Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1898: Volume 54, November 1898Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, November 1898: Volume 54, November 1898
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
It takes in not so much the reality of Progress as its
accompaniments--not so much the substance as the shadow. That
progress in intelligence seen during the growth of the child into
the man, or the savage into the philosopher, is commonly regarded
as consisting in the greater number of facts known and laws
understood: whereas the actual progress consists in those internal
modifications of which this increased knowledge is the expression.
Social progress is supposed to consist in the produce of a greater
quantity and variety of the articles required for satisfying men's
wants; in the increasing security of person and property; in
widening freedom of action: whereas, rightly understood, social
progress consists in those changes of structure in the social
organism which have entailed these consequences. The current
conception is a teleological one. The phenomena are contemplated
solely as bearing on human happiness. Only those changes are
held to constitute progress which directly or indirectly tend
to heighten human happiness. And they are thought to constitute
progress simply _because_ they tend to heighten human happiness.
But rightly to understand progress, we must inquire what is the
nature of these changes, considered apart from our interests.[7]
With the view of excluding these anthropocentric interpretations and
also because it served better to cover those inorganic changes which the
word "progress" suggests but vaguely, I employed the word "evolution."
But my hope that, by the use of this word, irrelevant facts and
considerations would be set aside, proves ill-grounded. Mr. Mallock now
includes under it those things which I endeavored to exclude. He is
dominated by the current idea of progress as a process of improvement,
in the human sense; and is thus led to join with those social changes
which constitute advance in social organization, those social changes
which are ancillary to it--not constituting parts of the advance itself,
but yielding fit materials and conditions. It is true that he recognizes
social science as aiming "to deduce our civilization of to-day from
the condition of the primitive savage." It is true that he says social
science "primarily sets itself to explain, not how a given set of
social conditions affects those who live among them, but how social
conditions at one epoch are different from those of another, how each
set of conditions is the resultant of those preceding it."[8] But in
his conception as thus indicated he masses together not the phenomena
of developing social structures and functions only, but all those which
accompany them; as is shown by the complaint he approvingly cites
that the sociological theory set forth by me does not yield manifest
solutions of current social problems:[9] clearly implying the belief
that an account of social evolution containing no lessons which he who
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