To such a final position do we come in following out the development of the idea of progress. The early assurance and dogmatic confidence which marked the early years of the century are followed by a complete abandonment of the idea of a guaranteed or assured progress, whether based on the operations of a Divine Providence, or on faith in the ultimate triumph of reason, or on merely a fatalistic determinism. Progress is only a possibility, and its realisation depends on ‘humanity’s own actions. Further, any mention of progress in future must not only present it as quite contingent, but we have to reckon with the fact that the idea of progress may itself progress until it resolves itself into another conception less complicated and less paradoxical, such as “the attainment of a new equilibrium.” Some effort must be devoted also to a valuation of criteria. Various values have in the past been confused together, scientific, materialistic, hedonistic, moral, aesthetic. Ultimately it seems that we shall find difficulty in settling this apart from the solution offered by Renouvier—namely, that true progress is not merely intellectual, but moral. It involves not merely a conquest of material nature but of human nature—a self- mastery. Progress is to be measured not by the achievements of any aristocracy, intellectual or other, but by the general social status, and our criterion of progress must be ultimately that of social justice. This itself is a term needing interpretation, and to this question of ethics we now turn. CHAPTER VI ETHICS INTRODUCTION : Difficulties of the moral problem as presented in the nineteenth century—Recognised as a social problem—Influence of Comte important in this connection—Other influences—Christianity—Kant—The practical reason. I. Taine and Renan—Renan’s critique of Christian morality—Early socialistic views—Change in his later life—Prefers criterion of beauty to that of goodness. II. Renouvier the great moralist of our period—Relation to Kant —His Science de la Morale—Personality in Ethics—Justice. III. Fouillée, Guyau, Ollé-Laprune and Rauh pass further from the Kantian rigorism to an ethic in harmony with the philosophy of idées-forces of life and action—Humanitarianism of Fouillée and Guyau—Idées-forces and Morale sans Obligation ni Sanction —Rauh’s doctrines—Other thinkers. CONCLUSION: Action and belief—Ethics and Religion. CHAPTER VI ETHICS