end, but achievement and the enjoyment of it. The progress is towards
and for the end; the end is the supreme good and the progress is only
good because of it, because it is on the way that leads to it, the way
we are content to travel only because it leads there. Once more, and on
still surer grounds, we must pronounce what we have come to know as
Progress to be no possible ideal of action. What draws us on is the hope
of something to be attained in and by the progress. To take Progress,
which on the one hand is a fact and on the other is an incomplete fact,
to be the end of our striving and our doing is to acquiesce in a
self-contradiction.
Yet the counter-ideal of a state in which we shall simply rest from our
labours and sit down to enjoy the fruits of them does not promise
satisfaction either, and so cannot be the end or ideal. Our desire and
our endeavour is not for a moveless, changeless, undeveloping
perfection. In fact, so often as the dream of such a state attained has
presented itself, it has to thoughtful minds appeared anything but
attractive or desirable. Our desire is to go on, and for that we are
willing to pay a price--nay, it is for more than merely to go on, it is
to advance and increase in perfection, so much so that the ideal itself
once more slews round into its opposite and the search appears worth
more than the attainment. It seems that we were not on the other view so
wholly wrong, but must try so to frame our ideal of action as to unite
both characters and satisfy both demands at once, so that it shall be at
once a state and a movement or process, an achievement and a progress, a
rest or quiet and a striving after it, a perfection and a perfecting.
The combination at first sight appears impossible. Yet both characters
it must combine. Here again, I must confess that the idea of mere
Progress, even as achieved by our own efforts, seems to me to omit
something essential to an ideal of action--of what is worth while our
acting for. What is to be an ideal of action must have the character of
a fulfilment--something to be consumed, not merely eternally added to.
For this character of the (or any) ideal of action the best name is
fruition or enjoyment. And the defect in the conception of it as
Progress is that it seems to postpone this without a date.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account