this general discharge throughout the nervous system of society, manifesting itself in the vigour and energy with which all schemes for improvement are taken up and carried out. That discoveries will be made and progress effected is as certain as that gold is to be found in a goldfield; the only practical question is, By whom? Who is to be the lucky man?

To us who have witnessed the advance which has given rise to this universal hope, the hope itself seems so reasonable and so justifiable that we are apt to overlook the fact that it is without parallel in the history of mankind. Never, of course, has any generation of men imagined its own lot perfect; all have had their ideals, and all have believed their ideals to be true. But whereas we place the realisation of our ideals in the future, all previous generations have placed it in the past: the Golden Age til now has always been regarded as the starting-point of man's history, not its goal. All races have looked back with pride upon a heroic past; all mythologies tell of the better and brighter lot that was in the beginning man's; all poets sing of the brave days of old; all fairy tales begin with "once upon a time." The historians of Greece and Rome discovered no progress in the history of their countries, but only degeneration from the patriotism and simplicity of earlier times, or at best a series of changes making its round like the circle of the

year's seasons. The philosophers of Greece are mainly occupied, when they deal with sociological questions, with the causes of corruption and decay of constitutions; and, if they frame ideal constitutions, they intend them to be final; they do not imagine them to have any possibility of growth. In modern times the same tendency has been equally manifest. Political revolutions have always aimed, not at introducing a new, but at restoring an old state of things: the actors in the French Revolution even dressed and posed as ancient Greeks and Romans. In philosophy, civilisation, as being artificial, has been regarded as a degeneration from a "natural" state of man which was at once primitive and perfect.

In the individual, optimism may be dismissed as a mere mood, or as a tendency to cheerfulness not based on any rational estimate either of the future or of the past. But when a whole generation of men, when, indeed, the whole civilised world, looks to the future, not with careless levity, but with the calm assurance of confidence in the progress that is and is to be, we cannot dismiss its optimism offhand. Astonishing as it is, that the world as it grows older should grow more hopeful, there are good reasons for the fact.

The child's estimates of distance, magnitude, and importance differ from those of the adult. The estimates, however, persist in memory, and we have

all discovered, on revisiting familiar scenes of childhood, how exaggerated our childish estimates were when compared with the actual facts. It is this exaggeration of memory, this illusion of the mind's eye, that psychologically is the foundation of the tendency to idealise the past. To us as children the exploits of our elders were marvellous in our eyes; and they remain as marvels in the memory, as marvels, however, which, as all marvels do, belong to the past. The past becomes the wonderland in which were performed the great deeds, not only of our fathers' time, but of the old times before them. The past becomes the poet's treasury, from which he produces things new and old-the abidingplace of all things good and great and beautiful which are not, but ought to be, and therefore once were.

To measure progress, as indeed to measure any movement and determine its rate and direction, some fixed points are necessary. As long, therefore, as there is no contemporaneous record of events, fixed in writing, there is no possibility of checking the laudator temporis acti and of reducing the unconscious exaggerations of his memory to their due proportions. But even if there were, in the lowest stages of culture the rate of progress is too slow to be perceptible at the time. In the beginning man is at the mercy of his environment: it is only when he has learnt to modify it to his needs that progress begins to move. And by the time that man has

passed from savagery to barbarism, and has emerged from barbarism to civilisation, the conviction that the present and the actual are things of naught as compared with the ideal past, is too intimately inwrought with his religion, his mythology, his philosophy, and the accepted history of his race and its heroic origin to allow him to see facts as they are, or to divine the true trend of human affairs. Further, there is a very practical reason for his looking with suspicion and not with confidence on social changes. It is only as the result of a long course of slow evolution that society has attained to a condition of fairly stable equilibrium. In the beginning society may be compared to a man hanging on for bare life, with a precarious foothold, to the face of a sheer cliff: when the least movement may prove fatal, all movement is dreaded. Thus the characteristic of all early societies is that they are impeded by "the cake of custom" and rigid with the immobility of conservatism.

To those who hold that experience mechanically impresses itself upon the mind and so automatically expresses itself as truth, it must appear somewhat strange that mankind should have advanced for thousands of years without knowing that they had progressed; and still more strange that it was not as an induction from experience, but on a priori grounds that they arrived at the conclusion. Yet so it was. The mere contemplation of the rise and

fall of empires no more suggested the presence and persistence of a constant tendency to progress than the mountainous wave which threatens to engulf the ship suggests that the sea-level is a scientific truth. But when Darwin established his theory that man was descended from the brute, all was clear: it became certain a priori that the long history and "pre-history" of man must have been one of progress and advance. When the descent of man was established, his ascent came to be studied, and human evolution was seen to be synonymous with progress. Savages were seen to be the nearest existing representatives of primitive man, and there was an end to the idea that the primitive state was perfection. The comparative method, once applied to the study of mankind, was able to set side by side examples of savagery, barbarism, and civilisation, which illustrated every step in the process of the evolution of society, and showed that, though the forms of society may fluctuate as do the waves of the sea, society itself is steady in its advance and progressive in its evolution. This conclusion, which at first was a deduction drawn from the animal descent of man, has now the independent support of an enormous amount of evidence. The existence of a Stone Age, paleolithic and neolithic, of a Bronze Age and an Iron Age, and the succession of those ages in the order named, are established facts of science. That the culture of nomad peoples is lower than that