Chapter XI

THE PATH OF PROGRESS

ECONOMIC THINKING has always embodied some conception of progress and must always do so; for the concept of value is the chief concern of economic thinking, and progress is indissociable from value. Agnosticism with regard to value implies agnosticism with regard to progress. It may be a gay agnosticism like that of the old American folk song, "We don't know where we're going but we're on our way!" As Professor Walton Hamilton once pointed out, this refrain is a remarkably apt characterization of the state of mind into which some contemporary economists have got themselves. But gay or not, the state of mind which is described by this characteristically Hamiltonian irony is one of complete and stultifying agnosticism. Value may also be conceived to be known but unattainable, in which case progress also is unattainable. But if value is knowable and attainable, then progress also is knowable and attainable. If the technological process is the locus of value, the continuous development of the technological arts and crafts and the accompanying recession of superstition and ceremonially invested status is progress.

If the industrial revolution is itself the vehicle of progress, then Condorcet and the other optimists of the "age of reason" were not so far wrong as subsequent generations have believed. This does not mean that perfection is "just around the corner." But the authors of the idea of "infinite perfectibility" really made no such rash promise. In attributing the disorders and violence of the times to bad institutions Cordorcet was speaking the language of Veblen and Dewey more than a century before them; and in declaring that we are now entering a period of "neo­technics," he was only anticipating Patrick Geddes and Lewis Mumford. The fact that we have not yet fully realized the possibilities of science and technology­­ possibilities of emancipation from the follies of the past and of attainment of an "economy of abundance" ­­is of secondary importance. The primary consideration is the fact that we do now realize these possibilities more clearly and more generally than ever before. The disorders of the present age are more widespread and more cataclysmic than those even in which Condorcet himself was "liquidated." But no one any longer believes that disorder and destruction are inevitable or necessary. The "demonstration" that increase of population necessarily and inevitably nullifies all the achievements of advancing technology, by which the Reverend T. R. Malthus, avowed spokesman of the landed gentry, undertook the final refutation of Condorcet's revolutionary optimism, was abandoned even by its author in the second and subsequent editions of his celebrated Essay and is now completely discredited. No one any longer doubts the physical and technological possibility of a world­wide economy of abundance.

Far more than in the time of Condorcet the twentieth century has accepted the machine. No serious student attributes the evils of the age to its machines. Popular essayists sometimes write as thought tanks and airplanes were responsible for the bloodshed which is now going on, and novelists occasionally draw pictures of the horrors of a future in which life will have become wholly mechanized, with babies germinating in test tubes, "scientifically" maimed for the "more efficient" performance of industrial tasks. But this of course is literary nonsense, two kinds of nonsense. One kind portrays the devices of the future as horrible perversions, just as traveling in stagecoaches at the vertiginous speed of fifteen miles an hour was once thought to be. Extracorporal gestation might well be a great improvement on nature, just as the extraction of the mammary secretion of the cow is a great improvement and one to which we have been able to reconcile our sentiments of decency, though it must have seemed a horrible perversion to the stalwart moralists of primitive society. As Mr. J. B. S. Haldane pointed out many years ago, all biological inventions seem disgusting at first. But this is nonsense. If science can reduce infant mortality by establishing an "unnatural" relation between a human baby and a lactating quadruped, then by all means let it be done. Such, happily, is now the prevailing attitude.

To represent schemes of mutilation as the teaching of science for the attainment of efficiency is nonsense of quite another kind; it simply is not true. Mutilation is neither scientific nor efficient. If we can credit science at all, we must know that any community in which any sort of mutilation is practiced is a mutilated community. Modern industry demands the full powers of all its participants. Its development has all along been coincident with the expansion of the powers of a continually larger part of the community. Any deviation from this procedure is contrary to science and to industrial efficiency. It is said that the control of subject populations has recently been attempted by the withholding of certain vitamins from their diet; but no one has ever claimed that such a procedure enhances the efficiency of its victims, and no one who knows anything about science has ever seriously supposed that it is the discovery of the vitamins which has brought about such practices. After all, this is not the first time that victors have maimed the vanquished, as every good bible reader knows.

There is nothing wrong with the machines. Nevertheless many people whose minds are entirely free from nonsensical aversions are still unable to think of progress in terms of the advancement of science and the arts, chiefly for this reason. The traditional conception of progress is that of movement toward the attainment of an "end." Within the limits of day to day activity finite and provisional ends are of course set up. Thus one may speak of progress toward the attainment of an academic degree. In a much more general but still limited sense one may even speak of the advancement of science as progress toward knowledge, or something of the sort. But the idea still persists that the attainment of such limited objectives constitutes "real" progress only insofar as these limited objectives contain some particularization of the universal "end."

This is also true of value, which has likewise been traditionally conceived in terms of ultimate value, the summum bonum of the philosophers. Thus the real difficulty with regard to "ends" is a major obstacle to a technological (or instrumental) understanding of the whole value­progress complex. It is frequently expressed in simple and direct language such as this. A machine is neither good nor bad in itself. The question is, What is it for? What does it do? What end does it serve? A machine (or instrumental technique) may serve desirable ends. It may save life or enrich personality. But a machine may also serve the ends of destruction and debasement. Machines are used in war, and scientific knowledge may be employed in the commission of crime. How then can we speak of machines, or even of the arts and crafts and instrumental procedures as a whole, as being good in themselves, irrespective of the ends for which they are employed? How can we speak of the advancement of science and technology as progress except with reference to some conception of the end to the attainment of which all human efforts are directed ?

It is by virtue of this way of thinking that consumption plays its unique role in economic theory. Consumption is the "end" for which all other economic activities are carried on, by definition. Textbook writers have fallen into the habit of explaining consumption to their readers as the process in which goods are "used up"; and this involves them in difficulties, since many things­­ such as diamonds, or even books ­­are not used up by their consumers, whereas many other things­­such as fuel­­ are used up in processes otherwise identified as production. The truth is, the other meaning of this root, by which it is linked to "consummatory" and "consummation," is the only one by which it can be clearly distinguished from production and is in fact the meaning which its earlier users definitely intended to invoke, as any student can demonstrate for himself by substituting the word "consummation" for "consumption" wherever it appears. This is why no one ever undertook to prove that consumption is the "end" for which all the rest is carried on. The distinction of "consumption" from "production" is synonymous with the distinction of "end" from "means."

So deeply is this distinction embedded in the thinking of the community that even avowed revolutionaries have been unable to eradicate it. No other revolutionary slogan has been more widely used and none has made a more effective appeal than the formula, "Production for use." To most people these words seem to appeal to simple common sense. Nevertheless they are in fact a transliteration into economic terminology of Kant's "categorical imperative," and their appeal is to metaphysical tradition. In proposing that we should "treat every man as an end and never as a means," Kant assumed "man" to be a spiritual entity. He did so on the basis of the immemorial tradition according to which it has been believed throughout the ages that every man has direct intuitive knowledge of himself as a spiritual entity. For all their anticlericalism it is to this essentially religious belief that modern revolutionaries appeal when they advocate "production for use," and it is this belief alone which sustains the conviction that machines economic processes, and human life itself can have significance only in terms of the "end" to which all else is a "means."

What is the evidence by which man knows himself "intuitively" to be a "mind" or "spirit"? It is "intuitive" in the sense that this "inner" knowledge, "inner" in the sense that it is not based on the evidence of the senses. The "knowledge" of primitive man was derived from the evidence of dreams, the departure of "life" with a dying gasp, and the like. But for all these phenomena modern science has other explanations, explanations which cover not only the actual phenomena of dreams, respiration, and the like but also the social processes of legend creation and transmission by virtue of which these phenomena have been so persistently misconceived, with the result that no evidence remains, and in destroying the last remaining vestige of supposed evidence of direct, intuitive, inner, self­knowledge of spiritual "reality," modern science has precipitated an intellectual revolution far more momentous than the one effected by Copernicus.

For what is at issue is not the "common sense" of the community. Copernican astronomy and Newtonian physics claimed the whole physical universe as the domain of science; but through the efforts of Descartes and his successors, of whom Kant was perhaps the greatest, an armistice was arranged between science and metaphysics. A boundary was established between the "outer" world of science and the "inner" world of metaphysics. According to the terms of this armistice the validity of the findings of science was conceded, subject only to this reservation. Such an arrangement was of course extremely favorable to science. Not only did it bring an end to the long struggle in which scientists had been engaged, permitting them to explore the moons of Jupiter and even the organs of the human body without further opposition; it also permitted scientists to be scientists and still to be men, retaining with regard to the "inner" and "real" world the beliefs with which they no less than all their neighbors had been indoctrinated "at their mothers' knees."

The relief was more than personal. Many a troublesome problem could be solved by a judicious application of the Cartesian compromise. Thus is was that classical political economy solved the troublesome problem of value and progress. Price is a physical phenomenon, a feature of the "outer" world, and therefore subject to scientific analysis. But the valuations which this mechanism of the market assembles and summarizes are the private experiences of individual souls and are therefore real and valid within the purview of Cartesian and Kantian metaphysics. The mechanism of production and the pecuniary organization of society is the "means" to which the satisfaction of the inner aspirations (wants) of mankind is the consummatory "end." In theory these two worlds are linked by price, which is both a physical mechanism and a register of spiritual experience.

This happy compromise was upset by the Darwinian revolution. It was of course science which violated the terms of the Cartesian armistice, and not in the field of biology alone. The demonstration of the continuity of the human species with all other species was of climactic importance, but archeological evidence of the continuity of present civilization with extreme antiquity, increasing knowledge of comparative cultures, analysis of social mechanisms in terms of "collective representations," "folkways," and "mores," greatly increased knowledge of the physical mechanisms of behavior and of the processes by which behavior patterns are formed in individual and social experience, all contributed to the elimination of the last frontier between knowledge and belief. As a result of all these developments science no longer respects the frontier by which the universe was once thought to be divided into "outer" and "inner" worlds, and no longer credits the supposed "immediate" knowledge of "inner" spiritual reality or recognizes the so­called "individual" wants and satisfactions as having any unique validity or as being in any sense "consummatory."

The disrepute into which the idea of progress has fallen in recent years is a further consequence of the collapse of metaphysical dualism and a phase of the general moral nihilism of the times. As such it is historically explicable. Just as the identification of the mores, the recognition of the traditional character of the "eternal verities," has given rise to the assumption that there are no verities, so the nullification of the "inner" world of consummatory spiritual experience has given rise to the assumption that consummation is meaningless; and since progress itself is supposedly meaningless except in terms of such attainment, the idea of progress itself has fallen into disrepute.

But however explicable, this situation is a paradox. It is the validity of science which has supposedly destroyed the values of the modern world, and it is the progress of science which has rendered the idea of progress itself supposedly untenable. Clearly there is more here than meets the eye. Why do we say that machines must be "for" use? The meaning "use" is implicit in the meaning "machine." We know that every paradise is a projection of some community's actual social arrangements into infinity. For South Sea Island dwellers it is the Ultimate Atoll, for Eskimos the Infinite Snowbank, in each case rule by the Perfect Chief, and so on. Such Projections, we know, are without validity. Yet we still insist that progress must be conceived in this way or not at all. Why? What principle of logic, or of common sense, presents our thinking with this absolute disjunction: either progress must be traditionally conceived and therefore without general validity, or it cannot be conceived at all? Such a disjunction can be sustained by definition. We can agree to limit the use of the word "progress" to "progress­as­it­has­been­ ­traditionally­conceived," and by doing so we can assert with confidence that progress­so­defined can be conceived only as­progress­ ­has­been­traditionally­conceived. But this is only a restatement of the initial agreement. The question still remains, Why should we subject or thinking to such limits in the first place? Doubtless it would only add to the confusion if we were to throw the meaning of the word "progress" wide open by making it synonymous with "change." On the basis of such a preconceived definition we might then declare that a chemical reaction is progress; but that would certainly not increase our understanding of social development. Surely there is some meaning which all the "collective representations" of human societies have had in common. What is it? What have they all been trying to do ?

All human behavior exhibits a certain continuity of a technological, instrumental, or cause­and­effect character. It is with reference to these observed and instrumentally "controlled" continuities that we use such terms as "value" and "progress" in common speech. In speaking of his "progress" down the page a writer is thinking in terms of the instrumental continuity of each written line with the line which precedes and the line which is to follow it. such continuities are clearly more significant the further they extend. Progress "toward" the "completion" of an essay is an extension of this character. Here also what the mind is grappling with is not a preconception of the finished essay but a continuity which exists in any given sentence or paragraph and extends to the paragraph, the sentence, and the final word to which this continuity extends. Meanings such as this are capable of a considerable degree of extension without confusion. Thus we speak quite easily of "the progress of science." It is the paradox of our present state of mind that in spite of the disrepute into which the whole conception of progress has fallen we do actually continue to employ such phrases as this quite without embarrassment. When a scientist speaks of the progress of science other scientists do not leap up to reproach him with having uttered nonsense, for the phrase "the progress of science" is not nonsense. Neither does it depend for its meaning on any preconceived idea of what "the total realization of all scientific knowledge" might be. The meaning to which such a phrase refers is not that of a quantity of knowledge­­ not a finite quantity any more than infinity. It is that of a process which is now going on and which may quite reasonably be conceived as continuing.

It is this meaning of process­continuity which has given rise to the conception of progress as a metaphysical projection. In the effort to extend our understanding of the continuities in which we are engaged we have inevitably raised even such extensive continuities as that of science to a larger scale. The question then becomes, in what fashion is science continuous with human activity generally? At this point, however, the imagination of mankind is liable to that peculiar sort of stimulation which we have recently identified as "ceremonial." We become excited, and we begin to think in capital letters. The everyday thinking which has sufficed for an understanding of common continuities now gives way to our inveterate propensity for myth­making; group loyalties become obsessive; and so we find ourselves insisting that the progress of science is but a "means" to the far more sublime "end" which is the eventual triumph of the Republican Party, or something of the sort. Does this mean that human behavior is wholly without significance? Or does it mean that our problem is one of decontamination ?

Is there no point of which we can say, "This is the point at which we went astray. Up to this point our thinking was sound; beyond this point it was unsound; and consequently it is to this point that we must return and renew the attempt to carry on from here by the same sound methods which had been employed hitherto"? Those who declare that the concept of progress "must" have reference to metaphysical ultimates, that metaphysical ultimates are without significance, and therefore that the concept of progress is itself without significance, seem to deny the existence of any such point. In doing so they seem to be making the same mistake into which we have been misled by the principle of "mores," that of asserting that all judgements are conventional observances and nothing more. Said the Cretan, all Cretans are liars. Since the effort to extend our understanding of the continuities of human behavior has resulted in metaphysical fatuities, they seem to say, all intellectual efforts must be of this character.

It is the progress of science which belies this judgement, and it does so not only by example but by precept. Not only is the progress of science and technology itself a significant reality; its inevitable extension to the study of human behavior has given us the means of distinguishing between technological and ceremonial activities. This is the point at which scientific generalization is securely tied to the everyday judgements of which common existence is composed. Speaking of the progress of science, for example, we can say with certainty that it is continuous with the technological practices in which men have engaged as far back as our knowledge goes, as it is also continuous with all present tool­using activities of the commonest and humblest sort. It is also continuous with all the "creative" activities which we designate as the arts.

This total activity, as we know, has undergone progressive development throughout human experience. All that we can now do is done by virtue of that progressive development. Progress is the continuation of this process. We speak with certainty of the progress of aviation, meaning that better planes are built now than formerly­­ better in the sense of larger, faster, stronger, lighter per horsepower, and so forth. This judgement is valid quite without reference to the "ends" for which planes may be used. The fact that some people are using planes to kill other people is quite as irrelevant as it would be for a hardware merchant to inquire whether a hammer is to be used to bash in someone's skull before venturing an opinion which is the better of two hammers. In the same sense the judgement that the progress of aviation is a part of general progress is a valid judgement. The continuity it asserts is between plane­building and building in general. Since the building of better planes is in fact contingent upon and contributory to better building generally, it is a part of a general process, coextensive with human existence, by virtue of which the human race has risen above the brutes and gives every indication of rising far higher than anyone now can foresee.

The fact of war is by no means irrelevant to this judgement. We sometimes hear it said that the only result of the invention, for example of airplanes is that people are killing each other on a larger scale than ever before. If such a proposition were true, it would indeed nullify the technological conception of progress; for if people are indeed being killed on a larger scale than ever before, this circumstance must eventually operate to the disadvantage of further airplane building and of technological development generally. But is it true? To say that killing is the "only" result of the technological development of the airplane is patently false, but this is perhaps a rhetorical exaggeration. The essential question is whether advancing technology creates disorder, and whether the disorders so created are in fact increasing by a cumulative process such as might be conceived to nullify the progress of the arts and sciences.

There is a sense in which technological development might be said to give rise to disorder> It has been recognized all along that technological development alters the physical habitat of a community in such a way that a shift in the institutional balance of power become inevitable. This shift may well be accompanied by disorder. In this sense the perfection of the airplane may be said to have brought on the present war; since, if the supposed supremacy of the French army and the British navy had not been a technological illusion, doubtless the present war would not have occurred. Does this mean that German (and Italian and Japanese) aggression had no part in bringing on the conflict? To say so would be equivalent to attributing the increase of kidnapping in recent decades solely to the development of the automobile without any reference to pre­ existing organized crime (especially in the prohibition era) or to police corruption and inefficiency, the confusion of legal jurisdictions form which law enforcement has always suffered in America, etc., etc. Doubtless it was the development of automobiles and motor highways which gave to crime this particular direction, and doubtless it was a change in the technology of war which gave international conflict this particular direction; but the forces of conflict are in every case institutional.

Even so, the question still remains whether conflict and disorder are in fact becoming more general and catastrophic. If they are, progress is nullified irrespective of the distinction between causes and directions. But on this point the evidence is conclusive. Current pessimism to the contrary notwithstanding. Population has increased tremendously throughout modern times. To be sure, this is no positive guarantee that it will continue to do so throughout the indefinite future, but neither is there any conclusive evidence that it will cease to do so. If the present disorders were unique, the situation would be rather more terrifying than it is. The very fact that they are not unique suggests that we must judge future probabilities in terms of an experience in which disorders such as the present ones have nevertheless been accompanied by continuing increase of population. It has been said that wars have been increasing in frequency throughout modern times, but in that case they must have been decreasing in violence­­ appearances to the contrary not withstanding­­ since throughout the same period population has unquestionably increased. If later wars had brought the same devastation throughout the areas involved which the Hundred Years War and the Thirty Years War brought to the areas most seriously affected, the situation would be quite different. But such is not the case. To recognize these facts is not to condone war, nor even to accept it as "inevitable." The only question at issue is whether the current evidence shows that disorders are in fact increasing catastrophically; and the answer is that the evidence shows nothing of the sort­­ or rather, just the contrary.

What the evidence shows is that humbug, cruelty, and squalor have been decreasing for the population as a whole throughout modern times as they have been decreasing throughout the history of the race. No one seriously advocates turning back the clock to the day when Plato dispensed sweet wisdom to a few disciples while all the rest of the world lived in fear of evil spirits, or to the day when theology was most angelic and the clergy lived in open concubinage, lords enjoyed first night rights with every bride, and no man was safe from violent molestation or from smallpox, typhus, and starvation. In spite of all sentimentality and all the intellectual scruples of scientific caution, we are all committed by the whole continuous series of everyday judgements and activities to carrying on those achievements of tool and instrument, hand and brain, the genuineness of which no one really doubts.

It is from the pattern of this continuing activity that the idea of progress derives its meaning. Nevertheless his meaning can be projected into the future. If the progressive advance of technology means a similarly cumulative diminution of the extent and importance in the affairs of the community of superstition and ceremonial investiture, then the projection of this process into the infinitely remote future would seem to reveal an "ultimate" condition of complete enlightenment and efficiency wholly devoid of mystic potencies. Such a state of affairs is perhaps difficult to imagine, and yet these phrases have a familiar sound. This would be in effect a classless society, one in which as a consequence of the withering away of the state (that is, the whole institutional scheme of rank and privilege) all prerogatives of status would have disappeared. It would be a society in which men and women would go about their concerns with the simple innocence of little children, one in which the lion and the lamb would lie down together in common amity.

These are poetic expressions. They lack the precision and detail of scientific formulas. What they express is perhaps vision rather than analysis. Nevertheless, as scholars have often remarked, the visions of the great spiritual leaders, the visions by which mankind has been most profoundly moved, exhibit striking similarities. It has often been remarked that the teachings of Jesus and Buddha were both characterized by a gentleness, an abhorrence of every manifestation of coercion, which is more than a mere quality of temperament. For both the injunction to turn the other cheek is accompanied by an equally fundamental abhorrence of Phariseeism, of the mores of conformity, and of the institutionalization of human behavior. These ideas, or attitudes, are also found in the teachings of lesser men such as Marx and even Condorcet. Perhaps it is impious to couple the name of Condorcet with that of Gautama Buddha, but Condorcet's aversion to Phariseeism and his conviction that emancipation comes only by enlightenment are singularly reminiscent of the teachings of Buddha. Scholars are still uncertain as the what "nirvana" meant to Buddha himself (as distinguished from the institutionalization of Buddhism in later centuries) , and therefore we may perhaps be allowed to conjecture that the "nothingness" by the attainment of which man was to free himself from spiritual slavery was less metaphysical and more sociological that the priestcraft of organized Buddhism has supposed and was not altogether unrelated to the Marxian nothingness of the classless society which follows the withering away of the state. It is also worthy of remark that all these seers viewed the use of tools, the ordinary act of the common artisan, as a function of the profoundest import. The fact that Voltaire closed Candide by retiring to cultivate his garden means more than a mere shrug of ironic shoulders; it imputes a reality to the act of cultivation which is absent from the institutionalized humbug of the world of affairs. We must not overinterpret these poetical expressions. Certainly we must not impute to the teachers of the past­­ in some cases of many centuries past­­ all the analytical clarity which our generation owes to the sum of the scientific achievements of the race. But perhaps the difference is more one of terminology than of substance. Perhaps the knowledge we have attained by laborious analysis may be essentially the same as the insights of poetic vision, the vision of a world in which enlightenment would have replaced superstition, and efficiently organized teamwork institutional coercion.

But even such a vision is a projection of the current process into the indefinite future, not an independently conceived "end" by which present process is to be judged and guided. What it represents is insight into the current realities of human life. It is these current realities of which the vision is a poetical expression and from which it derives its meaning, not the other way about. In this sense perfection may be conceived to have an operational meaning like the mathematical concept of infinity. Doubtless mankind will achieve perfection only at infinity. Doubtless technological progress is an asymptotic function. There is no finite moment in the past at which human behavior is know to have been wholly ceremonial. As far back as our knowledge goes rudimentary tool­activities have been going on; and our knowledge of the present situation does not encourage any expectation of the total disappearance of superstition, status, and institutional coercion within the foreseeable future. This does not mean that our interpretation of current process as one of progressive enlightenment and efficiency is incorrect. It means that the reality of progress is implicit in the finite process of which visions of infinity are a projection, just as mathematical infinity is a projection of finite series.

Within the limits of current process it is true that mankind needs superstition and coercion. This fact is often cited as the climactic nullification of the "illusion" of progress. But such an interpretation is an expression of the metaphysical misconception of the idea of progress. To whatever degree superstition and institutionalized status may prevail at any given time, the habituation of the race to those forms of behavior does constitute a need, just as a cripple needs a crutch. But the fact that a person is habituated to the use of crutches does not establish that crutches are good in themselves or that the attainment of crutchless health is a fatuous illusion. Needs conceived in weakness are not a sound criterion of possible achievement, for individuals or for societies. The supposition that the prevalence of institutionalized humbug and coercion at any given time proves the impossibility of progress is a special case of the paradox of Zeno. It was precisely by this method that Zeno was supposed to have "proved" that a moving object does not move, since at any given moment it is at a given point. This fact, as we have long since assured ourselves, does not prevent an object from passing through an infinite series of points during an infinite series of moments; and in the same sense the deplorable conditions which prevail in any community at any given time do not constitute a proof that such conditions must continue to prevail. Doubtless the immediate future will be not wholly different from the immediate past; but the fact that a given difference is infinitesimal does not mean that it is not profoundly significant.

The changes which have accompanied industrial revolution have been felt to be significant by the whole community throughout modern times. It is this judgement which has given rise to the idea of progress, an idea which is one of the most characteristic features of modern Western civilization.³ The idea has of course been institutionalized. When dynastic power was paramount, that was the force to which the progress of opulence was prospectively attributed. When money power superseded dynasties, the attribution was to "Capital the Creator." Throughout both these periods the nature of the process was but dimly apprehended. It is much clearer now. But the identification of technological process and its dissociation from institutional obsessions has been at the expense of the idea of progress. What we now have to do is to de­institutionalize that idea itself­­to recognize as a misconception the idea of progress as movement toward the attainment of some previsioned "end," and to reconstitute the criterion of progress in terms of the continuity of technological development. If we can do this­­ if we can now see that the path of progress is the advancement of the arts and sciences, tools, instruments, and the machine process, and not the apotheosis of any legendary power­system­­ we shall have consummated the revolution to which the Copernican revolution was a preliminary skirmish.

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