If progress were but the addition of bit to bit, of new bits to what is already there, or if we could change _this,_ and leave _that_ unchanged,--as the word perhaps verbally means, and as many people at any rate seem to understand it, progress might indeed seem an easy thing, and to be undertaken with a light heart. For, it would appear as if we could lose nothing, and might probably (indeed, as enthusiasm and forgetfulness of the merits of the past are in certain periods ready to urge, must certainly) gain. But it is a more serious matter when we realise that we must move altogether, if we really are to move at all; i. e. really are to make progress, and not merely change, so to speak, from one foot to rest on another. For progress,--if it be what it is expected to be, and what it must be if it does what it is expected to do--is an organic, and not merely a mechanical or chemical change. A mechanical change is only a nominal or formal change: a chemical is more than change; but in organic change, that which changes also abides, and the new is not merely other than the old, and not merely a re-arrangement of the old, but the old transmuted,--the same yet not the _mere_ same[8]. Progress in short is always the unity of differentiation and integration. It must not be an externality, nor a mere dead product of a transformation scene, but a continuous growth, inwardly digested, made part and parcel of the collective life, which it has thereby rendered more full, real, and not merely made less intense at the cost of some extension. In true progress, which is only another name for true growth, nothing is quite lost, but only changed, retained in a richer shape and a fuller reality. How far such progress is possible, except in limited and finite spheres: how far progress in one involves necessarily deterioration in another and how, therefore, progress is not attributable to the Absolute, are questions we need not here discuss. But so far at least we may go as to say that a progress which does not follow the natural law of development and carry on into the future the worth and substance of the past, is not a progress which any general enthusiasm ought to be spent upon.