Note 214 — Chapter V · SOME METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF ETHICS AND RELIGION

Not, of course, pure progress. It does not require profound insight to discover that moral progress, like everything else, has its price, and that all “progressive evolution” implies “degeneration” as one of its aspects. But the moral progress of society will be genuine if, on the whole, our gain is—from the moralist’s special standpoint—more than our loss. We have no reason to despair of our kind if the impartial historian, comparing the facts—not the self-complacent fictions of popular optimism—about our current social life with the facts—not the fancies of Apologetics—about social life, say, in the first century of the Roman Empire, can pronounce that there has been advance on the whole.