What progress--it is a question which some will receive with almost angry
surprise--what progress has the human mind made since 1815?

If the thought be startling, do me the great honour of taking it home,
and verifying for yourselves its truth or its falsehood. I do not say
that it is altogether true. No proposition concerning human things,
stated so broadly, can be. But see for yourselves, whether it is not at
least more true than false; whether the ideas, the discoveries, of which
we boast most in the nineteenth century, are not really due to the end of
the eighteenth. Whether other men did not labour, and we have only
entered into their labours. Whether our positivist spirit, our content
with the collecting of facts, our dread of vast theories, is not a
symptom--wholesome, prudent, modest, but still a symptom--of our
consciousness that we are not as our grandfathers were; that we can no
longer conceive great ideas, which illumine, for good or evil, the whole
mind and heart of man, and drive him on to dare and suffer desperately.

Railroads? Electric telegraphs? All honour to them in their place: but
they are not progress; they are only the fruits of past progress. No
outward and material thing is progress; no machinery causes progress; it
merely spreads and makes popular the results of progress. Progress is
inward, of the soul. And, therefore, improved constitutions, and
improved book instruction--now miscalled education--are not progress:
they are at best only fruits and signs thereof. For they are outward,
material; and progress, I say, is inward. The self-help and
self-determination of the independent soul--that is the root of progress;
and the more human beings who have that, the more progress there is in
the world. Give me a man who, though he can neither read nor write, yet
dares think for himself, and do the thing he believes: that man will help
forward the human race more than any thousand men who have read, or