It would seem to follow from these considerations that progress involves something more than the continuous accumulation of results in some specified direction, the piling of them up on one another in such a way that the total heap is more impressive than any of the portions added to it, and more illustrative, consequently, of a particular career. There might, indeed, be progress in this sense, if we divorced the conception of it from any standard which might intelligently judge it and set a value upon it. For the passage from seed to fruit, or any movement in time which attains an end illustrative of the steps by which it has been reached is in that sense progressive. But progress in this sense means no more than the fact of history. The career of things in time is precisely that sort of movement, and indicates the sense in which history is naturally purposeful. To call it progress adds nothing to the meaning of it unless a standard is introduced by which it can be measured. If we will risk again the treacherous distinction between man as intelligent and nature as simply forceful, we may say that progress rightfully implies some improvement of nature. We should then see that to improve nature involves the doing of something which nature, left to herself, does not do, and, consequently, that nature herself affords no indication of progress and no measure or standard of it. Nor does history afford them, if we divorce history from every moral estimate of it. For again, we may say that progress implies some improvement of history, so that to judge that there has been progress is not to discover that history by evolving has put a value upon itself. It is rather to judge that history has measured up to a standard applied to it. It seems idle, therefore, to suppose that history apart from such a standard can tell us what progress is or whether it has been made.