Khafre), King of Egypt (r.c. 2850 B.C.)] and Hermes, or our bas-reliefs
with those of Persepolis or the Parthenon, or our paintings with those of the
van Eycks [Eyck, Hubert van (1366?-1426); Eyck, Jan van (1370?-1440)]
or Holbein [Holbein, Hans, the Younger (1497?-1543)]? If “the
replacement of chaos with order is the essence of art and civilization,”
is contemporary painting in America and Western Europe the replacement
of order with chaos, and a vivid symbol of our civilization’s relapse into
confused and structureless decay?
History is so indifferently rich that a case for almost any conclusion from
it can be made by a selection of instances. Choosing our evidence with a
brighter bias, we might evolve some more comforting reflections. But
perhaps we should first define what progress means to us. If it means
increase in happiness its case is lost almost at first sight. Our capacity for
fretting is endless, and no matter how many difficulties we surmount, how
many ideals we realize, we shall always find an excuse for being
magnificently miserable; there is a stealthy pleasure in rejecting mankind or
the universe as unworthy of our approval. It seems silly to define progress
in terms that would make the average child a higher, more advanced
product of life than the adult or the sage–for certainly the child is the
happiest of the three. Is a more objective definition possible? We shall here
define progress as the increasing control of the environment by life. It is a
test that may hold for the lowliest organism as well as for man.
We must not demand of progress that it should be continuous or
universal. Obviously there are retrogressions, just as there are periods of
failure, fatigue, and rest in a developing individual; if the present stage is
an advance in control of the environment, progress is real. We may
presume that at almost any time in history some nations were progressing
and some were declining, as Russia progresses and England loses ground
today. The same nation may be progressing in one field of human activity
and retrogressing in another, as America is now progressing in technology
and receding in the graphic arts. If we find that the type of genius prevalent
