not conceived of as the result of any rational human control, nor is the achievement of the progress itself generally thought of as taking place according to any rational or logical processes. It is the free gift of the gods or of a god and is for the inheritance of the elect. Although this more or less ecstatic and mystical concept of progress has numbered among its adherents some of the greatest names in the history of religious faith and dogma, it is now become a view of but little importance in the world of ideas. Its present adherents are numbered among the relatively undistinguished sects, still largely uncontaminated by the trends of modern science.

A second general theory of progress has regarded it as an inevitable consequence of the order of nature itself. This concept of progress as the product of the "natural order" is decidedly one which has grown up in the period of written history. It began to be split off from the notion of a theologically or personally ordered world (as implied in the preceding theory) in the days of the early Greek philosophers who lie between Thales of Miletus and Socrates of Athens. Their concept of Nous as a general principle of balance or harmony in the universe, extending itself into the human personality as reason and into society as positive law and custom, gradually replaced the concept of the gods, as far as the thinking of the philosophers was concerned. But it was not until early modern times that this principle of Nous (corresponding to the principle of natural law of the post-Aristotelians) came to be conceived of as a force making inevitably for progress, so tenaciously did the tradition of the "fall of man," on the one hand, and the theory that righteousness is to be attained only in the hereafter or in the "city of God," on the other hand, hold it back. The "reason" of Socrates and the sophists, which divided the field with the "revelation" of the theologians in the minds of the churchmen of the Middle Ages, aided by the "experience" philosophy of Roger Bacon, began to outdistance its rival theological concept in the turbulent sixteenth century, and by the close of the eighteenth century it had won a

"This view of natural law as the mother and source of human law and human reason was especially developed by the philosopher theologians of the Middle Ages. See particularly the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Maimonides, and the later writings of Suarez, Grotius, and Vico.

complete victory. Aided by the careful logical analyses of Montesquieu and the brilliant periods of Voltaire and a half-hundred followers, reason had apparently laughed revelation to scorn in the thinking of the intelligensia; a task which was to be completed for the literate masses of the nineteenth century by such publicists as Thomas Paine, Bradlaugh, Ingersoll, Haeckel, and their imitators.

The theory of evolution of Spencer and Darwin, though in the main formulated according to scientific inductions from the facts of natural history, was seized upon by the metaphysicians and harmonized with their conception of a metaphysical natural law. Thus the principle of evolution was made to confirm the supposed inevitableness of progress metaphysically conceived which had been predicated in theory by Vico and expanded and enlarged by the philosophers of the French Enlightenment using the historicalrational method of exposition to formulate and justify their contentions. What history did for the metaphysicians of the eighteenth century, in positing a theory of inevitable progress, biology confirmed and reinforced in the nineteenth century.

Both of these earlier concepts of progress place the motivation for, and even the center of the process of achievement itself, outside of the initiative of man as a causal factor. According to the former theory, man is only an end-product and a recipient of the process which is determined in the minds of the gods. According to the other or metaphysical view, the process originates outside of man in Nous or natural law, but it realizes itself, in so far as social as distinguished from cosmic progress is concerned, through the mind of man, or the human extensions of the universal principle of natural law, that is, human reason and legislation. It has remained for the third or scientific explanatory theory of social progress to conceive of it as purely a human concept originating in the mind of man himself, as a phase of his conscious or telic adjustment to his world. It declares that the scientific theory of social progress is but a viewpoint from which to regard the world and to see it in reciprocal relation or as a unity, the statement of a shifting and tentative objective to serve to correlate the efforts of mankind for improvement which would otherwise conflict and largely neutralize one another, as indeed they largely continue to do to this

day. Such, also, might be regarded as the implied intention, or at least the imputable function, of the theological conception of progress, in so far as it finally succeeded in shaking itself free from a theory of regression and entered upon a constructive statement of social advancement. This advancement was, however, to be conceived as the gift of the gods, rather than as the result of the telic efforts of man. But this theological theory was not able to render itself sufficiently utilitarian and functional. It so largely ignored human initiative and effort in its prospectus of progress, and it carried such a dead weight of magic and was generally so averse to the adoption of a scientific explanation of phenomena and procedure, that it could not function telically. Its method of mysticism and magic held it to the past or merely to a subjective and aesthetic interpretation of phenomena.

The metaphysical theory is now being attacked by the metaphysicians themselves, and the theologians see in it the enemy of faith. Dean Inge3 denies that there is any inevitable tendency toward progress, and maintains that science and invention have probably done as much harm, except in providing creature comforts, as good for civilization. Mr. Robert Shafer contends that the doctrine breeds a harmful optimism which ultimately will lead to bitter disappointment and a strong social reaction. There is no general law of progress, he says, and none can be formulated. Those who adhere to science as a method also have had their fling at the metaphysical doctrine of progress. They point out that a scientific theory of evolution contains in it no implications for a metaphysical doctrine of progress, since evolution may be either progressive or regressive, and that the concept of progress itself is a purely human one." Park and Burgess go so far as to maintain that there can be no general sociological theory of progress, but that progress must be conceived and promoted only in particular fields, such as medicine, engineering, education, and the like, leavThe Idea of Progress. (Gifford Lecture for 1920.)

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*Progress and Science, chap. ii.

A. J. Todd, Theories of Social Progress, chaps. vi and vii; Bernard, "The Conditions of Social Progress," American Journal of Sociology, July, 1922. "Introduction to the Science of Sociology, pp. 1001-2.

ing progress in general—if there is such a thing-to take care of itself or to profit from the results in the special fields.

With Mr. Shafer and similar critics of the theory of progress we can heartily agree in at least one matter-that there is no general "natural" law of progress, because there are no "natural" laws of any sort. Mr. Shafer argues-in so far as he argues at all on logical rather than on personal grounds-against a theory of progress which is already discredited. He militates as a metaphysician and a theologian against a metaphysical conception. Apparently, he has not yet grasped the scientific conception of progress.

Law is distinctly a human concept of human origin, although it required many ages for man to realize this fact. It is the causal or reciprocal order which man reads into nature or society from the anthropocentric standpoint, to help him see things in relationship and thus to control his adjustment to his world in order that it may become a tolerable place in which to live. This anthropocentric statement of law may be seen in all stages of efficiency for enabling man to realize his twofold purpose of understanding or seeing and of controlling (his adjustment to) his world. The earliest forms of scientific law are descriptive and very general. Accordingly, man's understanding of his world and control over it are vague and imperfect. Gradually, by logical and experimental devices, he perfects his generalizations about his world until they become precise and quantitative. They are based on ascertained facts instead of assumptions. He makes the transition from magic and fetishism and metaphysical conceptual logic over to scientific method. His insight into his world grows and his control over it becomes so effective that there is a diminishing ratio of error and waste energy in comparison with accurate and effective adjustment. Such has been the history of the interpretation of phenomena and of their control or adaptation through scientific generalization or law. This process, at first based on theological and metaphysical-magical and hypothetical-guesses and approximations, has steadily proceeded toward tested and measured generalizations, in which quantitative measurements take the place of assumptions based on analogy and similarity. But all alike, whether based on magic or science, guess or quantitative measurement, have been the result of

the projection of a human viewpoint." The law is merely the generalization of what man sees. Shift his viewpoint and he sees something else and systematizes or organizes quantitatively what he sees in other generalizations, and this is true without limit.

The law is not in nature. It is in the mind of the person who has formulated it as a method of seeing nature and in the minds of those who have copied it from him as a viewpoint. This is a fact which the metaphysician has not yet realized, and the realization of it will transform his attitudes toward science, progress, human relationships, all things. It will create a new intellectual, perhaps a new emotional, world for him. The mark of the metaphysician is that he conceives of law as a part of a fixed and absolute, unvarying "nature," as an extension of the "natural" order through "reason," into the minds and institutions of man, just as the mark of the theologian is that he regards law, morals, conscience, truth, as existing as unvarying absolutes in the minds of the gods and emanating therefrom, either through "revelation" (the spoken word of the gods) or through "intuition" (inner revelation). The method of the scientist, which in its pure form is wholly without mysticism, does not give him any means with which to trace the law farther back than his own or other men's psychic and physical reactions to phenomena. As a scientist he is able neither to confirm nor to deny the assertions of the metaphysician or of the theologian who professes to be able to go back of his perception to other sources of truth.

The scientific method of formulating laws may be illustrated from the field of physics, because in this field of knowledge man's perceptions of phenomena have been very largely reduced to quantitative abstract generalizations and these generalizations or laws are fairly widely known at the present time. Physical laws do not describe the concrete phenomena of nature. They only establish a generalized, and more or less arbitrary, abstracted norm which serves as a basis for the measurement of these phenomena or events and of their relationships to one another. Thus, the law of

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See article on "Invention and Social Progress" by the author in American Journal of Sociology, July, 1923, for an account of the projective method of thinking.