Progress and History. Various
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the men of the Stone Age assuredly bore their full share in the work of race-improvement; and the only point on which there may seem to be doubt is whether we of the age of metal are as ready and able to bear our share. But let us be optimistic about ourselves. As long as we do not allow our material achievements to blind us to the need of an education that keeps the spiritual well to the fore, then progress is assured so far as it depends on culture.
Yet if we could likewise breed for spirituality, humanity's chances, I believe, would be bettered by as much again or more. But how is this to be done? Science must somehow find out. To leave it to nature is treason to the mind. Man may be an ass on the whole, but nature is even more of an ass, especially when it stands for human nature minus its saving grace of imaginative, will-directed intelligence. So let us hope that one day people will marry intelligently, and that the best marriages will be the richest in offspring. I believe that the spiritual is not born of the sickly; and at any rate should be prepared to make trial of such a working principle in my New Republic.
So much for the practical corollaries suggested by our flying visit to Prehistoric Europe. But, even if any detailed lessons to be drawn from such fragmentary facts have to be received with caution, you need not hesitate to pursue this branch of study for its own sake as part of the general training of the mind. Accustom yourselves to a long perspective. Cultivate the eagle's faculty of spacious vision. It is only thus that one can get the values right—see right and wrong, truth and error, beauty and ugliness in their broad and cumulative effects. Analytic studies, as they are termed, involving the exploration of the meaning of received ideas, must come first in any scheme of genuine education. We must learn to affirm before we can go on to learn how to criticize. But historical studies are a necessary sequel. Other people's received ideas turn out in the light of history to have sometimes worked well, and sometimes not so well; and we are thereupon led to revise our own opinions accordingly. Now the history of man has hitherto stood almost exclusively for the history of European civilization. Being so limited, it loses most of its value as an instrument of criticism. For how can a single phase of culture criticize itself? How can it step out of the scales and assess its own weight? Anthropology, however, will never acquiesce in this parochial view of the province of history. History worthy of the name must deal with man universal. So I would have you all become anthropologists. Let your survey of human progress be age-long and world-wide. You come of a large family and an ancient one. Learn to be proud of it, and then you will seek likewise to be worthy of it.
Books for Reference
W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters and their Modern Representatives, 2nd edition, 1915.
E. A. Parkyn, Introduction to the study of Prehistoric Art.
R. R. Marett, Anthropology (Home University Library).
J. L. Myres, Dawn of History (Home University).
FOOTNOTES:
[5] Presidential Address to the International Folk-Lore Congress, 1891, p. 9.
III
PROGRESS AND HELLENISM
F. Melian Stawell
To speak the truth about national characteristics it is often necessary to speak in paradoxes, for of all unities on earth nothing contains so many contradictions as a nation. So it is here: it may be said quite truly that the Greeks had at once the most profound conceptions about Progress and no faith in it: that they were at once the most hopeful and the most despairing of peoples. Let me try to explain. When we speak of a faith in Progress, whatever else we mean, we must mean, I take it, that there is a real advance in human welfare throughout time from the Past to the Future, that 'the best is yet to be', and that the good wine is kept to the last. But if we are to have a philosophy underlying that faith we must be able to say something more. What, in the first place, do we mean by 'a real advance'? Or by 'human welfare'? Progress, yes, but progress towards what? What is the standard? And if we cannot indicate a standard, what right have we to say that one life is any better than another? The life of the scientific man any better than the life of the South Sea Islander—content if only he has enough bananas to eat? Or than the life of a triumphant conqueror, a Zenghis Khan or a Tamberlaine—exultant if he has enough human heads before him? Or, indeed, any of these rather than the blank of Nirvana or the life of a vegetable?
Our first need, then, is the need of a standard for good over and above the conflicting opinions of men, and some idea as to what that standard implies.
And the next question is, why we should hold that any of this good is going to be realized in human life at all? If it is, there must be some connexion of cause and effect between goodness and human existence. What is the nature of that connexion? Finally, why should we hope that this goodness is realized more and more fully as time goes on?
The Greeks faced these questions, as they faced so many, with extraordinary daring and penetration and with an intimate mixture of sadness and hope.
They themselves, of all nations known to us in history, had made the greatest progress in the shortest space of time. A long course of preparation, it is true, underlay that marvellous growth. The classical Greeks—and when I speak of Hellenism I mean the flower of classical Greek culture—the classical Greeks entered into the labours of the island peoples, who, whether kindred to them or not, had built up from neolithic times a great civilization, the major part of which they could, and did, assimilate. They found the soil already worked. None the less it is to their own original genius that we owe those great discoveries of the spirit which, to quote a recent writer, 'created a new world of science and art, established an ideal of the sane mind in the sane body and the perfect man in the perfect society, cut out a new line of progress between anarchy and despotism, and made moral ends supreme over national in the State.'[6]
But these practical achievements of theirs have been already summed up by Professor J. A. Smith in his lecture[7] at this school last year, and it is to that lecture that I would refer you. I will take it as a basis and proceed for my own purposes to discuss the Greek conceptions about progress. Those conceptions were complex, and, speaking roughly, we may say this: if belief in real progress implies belief in three things, namely, (1) an absolute standard apprehended, however dimly, by man, (2) a causal connexion between existence and perfection, and (3) a persistent advance through time, then the Greeks held to the first two and doubted, or even denied, the third. Their two great thinkers, Plato and Aristotle, worked out systems based on the conviction that there really was an absolute standard of perfection, that man could really apprehend something of this perfection, and that the effort towards it was essential to the very existence of the world, part of the stuff, as it were, that made the universe. These systems have had an effect not to be exaggerated on the whole movement of thought since their day. Moreover, many of their fundamental conceptions are being revived in modern science and metaphysics. And the convictions that underlie them are calculated, one would say, to lead at once to a buoyant faith in progress. But with Plato, and Aristotle, and the Greeks