Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: TS PROGRESS AND CIVILISATION. There is no one idea which so universally pervades the public mind of Europe as that of Progress. The Progress of the Nation, the Progress of the Age, the Progress of Civilisation, the Progress of Society, the Progress of Mankind, are phrases which meet us everywhere. We find them in the columns of every newspaper, in the articles of every Eeview, in the Philosophic pages of Buckle and Macaulay, in Social Science Congresses, in private circles, in Parliamentary Debates, and even in the Pulpit. Nor is there anything the least surprising in the general prevalence of such ideas. We whose lot has been cast in this nineteenth century have had the high privilege of living during a most eventful epoch in the history of civilised man. We are often referred to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as the period when Europe was arousedfrom the lethargy of the Middle Ages, and when various discoveries and inventions imparted a new impulse to civilisation. We read of the inventions of printing and of gunpowder, of the discovery of the properties of the Magnetic needle, and the consequent improvement of Navigation. The progress thus made in this art led to the discovery of the New World and of the passage by the Cape of Good Hope, while from the great astronomical discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo in the same period may be dated the birth of modern Science. There cannot be a doubt either that these great events did give an extraordinary stimulus and momentum to the advancing movement of that age, or that these powerful agents are still at work after the lapSe of between three and four centuries. They have lost none of their original force, they are not spent or exhausted; but, on the contrary, are going through a process of development, which is adding t...