that mankind revolves in a vicious circle is
 destroyed by patent facts. The mediaeval notion of
 a static society bound to rule-of-thumb routine is
 swept into the discard by events. (13)

 Encouraging this movement was the Industrial

Revolution which in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries affected much of Western Europe and the Northern

parts of the United States. The role of the machine in

increasing the wealth of the Western world was too

apparent to be disbelieved.4 The belief in progress

through a machine economy became widespread. The goal

of society came to be seen as further industrialization

and the idea of progress was elevated from the status

of belief to that of fact. Yet progress was not

necessarily continuous.

 It is quite easy to fancy a state of society, vastly
 different from ours, existing in some unknown place
 like heaven; it is much more difficult to realize
 as a fact that the order of things with which we
 are familiar has so little stability that our actual
 descendants may be born into a world as different
 from ours as ours is from that of our ancestors
 of the pleistocene age.

 But if we accept the reasoning on which the dogma
 of Progress is based, must we not carry them to their
 full conclusion? In escaping from the illusion of
 finality, is it legitimate to exempt that dogma
 itself? Must not it, too, submit to its own negation
 of finality? Will not that process of change for which
 Progress is the optimistic name, compel "Progress"
 too to fall from the commanding position in which it
 is now, with apparent security, enthroned?(15)


 13Ibid., p. xxiii.

 But notice William Woodruff and Helga Woodruff,
"Economic Growth: Myth or Reality; The Interrelatedness
of Continents and the Diffusion of Technology, 1860-1960,"
Technology and Culture, VII (Fall, 1966).

 15Bury, Idea of Progress, pp. 351-52.