Both kinds of progress can, indeed, be called spiritual in the sense that they both rest upon a spiritual activity in man, yet we may call the supremacy over natural forces material progress because in it material objects are mastered and turned to man’s use. The supremacy of reason over human dispositions, on the other hand, is a spiritual achievement in another sense, in that it means the working of spirit upon spirit, _i.e._, of one section of the power of reflexion upon another section of it. And what is meant by the supremacy of the reason over human dispositions? It means that both individuals and the mass let their willing be determined by the material and spiritual good of the whole and the individuals that compose it; that [pg 038] is to say, their actions are ethical. Ethical progress is, then, that which is truly of the essence of civilization, and has only one significance; material progress is that which is not of the essential at all, and may have a twofold effect on the development of civilization. This moral conception of civilization will strike some people as rationalistic and old-fashioned. It accords better with the spirit of our times to conceive of civilization as a natural manifestation of life in the course of human evolution, but one with most interesting complications. We are concerned, however, not with what is ingenious, but with what is true. In this case the simple is the true—the inconvenient truth with which it is our laborious task to deal. * * * * * The attempts to distinguish between civilization as what the Germans call “Kultur” and civilization as mere material progress aim at making the world familiar with the idea of an unethical form of civilization side by side with the ethical, and at clothing the former with a word of historical meaning. But nothing in the history of the word “civilization” justifies such attempts. The word, as commonly used hitherto, means the same as the German “Kultur”, viz., the development of man to a state of higher organization and a higher [pg 039] moral standard. Some languages prefer one word; others prefer the other. The German usually speaks of “Kultur”, the Frenchman usually of “civilisation”, but the establishment of a difference between them is justified neither philologically nor historically. We can speak of ethical and unethical “Kultur” or of ethical and unethical “civilisation”, but not of “Kultur” and “civilisation”. But how did it come about that we lost the idea that the ethical has a decisive meaning and value as part of civilization?