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Adventures in Philosophy |
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by Moses Mendelssohn
Progress is for individual man, who is destined by Providence to pass a portion of his eternity here on earth. Every one goes his own way through life. One's route leads him over flowers and meadows; another's across desert plains, over steep mountains or by the side of dangerous precipices. Yet they all get on in the journey, pursuing the road to happiness, to which they are destined. But that the bulk, or the whole human race here on earth, should be constantly moving forth in progress of time, and perfecting itself, seems to me not to have been the design of Providence. Do you want to divine the design of Providence with man? Then forge no hypotheses; look only around you at what actually does pass -- and if you can take a general view of the history of all ages -- at what has passed from the beginning. That is fact: that must have belonged to the design; that must have been approved of in the plan of Wisdom, or at least have been admitted in it. Providence never misses its aim. That which actually happens must have been its design from the beginning, or have belonged to it. Now, in respect to the human race at large, you do not perceive a constant progress of improvement that looks as if approaching nearer and nearer to perfection. On the contrary, we see the human race as a whole subject to slight swings; and it never yet made some steps forward but what it did, soon after, slide back again into its previous station, with double the celerity. Most nations of the earth pass many ages in the same degree of civilization in the same crepusculous light, which appears much too dim for our spoiled eyes. Now and then a particle of the grand mass will kindle, become a bright star, and run through an orbit, which, now after a longer, now after a shorter period, brings it back again, to its standstill, or sets it down at no great distance from it. Man goes on; but mankind is constantly swinging to and fro, within fixed boundaries; but, considered as a whole, retains, at all periods of time, about the same degree of morality, the same quality of religion and irreligion, of virtue and vice, of happiness and misery; the same result, when the same is taken into account against the same; of all the good and evil as much as was required for the transit of individual men, in order that they might be trained here on earth, and approach as near to perfection as was allotted and appointed to every one of them.
Excerpted from Jerusalem: A Treatise on Ecclesiastical Authority and Judaism, by Moses Mendelssohn |
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