A PARADOXICAL VIEW OF "PROGRESS."
TR. FORSTER, in his very interesting speech last week at IN.1. Leeds, on the subject of University extension, said he supposed that a much higher amount of. education would make Leeds richer, though he was not sure of this; that it would cer- tainly make Leeds happier, since knowledge confers new enjoy- ments and new means of avoiding pain ; but that it was quite uncertain, again, whether high education would make Leeds better or not, since knowledge, though it gives power over nature, does not at all necessarily imply increased power of self-denial and self-government. It is, to us, very satisfactory to hear from a popular statesman this sort of warning that the world's idea of progress is not a very sound one, and is quite consistent, at all events, with a certain amount of serious moral retrogression. Indeed, we think it might be safely said that the higher the intel- lectual culture of any mind becomes, so much the greater be- comes also the complexity of the moral problems set it, and that therefore it is a proportionally much more difficult thing for such a mind to keep up even the same relative standard of self-forget- fulness and self-denial as that of a nature furnished with but a few simple elements of moral and intellectual experience. Of course, education may very much soften and, in a sense, civilise the type of selfishness. It may cause the brutal type of selfishness to be ex- changed for a silkier type of selfishness, but it is quite certain that a thoroughly selfish man of the highest education is in a less hopeful moral condition, is less likely to be made ashamed and converted by any of the ordinary moral agencies of human society than a thoroughly selfish man who is totally illiterate. The mere fact that it is so much easier to plant the seed of all goodness, moral humility, in a mind which must feel one way or another the profound inferiority of its resources to those of other men, than it is in one which has tried all things, and found them 'all vanity and vexation of spirit,' suggests how many opportunities of sur- prise and shame, and how many motives for new endeavour there may be available to the ignorant bad man, which are not available to the accomplished bad man. We go further than Mr. Forster, and though we maintain -that a fair degree of culture is a most valuable thing, which every good society ought to covet for all its members, we not only believe that such culture does not necessarily bring any moral advance with it,—except the mere advance out of coarse and brutal tastes, —bat that it probably introduces more new motives and oppor- tunities for self-seeking and moral epicureanism, than it does for self-denial and devotion to the interests of others. Education has not reached that point yet in the most educated of States ; for there can hardly be anything but good in educating human beings out of the tastes and passions of brutes, even if we re- place them by- human tastes and passions still more susceptible of moral perversion than those in the circle of which they were imprisoned before. But the stage of decency once reaohed,—and education, no doubt, does good against which there is no set-off, in substituting the steady preference for decent modes of life for the preference for indecent and brutal modes of life,—the further progress of culture is not necessarily a moral progress at all, and may be an advance into the region of much greater moral dangers.
But Mr. Forster's remark suggests a much wider criticism. " Progress " has for a long time meant the process of introducing
men to a vastly greater range of experiences, and a larger number of spheres of experience, than were before open to them ; and it has meant this quite rightly, since it is pretty clear that human nature, as we now know it, is, in the case of the great majority of all nations, confined to a sphere of experience far too narrow for its real capacities. But it does not at all follow that men may not make the mistake of supposing that there is no constant relation between the power of the average mind and the quantity and number of its interests ; and that those interests, intellectual though they be, may not be so far multiplied as to be too numerous for the mind which has to deal with them, so that instead of being elevated and strengthened, it may be lowered and weakened by the effort to grasp them. This is, no doubt, what, in a very small way, people are already dis- cerning to be the danger of too widely and thinly spread an education. It makes children, and the men who grow out of the children, ' smatterers ' in their intellectual life, instead of giving them firm and solid acquirements of a limited range. But what we refer to goes far beyond the range of what is called edu- cation. The whole idea of " progress " and "civilisation" is at present inextricably mixed up with the notion of crowding a much larger number of experiences into a shorter time than ever before. Now, is it not quite possible that that process may be so over- done,—in relation of course to the capacities of man,—that pro- gress may come to future generations to mean the very opposite of this,—i.e., may represent the effort steadily to limit the number of available human interests and enjoyments, so that they may not be too numerous and too disturbing for the character of the being who has to undergo them? At present, we think a great deal, and no doubt quite rightly, of any invention which enables men to live through in a day what it would have taken them a week or a month to live through in times gone by. The tele- graph enables us to send fifty brief messages and get replies to them in a few minutes, where a few years ago none could have been obtained under many days, or even weeks. The railway enables us to travel from twenty to forty miles, work for many hours in a city, and then travel home again, when a few years ago it would have been simply impossible to combine the work done with the country enjoyments gained. So far there may be, perhaps, nothing but gain. But how about the future developments of this tendency? Is it not easily pos- sible for men to be tempted to attack more work than they can do, and to be tempted to taste more pleasures than they can enjoy? And if so, could the remedy be really left simply to individual discretion? Would it not take a good deal of social co-opera- tion to prevent the mischief spreading? May we not come to regard with as much concern and fear the access of new temptations to multiply the number of human tasks and pleasures, as we now regard it with satisfaction and hope ? Railways have no doubt hitherto added infinitely to the real enjoyment and the real education of the great majority of man- kind, though doubtless a few volatile persons have been injured instead of benefited by the new facilities for change. But imagine a discovery which should enable human beings to travel safely with the rapidity of electricity, and at a trifling cost. Would such a discovery, considering what human nature is, really im- prove or injure the average quality of human character ? We suspect the latter. The temptation to see many things would come into such dangerous conflict with the resolve to understand adequately what you see, that the world might very well have, in a few generations, a poorer type of average human character as the result of such a discovery. And if it had, would not a conception of progress and civilisation spring up just the opposite of that which
we now have? Would it not:mean the organised effort of nations to keep their experience within the range at which that experience could be so far digested as to be useful? Would it not mean a steady attempt to confine instead of to multiply the accessible spheres of individual experience, to retard the pace of life, to devise artificial means of limiting the fields of study and enjoy- ment, so as to make them; more microscopic, instead of more de- sultory ?—a constant effort to stamp with disapproval what we now regard with admiration,—we mean the courage which at- tempts great feats of labour, and which is greedy of all kinds of experience?
It is clear that, in one sphere at least, the operation of the new distractions of life has already worked a greater change than men are at all aware of, and that these distractions are capable of working very much greater changes yet. All moral and religious teaching assumes that an amount and a degree of attention is paid to the inward moral life, which it is hardly possible for anybody who is accessible to the full tide of modern interests, intellectual, social,
and political, to pay at all. A great part of the growth of what is called " secularism " is not the growth of an opinion, but the inroad of a variety of distracting influences. The greatest say- ings of all religions assume time for a brooding conscience. Multiply indefinitely the small vibrations of social and intellectual interest, and that time disappears. Look at the enormous drain on human time which the new sciences alone cause. They fill the mind with great and profitable speculations which, whether in- consistent with theological beliefs or not, are at all events in a totally different plane from those beliefs, and which yet absorb the vital force, the powers of reflection and reverie and imagination, which used to be available for the religious sphere. And yet the new sciences constitute but a, department, and a very small department, of the new demands on. men's curiosity and effort. It seems to us that the force which. is almost as likely as any other to bring about the extinction of the human race, is the exhausting claim of the new intel- lectual interests placed, or likely soon to be placed, within our reach. These may very easily become instruments too powerful for man, as he is, to wield ; or rather too numerous to wield with that adequate grasp at which he is certain to aim when he sees how much depends on his pushing his partial knowledge in different directions. At all events, it is quite conceivable that " progress " may one day come to mean almost the opposite of what we now mean by it,—i.e., not new opportunities of various experience, but new devices for economising and accumulating the reserve- force of human character, till it is equal to the task of mastering such experience as, whether men will or no, they must undergo..
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