The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

*98. ADAMS, H., The Education of Henry Adams.

99. BERGSON, Creative Evolution.

100. SPENGLER, O., Decline of the West. 2 v.

*Books marked with a star are recommended for purchase. Number of books starred, 27; approximate cost (based upon a survey of secondhand bookstores), $90. Number of volumes in the list: 151; approximate cost (based upon a survey of secondhand bookstores), $300. Time required for reading: 4 years at 7 hours per week, 10 hours per volume.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Ten “Peaks” of Human Progress

INTHE YEAR 1794 a young French aristocrat by the magnificent name of Marquis Marie Jean de Condorcet was hiding from the guillotine in a little attic room on the outskirts of Paris. There, far from any friend, lest the coming of a friend should reveal his hiding place, he wrote the most optimistic book ever penned by the hand of man, Esquisse d’un tableau des progrès de l’esprit humain (A Sketch of a Tableau of the Progress of the Human Spirit).

Eloquently he described the recent liberation of science from the shackles of superstition and gloried in the triumphs of Newton. “Given 100 years of liberated knowledge and universal free education,” he said, “and all social problems will, at the close of the next century, have been solved…. There is no limit to progress except the duration of the globe upon which we are placed.”

Having completed his little manuscript, Condorcet handed it to his hostess. Then, in the dark of the night, he fled to a distant village inn and flung his tired body upon a bed. When he awoke, he found himself surrounded by the police. Taking from his pocket a vial of poison which he had carried for this culminating chapter of his romance, Condorcet drank it to the last drop and then fell into the arms of his captors, dead.

I have never ceased to marvel that a man so placed—driven to the very last stand of hope, with all his personal sacrifices of aristocratic privilege and fortune gone for nothing, with that great revolution upon which the youth of all Europe had pinned its hopes for a better world issuing in indiscriminate suspicion and terror—should, instead of writing an epic of despondency and gloom, have written a paean to progress.

Never before had man so believed in mankind, and perhaps never again since. Search through all ancient Greek and Latin literature, and you will find no affirmatory belief in human progress. Not until the Occident brought into the Orient the virus of—the fever of—progress can you find in any Hindu or Chinese thinker any belief in the notion that man marches forward through the years. It is a relatively new idea for men to have and to hold.

Progress—A Definition

What shall we mean by “progress”? Subjective definitions will not do; we must not conceive progress in terms of one nation, or one religion, or one code of morals; an increase of kindness, for example, would alarm our young Nietzscheans. Nor may we define progress in terms of happiness, for idiots are happier than geniuses, and those whom we most respect seek not happiness but greatness. Is it possible to find an objective definition for our term—one that will hold for any individual, any group, even for any species? Let us provisionally define progress as “increasing control of the environment by life,” and let us mean by environment “all the circumstances that condition the coordination and realization of desire.” Progress is the domination of chaos by mind and purpose, of matter by form and will.