As to progress other than material--that is to say, progress in intellectual capacity, in taste, in the power of enjoyment, in virtue, and generally in what is called happiness--every man’s view must depend on the ideal which he sets before himself of what constitutes happiness, and of the relative importance to happiness of the ethical and the non-ethical elements which enter into the conception. Until there is more agreement than now exists or has ever existed on these points, there is no use in trying to form conclusions regarding the progress man has made. Moreover, it is admitted that nearly every gain man makes is accompanied by some corresponding loss--perhaps a slight loss, yet a loss. When we attempt to estimate the comparative importance of these gains and losses, questions of great difficulty, both ethical and non-ethical, emerge; and in many cases our experience is not yet sufficient to determine the quantum of loss. There is room both for the optimist and for the pessimist, and in arguing such questions nearly everybody becomes an optimist or a pessimist. The historian has no business to be either. There is another temptation besides that of delivering his opinion on these high matters, of which the historian does well to be aware--I mean the temptation to prophesy. The study of history as a whole, more inevitably than that of the history of any particular country or people, suggests forecasts of the future, because the broader the field which we survey the more do we learn to appreciate the great and wide-working forces that are guiding mankind, and the more therefore are we led to speculate on the results which these forces, some of them likely to be permanent, will tend to bring about. [Sidenote: Modern Mastery of Nature] This temptation can seldom have been stronger than it is now, when we see all mankind brought into closer relations than ever before, and more obviously dominated by forces which are essentially the same, though varying in their form. Yet it will appear, when the problem is closely examined, that the very novelty of the present situation of the world--the fact that our mastery of Nature has been so rapidly extended within the last century, and that the phenomena of the subjugation of the earth by Europeans and of the ubiquitous contact of the advanced and the backward races are so unexampled in respect of the area they cover--that all predictions must be uttered with the greatest caution, and due allowance made for elements which may disturb even the most careful calculations. It may, indeed, be doubted whether any predictions of a definitely positive kind--predictions that such and such things will happen--can be safely made, save the obvious ones which are based on the assumption that existing natural conditions remain for some time operative. [Sidenote: A Glimpse into the Future]