The compensatory idea of a better life in heaven has played an enormous part in the social life of the world. Historians agree that the Wesleyan movement in the eighteenth century was instrumental in guaranteeing England against a violent revolution. The intolerable conditions created in the first generations of the industrial revolution were made tolerable to the labouring masses, who were living in conditions of indescribable wretchedness, by this ardent preaching of the happiness which was going to be theirs after death. In the same way there seems to have been a real feeling during the nineteenth century, among the oppressed and the miserable, that this wonderful good time which was going to come on earth in two or three centuries was in some way a compensation for the miseries being suffered in the present. We have some very interesting literary expressions of this idea from the nineteenth century. One of the first is to be found in Tennyson’s poem ‘Locksley Hall’, which was published in 1842. This is a very curious poem. The hero is a young man who has been bitterly disappointed in love and who consoles himself not with philosophy, and not with religion, but by reflecting on the march of progress and on the wonderful things which will happen in the future. He talks about the increase of knowledge and of virtue and finally about the parliament of man, the federation of the world.
A few years later, in the same year as the publication of the Origin of Species, you find Victor Hugo, in France, talking even more lyrically about progress and what it means to man. He has the most fantastic passage where he speaks of man sailing in a kind of magic ship through the ether. The ship is the calculus of Newton mounted upon the odes of Pindar—a mixture of inspiration and science—and man is sailing clothed in light into the pure and divine future, into virtue, into shining knowledge, into the end of plague and disaster, into abundance, into calm and laughter and happiness, into union with heaven. This goes on for hundreds of lines. It clearly was Victor Hugo’s brand of religion, and perhaps a majority of the great literary figures of the nineteenth century felt rather the same way.
There are, however, a few exceptions. You will find in Alfred de Vigny, for example, an extremely sceptical reaction to the first railroads. He was by no means convinced, as Victor Hugo and the French historian Jules Michelet were, that railroads were going to transport the human race into universal peace and universal virtue. On the contrary, he spoke of the potential danger of new machinery to man, the danger that the machinery might actually enslave its creator. It is interesting to see this dark picture appearing just at the time when there was the most unbounded optimism in regard to technical progress.
Outside the world of literature, you find these same ideas very strongly expressed at the time of the first of the universal exhibitions, the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London. This was opened by the prince consort on 1 May 1851; he spoke of it as the realization of the unity of mankind. In the staid columns of the London Times there were equally enthusiastic editorials which said the Exhibition foreshadowed universal peace, that this 1 May was the first morning since the Creation in which all the peoples had assembled from all parts of the world to perform a common act.
This tremendous enthusiasm did infect almost everybody, but it is interesting to find that the new religion of progress was regarded at the time by the guardians of Christian orthodoxy as extremely dangerous and heretical. In the Syllabus of Errors, published in 1864, Pope Pius IX lists as one of the grave errors (which must be pointed out and condemned) the idea that the Roman Pontiff should come to terms with, and reconcile himself to, progress, liberalism, and modern civilization. This was definitely a heresy which must not be accepted. Thus we see the incompatibility between the new view of time and of human development on earth, and the traditional Augustinian view of time on earth as quite unimportant, with future betterment existing only for a few and in another world.
In 1859 we come to the crucial year of the publication of the Origin of Species, which introduced the new scientific conception of the world as an evolutionary world which began in the immensely distant past and, without any breach of continuity at all between the lower forms and the highest human forms, will go on indefinitely into the future. The evolutionary theory as such is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, but it can be interpreted either way. There have been progressive movements within evolution—it is absurd to say that a human being is not superior to an amoeba. He clearly is superior. At the same time, however, it is quite clear that the evolutionary process has not been progressive along all lines; many have become extinct or completely stagnant, and the world today is full of what might be called living fossils.
Therefore, although there has been quite clearly a line of progress within the line of evolution, it cannot be said that the theory of evolution, when applied specifically to human beings, justifies neither pessimism nor optimism.
The prevailing interpretation in the latter half of the nineteenth century was optimistic. There were pessimists, such as Eduard von Hartmann, but they were much less influential than someone like Herbert Spencer, who developed a most elaborate and essentially optimistic evolutionary philosophy. The inevitability of progress seemed almost self-evident to Spencer; he regarded it as a law of equal validity with Newton’s law of gravitation. (Unfortunately, his whole theory assumed as its basis the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which we now have every reason for believing to be untrue.) There is no question that Herbert Spencer did exercise a prodigious influence in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that there was generally an extremely optimistic view of the future, a belief that progress was happening all the time and would almost certainly go on happening. I remember the golden glow of this optimistic theory when I was a child, the notion that we, who were fortunate enough to live in the more civilized parts of the world, were really incapable of doing the sorts of things that people had done in the remote past or that people were doing in the uncivilized parts of the world.
If somebody had asked me as a child, or my parents, if they thought that within my lifetime we should see large-scale revival of slavery, of torture, of persecution for heretical opinions, of mass deportations, we would have said, ‘It is absolutely impossible!’ Nevertheless, we have seen these dreadful things, and our hope in regard to the inevitability of progress has been very much shaken. We are convinced that we live in a world of incessant change, but we are not at all convinced now that this change must necessarily be in the direction which our system of values would regard as excellent. If we use enough intelligence and goodwill, we probably can achieve a high degree of progress, but it is up to us to see that this happens, and there is nothing in the processes of change themselves which is going to compel it to happen.
This tempered optimism is the most prominent view of the future, but another interesting fact is that with the coming of the hydrogen bomb human technology has reintroduced into the thinking of the West the old eschatological idea of the end of the world. The sudden and catastrophic ending of the world about which the Apocalyptic literature talks—a notion we had come to regard as untenable and absurd—has become once more a real possibility. Again, whether there shall be an indefinite future or whether there shall not is up to us.
Let us now consider, from our present viewpoint, what is likely to happen in the future. We begin with the very long-range view taken about four or five years ago by Sir Charles Darwin, the grandson of the naturalist, who is himself a physicist, in an interesting little book called The Next Million Years. It would seem at first glance that it is quite impossible to foresee what is likely to happen within a million years; and yet, in a certain paradoxical way, it is easier to make prophecies about very long spans of time than about shorter ones. The reason is quite obvious. When we deal with great spans of time we deal with huge numbers, and the average behaviour of great numbers of things or persons or
