Such facts show at once that any idea of inevitable or of universal progress is untenable, the product of an irrational idealism which prefers its own desires to reality. They show further that, up to the present, suffering and pain on the one hand, and on the other degeneration in a certain number of individuals, are as universal and apparently inevitable in human as in animal evolution. But they do not show that some sort of progress may not have occurred--not necessarily the kind of progress that some of us would like, not necessarily as rapid as could be desired, but yet indubitably and solidly Progress. We have seen that in the hundreds of thousands of species which constitute life, that which has been increased most obviously is the upper level of certain qualities--primitive forms have persisted, degenerate forms have arisen side by side with and in spite of the steady improvement in the highest types. This has happened in man also. The upper level of control and of independence in human group-units, and in a certain number of fortunate individuals, has obviously increased; but there are the slums, there are the drab lives of thousands in great cities, there are poverty, degeneracy, and crime. All that we can say is that to many at least it seems theoretically possible that man should be able to reduce the amount of degeneration, waste, and pain, to increase the changes to be summed up as progressive. The future Golden Age of Millenniarism is as impossible a notion as the past Golden Age of Mythology, and more demoralizing. Bury, with pardonable sarcasm, speaks of the result hoped for in it as “a menagerie of happy men ... in which the dynamic character of history disappears.” But once we have accepted (as the great majority accept) life as somehow worth living, the belief in progress asserts only (though there is much in that “only”) that life may be made more worth living to a larger proportion of people, although effort and failure always will and always must be conditions of its operation. As Goethe said, “Let humanity last as long as it will, there will always be hindrances in its way, and all kinds of distress, to make it develop its powers.”