66 PART III. PATH TO THE REMEDY. Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation."-LUKE xi. 17. S CHAPTER I. THEORIES OF SOCIAL PROGRESS. "Yet I doubt not thro' the ages one increasing purpose runs, And the thoughts of men are widen'd with the process of the suns.' Different Kinds of Progress. THE belief that society is in a state of progressive improvement is either consciously or unconsciously mixed up with reasonings now widely prevalent, and influencing the conduct of men. But the conception of the nature of such improvement is rarely precise, and as rarely found in connection with a distinct hold of the grounds on which the belief in progression rests. Without going into metaphysical niceties, we may distinguish three ways in which either a particular nation or society generally may be progressive. It may advance in material wealth, and of course in the arts subservient to the creation of wealth, as has evidently happened, and is now happening, not only in England and the United States, but to a greater or less extent in all the countries of continental Europe. It may advance, not uniformly but still continuously, in the discovery of truth, as has been the case with European society from the earliest times to the present moment, in physical science. Lastly, men or nations may be conceived as capable of a moral advance, as showing, therefore, in their lives a continually growing ascendancy of the higher or moral over the lower or animal faculties; in a word, as becoming, from time to time, more veracious, more just, more pure, and more full of love. The popular notions of progress are drawn from the immense advances which have been made in this country in wealth and the industrial arts, during the last century, and which do prove an enormous growth in the power of man to render nature subservient to his wants. This industrial progress is often regarded as necessarily involving in it all kinds of progress; and not only those whose minds are engaged in actively carrying it on, but those more studious persons whose attention has been chiefly fixed upon its principles, are apt to resent, as folly, or false humanity, or downright dishonesty, the doubts and criticisms of others, who fancy that the play of all this mighty mechanism is attended with a fearful increase of uncertainty and gnawing care, and, worse still, an unnatural stimulation of the animal passions, ruinous both to body and to mind. The popular belief in general progress is further confirmed by the authority of works in which the scientific advances of mankind are set forth, in a lucid and attractive form, by thinkers of eminence, such as Sir John Herschel's "Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy," Professor Whewell's "History of the Inductive Sciences"-works both of them certainly of the highest value, but still more perhaps by such a production as the "Kosmos" of Humboldt, in which all the treasures of human discovery are brought together in one grand and overwhelming combination, and in which speculative studies of the widest range, and a personal experience rich beyond parallel, concur in representing all the great men of our race, and all the families of which it consists, as consciously or unconsciously contributing to the attainment of one great and ever-growing yet harmonious result. In reading that wonderful work, which could scarcely have arisen anywhere but in Germany, in which physical science, in the whole of its wide extent, is taken up into the region of imagination, and by the transmuting power of genius reproduced as poetry, it is difficult for the mind, spell-bound and carried away by the charm, to avoid forgetting the fact that sin and unhappiness surround usnay, are within us, and that this deified human intellect is still |