We are no longer shocked by the notion that the idea of Progress has replaced a vision of

Paradise as the central concern of modern

man. From the early seventeenth century on, this displacement, as significant in its way as
Copernicus' revolutionary shift of the earth

and sun, has increased steadily, though intermittently. The begin

nings of the movement are fittingly symbolized by a famous state ment of Galileo, which
suggests that he was more concerned with

"how the heavens go" than with "how one goes to heaven."From the time of Galileo to the
present, it is only natural that the

idea of progress should have undergone continuing change. There are difficulties, however, in
tracing this change, and these ought to be stated at the onset. For one thing, the idea of progress
is inti

mately related to all of modern intellectual history; therefore, it is hard to pick it out as a single
thread. Secondly, although it mani

fests itself in practice as well as in theory, and filters up as well as down, the idea of progress
can be grasped with ease only in the great thinkers rather than in the amorphous masses; and
this means that we must deal with familiar figures of major stature and catch in a paragraph that
part of their elusive and complex theories which

relates to our subject. Lastly, our task must involve us in scandalous generalizations, random
selections, and glaring omissions.

I propose to travel the following route: to examine the scientific and historical imderpinnings of
the idea of progress in the seven teenth century; to look at its classical formulation in the
eighteenth century by Condorcet, in the light of antagonistic challenges from

Rousseau and Malthus; to estimate the changes in the idea of prog ress occasioned by the work
of Hegel and Marx; to acknowledge the metamorphosis of the idea of progress into a "culture-
versus civihzation" controversy (where scientific progress is not au