innovating: not asking if a machine or a system worked well, but if we could devise a better. In science—in all on which we pride ourselves in modern civilisation—we have followed the progressive principle: we have cultivated revolt. Since we began to do so, we have raised the level of our civilisation in each generation.
It is therefore not surprising that many are asking whether we ought not to extend the progressive principle to our religions, moralities, politics, economic systems, schools, domestic and civic and social traditions. It is, in other words, quite natural that there should be a demand for, not one reform only, but a hundred reforms, in modern life. We are justly, wisely proud of what is distinctive and superior in our civilisation: advance, better organisation, economy of waste, greater efficiency. The mystery is that so many would restrict this improvement to what they call the “lower” material departments of life, and keep a strict guard against the reformer at the frontiers of their spiritual or political world. The modern rebellion is a very logical effort to apply these very successful principles to as much of life as is susceptible of improvement.
This effort, further, coincides with the quite dominant and characteristic note of modern culture: evolution. We forget sometimes that until half a century ago Europe was oppressed by an entirely wrong view of the earth’s resources. Plato put a philosophic anathema on the earth. This material
