
happiness was propagated by some eminent thinkers, as well as by
some "not very fortunate persons who had a good deal of time on
their hands." And all these high-priests and incense-bearers to whom
the creed owes its success were rationalists, from the author of the
Histoire des oracles to the philosopher of the Unknowable.

EPILOGUE

In achieving its ascendency and unfolding its meaning, the Idea of
Progress had to overcome a psychological obstacle which may be
described as THE ILLUSION OF FINALITY.

It is quite easy to fancy a state of society, vastly different from
ours, existing in some unknown place like heaven; it is much more
difficult to realise as a fact that the order of things with which
we are familiar has so little stability that our actual descendants
may be born into a world as different from ours as ours is from that
of our ancestors of the pleistocene age.

The illusion of finality is strong. The men of the Middle Ages would
have found it hard to imagine that a time was not far off in which
the Last Judgement would have ceased to arouse any emotional
interest. In the sphere of speculation Hegel, and even Comte,
illustrate this psychological limitation: they did not recognise
that their own systems could not be final any more than the system
of Aristotle or of Descartes. It is science, perhaps, more than
anything else--the wonderful history of science in the last hundred
years--that has helped us to transcend this illusion.

But if we accept the reasonings on which the dogma of Progress is
based, must we not carry them to their full conclusion? In escaping
from the illusion of finality, is it legitimate to exempt that dogma
itself? Must not it, too, submit to its own negation of finality?
Will not that process of change, for which Progress is the
optimistic name, compel "Progress" too to fall from the commanding
position in which it is now, with apparent security, enthroned?
[words in Greek] ... A day will come, in the revolution of
centuries, when a new idea will usurp its place as the directing
idea of humanity. Another star, unnoticed now or invisible, will
climb up the intellectual heaven, and human emotions will react to
its influence, human plans respond to its guidance. It will be the
criterion by which Progress and all other ideas will be judged. And
it too will have its successor.

In other words, does not Progress itself suggest that its value as a
doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain not very
advanced stage of civilisation; just as Providence, in its day, was
an idea of relative value, corresponding to a stage somewhat less
advanced? Or will it be said that this argument is merely a
disconcerting trick of dialectic played under cover of the darkness
in which the issue of the future is safely hidden by Horace's
prudent god?