Hence we ask at first only: how does the old or the new system serve
the progress of mankind? What this human progress means is clearly
interpreted by the history of five thousand years of civilization. It
is the history of the growing differentiation of human demands and
fulfilments. Every new stage in the culture of mankind developed new
desires and new longings from nature and from society, but it also
brought with it new means of satisfying the longings and fulfilling
the desires. The two belong most intimately together. The new means of
fulfilment stimulate new desires of intellect and emotion and will,
and the new desires lead to further means of their satisfaction. Thus
there is an incessant automatic enrichment, an endless differentiation,
a thousand new needs on the height of civilization where the primitive
race found a few elementary demands, and a thousand new schemes of
material technique and of social, institutional life where the lower
culture found all it needed with simple devices. It is an unfolding
not dissimilar to that which the plants and the animals have shown in
their organic life in the long periods of natural evolution. The
development from the infusors to the monkeys was such a steady
increase in the manifoldness of functions. The butterfly is as well
adjusted to its life conditions and as well off as the fish, and the
fish as well off as the elephant, and in the evolution of economic
civilization as in that of the kingdom of animals the advance does not
involve an increase of joy. Pain results from a lack of adjustment,
but not from a scarcity of functions. Hence if we strive for progress
alone, we are moved not by the hope for greater joy, but by an
enthusiastic belief in the value of progress and development itself.
Does a socialistic order secure a more forceful, a more spontaneous, a
more many-sided, or even a more harmonious growing of new demands and
of new means for fulfilment than the capitalistic system which holds
us all to-day?
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.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account