3.8 Human Progress
The State of Nature
The state of nature and natural law are not the same.
The state of nature is the primitive condition of humanity. It belongs to the earliest stage of human life, before the development brought by civilization. Natural law, by contrast, is the enduring law that guides humanity forward and supports its progress.
Civilization is incompatible with the state of nature because human beings are not meant to remain forever in their primitive condition. Humanity carries within itself the capacity to improve. Intellectual and moral development unfold gradually, just as a child does not remain forever in infancy.
The state of nature is therefore a transitional condition. It marks the starting point of human development, not its fulfillment. Human beings leave it behind through progress, labor, reflection, and social life. Natural law governs humanity throughout that journey, and people advance in proportion as they understand it more clearly and live in closer harmony with it.
The State of Nature and Happiness
It may seem that life in a primitive condition has fewer troubles because it also has fewer needs. Human beings in such a state do not yet create for themselves many of the difficulties that arise in a more developed society.
But that does not make the state of nature the highest form of earthly happiness.
Its happiness is the happiness of ignorance: simple, limited, and unreflective. It resembles the contentment of animals, or the ease of children who are unaware of the responsibilities and struggles that come with maturity. Such happiness has its place in an early stage of development, but it is not the happiness proper to a being called to grow in intelligence, conscience, and freedom.
A more advanced life may bring more trials, but it also opens the way to a richer and more meaningful good. Humanity is not destined for the comfort of primitiveness, but for the fuller life that comes with development.
The Irreversibility of Human Progress
Humanity cannot return to the state of nature.
Once the movement of progress has begun, it continues onward. Humanity may pass through difficulties, errors, and setbacks, but it does not truly go back to its infancy. To suppose that it could return permanently to its primitive state would be to deny the law of progress.
This forward movement is not accidental. It corresponds to the divine order. Human beings progress because they are meant to progress.
For that reason, the state of nature should be understood as the point of departure, not the ideal to which humanity must return. The true path lies in advancing through civilization while learning ever more faithfully to understand and practice natural law.
The March of Progress
Human beings carry within themselves the power to advance.
Progress is not merely something imposed from outside through education. It belongs to human nature itself. Yet it does not unfold in everyone at the same time or in the same way. Individuals and societies move at different speeds, and those who are more advanced help others move forward through life in common, mutual influence, and social contact.
Intellectual Progress and Moral Progress
Moral progress follows intellectual progress, but not always immediately.
As intelligence develops, human beings become better able to distinguish good from evil. Once that distinction is understood, choice becomes clearer. The growth of intelligence strengthens free will, and with stronger free will comes greater responsibility for one’s actions.
This helps explain why highly enlightened societies may still appear deeply corrupted. Progress does not arrive all at once in complete form. Like individuals, cultures advance step by step. Before the moral sense is sufficiently developed, intelligence can be used for harmful ends. Knowledge and morality are both powers within human life, but they do not always mature in perfect balance at the same moment. Over time, however, they tend toward harmony.
The Irresistible Character of Progress
No one is permitted to halt the march of progress.
Human beings may slow it for a time, but they cannot stop it. Those who try to block it, whether from pride, fear, or attachment to old forms, set themselves against a movement stronger than they are. They are eventually carried away by the very current they hoped to restrain.
Progress is a condition of human nature. It is a living force. Imperfect human laws may obstruct it temporarily, but they cannot suffocate it. When institutions and customs become incompatible with further development, they are overturned along with those who insist on preserving them. This continues until human laws come into closer accord with divine justice.
Divine justice seeks the good of all. By contrast, many human laws are shaped in favor of the strong and against the weak. Wherever such inequality becomes entrenched, progress works against it.
Even those who resist progress in good faith cannot finally prevent it. Some sincerely believe they are defending what is right, because from their limited point of view they mistake resistance for wisdom. Yet their opposition remains small before the larger movement of humanity. A tiny stone may jolt the wheel of a great cart, but it cannot keep the cart from moving.
Gradual Progress and Sudden Upheavals
The perfecting of humankind usually follows a slow and regular course.
There is a steady progress that arises from the natural order of things. Ideas mature gradually, customs soften, understanding widens, and human life is transformed little by little. But when a people or a civilization does not advance quickly enough, stronger interventions occur. At certain moments, physical or moral shocks transform societies.
Human beings cannot remain forever in ignorance, because they are destined for an end established by Providence. Circumstances themselves educate them. Moral revolutions, like social revolutions, take shape silently over long periods. They germinate through generations and then suddenly break forth, sweeping away old structures that have become too worn and too narrow for new needs and new aspirations.
During such upheavals, people often notice only the immediate disorder. They see confusion, loss, and disturbance, especially where their material interests are affected. Yet a wider view reveals something more. Out of turbulence, a deeper order emerges. What seems destructive in the moment may prepare a more just and more luminous future. These upheavals resemble storms that disturb the air but leave the atmosphere purified.
The Appearance of Regression
At times human perversity seems so great that it appears as though humanity is moving backward rather than forward, especially in moral life.
A broader view shows otherwise. Progress becomes visible when people gain a clearer understanding of evil itself. By learning to recognize abuses more plainly, they become more capable of correcting them. The very excess of evil helps produce weariness with evil. It teaches the need for reform and awakens the desire for the good.
What looks like decline may therefore be part of a deeper process of awakening. Increased sensitivity to injustice, corruption, and cruelty is itself a sign of advancement. Humanity improves not only by doing better, but also by seeing more clearly what must no longer be tolerated.
The Greatest Obstacles to Progress
The greatest obstacles to moral progress are pride and selfishness.
Intellectual progress continues constantly, but moral progress is delayed by these two vices. At first, advancement in knowledge and power may even seem to intensify them. As intelligence expands, ambition often grows with it, along with attachment to wealth, status, and domination. Yet even this has a place within the larger order. The pursuit of material gain can stimulate research, discovery, and the enlargement of the mind.
In this way, good may emerge even from conditions still marked by moral imperfection. The same movement that temporarily feeds vanity and greed can also widen understanding and prepare souls for something higher. But this condition is only temporary. It changes as human beings come to understand that beyond the fleeting enjoyment of earthly possessions there exists a far greater and more enduring happiness.
Two Forms of Progress
There are two forms of progress that sustain one another: intellectual progress and moral progress.
They do not proceed in exact step. One may advance more quickly than the other, especially across long stretches of history. Civilized societies often cultivate science, industry, and thought with great energy while moral life matures more slowly. Yet moral progress does occur.
A comparison between the customs of earlier centuries and those of more recent times makes this clear. Harshness has been moderated in many areas, ideas of justice have expanded, and human sensibilities have become more refined. The improvement may be incomplete, uneven, and mixed with many faults, but it is real.
There is no reason to suppose that the advance of morality must cease while intelligence continues onward. Humanity has not reached perfection, nor is moral perfection beyond its reach. Experience proves the contrary. Just as there is a great distance between the moral condition of one age and that of a later one, so future centuries may surpass the present in moral elevation as much as the present has surpassed the past.
The movement continues. However slow, however interrupted, however obscured by crises and resistance, humanity advances toward clearer understanding, greater justice, and a more complete union of intelligence with the good.
Relapsed Cultures
History shows that some cultures, after reaching a high degree of development, seem to fall back into barbarity when violent upheavals shatter their institutions. Yet this apparent regression does not overturn the law of progress.
A society in decline may be compared to a house that threatens to collapse. It is demolished so that a stronger and more comfortable one may be built. During the rebuilding there is disorder, discomfort, and confusion, but these do not mean that nothing is being gained. They are part of a transition toward something more stable.
Another image makes the same truth clearer. A poor person once lived in a hovel and later, having become wealthy, left it for a palace. Someone poorer still then takes shelter in the abandoned hut and feels fortunate merely to have a roof. In the same way, the spirits incarnated in a declining culture are not necessarily the same spirits who formed it during its period of splendor. Those earlier spirits have progressed and moved on to more advanced conditions. Less developed spirits take their place for a time, and they too will eventually leave as they advance.
What looks like a relapse in a people may therefore be, in part, a change in the quality of the spirits incarnating there.
Peoples That Resist Progress
Some peoples seem, by temperament and custom, to resist progress. But such resistance is not indefinite. Groups that persist in opposing the movement forward gradually disappear in their present bodily form.
Their souls, however, are not abandoned. Like all others, they are destined to reach perfection through many successive existences. No soul is excluded from the universal law of advancement.
The most civilized individuals of today may themselves have passed through very primitive conditions in earlier lives. Those who now stand farthest from brutality were once immersed in it. Human superiority is never an original privilege; it is the result of long development.
The Life and Decline of Cultures
Like individuals, cultures have periods resembling childhood, maturity, and decrepitude. History confirms this. But decline does not affect all civilizations in the same way, nor does every kind of greatness deserve to endure.
Cultures that live only a material life, and whose greatness rests merely on force, conquest, or territorial expansion, are born, grow, and pass away because material power is exhaustible. Their strength wears out as the strength of an individual body does.
The same is true of societies governed by selfish laws—laws opposed to enlightenment and charity. Such societies carry within themselves the seeds of dissolution. Light disperses darkness, and charity overcomes selfishness.
There is, however, another kind of collective life: the life of the soul. A people whose laws harmonize with the eternal laws of the Creator possesses a deeper principle of endurance. Such a people does more than survive materially; it becomes a moral light for others.
Will Humanity Become One Nation?
Progress will not merge all the peoples of the earth into a single nation. Such uniformity is neither possible nor desirable. Nationalities arise from differences in climate, customs, needs, and the forms of law shaped to answer them.
Unity does not require sameness.
What progress can establish is something higher than political fusion: moral fraternity. Charity is not limited by geography, climate, or color. When divine law becomes the foundation of human law everywhere, peoples and individuals will practice mutual charity, live in peace, and cease trying to deceive or exploit one another.
The future of humanity is not a world stripped of all distinctions, but a world in which differences no longer serve as pretexts for domination, contempt, or injustice.
How Humanity Advances
Humanity advances through individuals who improve and enlighten themselves. As their number increases, they take the lead and draw others after them. At certain moments, exceptional spirits appear and give a powerful impulse to collective development. Later, individuals invested with authority act as instruments of Providence, enabling humanity to gain, in a few years, ground that might otherwise have taken centuries.
This movement reveals a profound justice in the law of reincarnation. Good and enlightened individuals labor to raise a people morally and intellectually. If earthly life were unique, a serious injustice would follow: countless persons would die before the benefits of that progress reached them. Many would have struggled through barbarous ages only to disappear before the civilization they helped prepare had arrived.
Divine justice does not permit such inequality to be final. Through the plurality of existences, the right to happiness remains open to all. Those who lived in times of barbarity may return in times of civility, within the same people or another, and enjoy the improved conditions that collective progress has made possible. No one is forever deprived because they were born too soon.
Why Reincarnation Explains Collective Progress
Without reincarnation, the progress of cultures becomes difficult to understand.
If each soul were created at birth and lived only once, then the greater advancement of some individuals would imply that they had simply been created better than others. That would amount to favoritism without merit. It would also fail to explain how an entire people can move from barbarity to civilization over the course of centuries.
In a thousand years, the original inhabitants of a nation die and are replaced many times over. If those later individuals were souls newly created at birth, they would not be the same beings who had lived through the earlier barbarous age. In that case, the efforts made to civilize a people would not improve the souls that had been imperfect; they would merely prepare conditions for entirely different souls, supposedly created more advanced from the outset.
That idea conflicts with justice and leaves the continuity of human progress unexplained.
Reincarnation offers a coherent account. The souls incarnating during an age of civilization have, like all others, passed through less advanced stages. They have already lived many times, and they return more developed because of the progress they made previously. They are drawn to environments that correspond to their degree of advancement. Thus, the work of civilizing a people does not cause more advanced souls to be newly created; it attracts souls who have already advanced, whether they once belonged to that people in earlier periods or come from elsewhere.
Here lies the key to the progress of humanity as a whole.
The Moral Transformation of the Earth
As peoples rise in moral level, the earth increasingly becomes a world suited to better spirits. When all cultures reach a common degree of moral development, the earth will be inhabited only by good spirits living in fraternal unity.
Spirits still attached to evil will then find no environment here that suits them. Repelled by the transformed condition of the world, they will seek less evolved worlds more in harmony with their state, remaining there until they become worthy to return.
Under this view, social progress benefits not only present and future generations, but past generations as well, since those who once lived under harsher conditions may be reborn into better ones. They can continue their perfection in an environment of greater enlightenment and civility.
The upward movement of humanity is therefore real, even when history seems to show interruptions. Cultures may falter, institutions may crumble, and peoples may temporarily sink into confusion, but the souls involved continue their journey. Nothing truly good is lost. What is prepared in one age becomes the inheritance of another, and all are eventually called to share in the fruits of progress.
Civilization
Civilization is progress, but incomplete progress.
Humanity does not pass suddenly from infancy to maturity. For that reason, civilization should not be treated as a sign of pure decadence simply because it is accompanied by disorder, excess, or suffering. What deserves blame is not civilization itself, but the abuse made of it.
Incomplete Progress
As long as moral development remains behind intellectual development, civilization cannot yet produce all the good it contains in seed. Intelligence may create discoveries, inventions, comforts, and new forms of social organization, while moral life still lags behind. When that happens, the benefits of progress are mixed with selfishness, pride, ambition, and new forms of unrest.
This condition is temporary, though often painful. Civilization, in its unfinished state, creates needs that awaken passions. It refines capacities without immediately teaching their right use. Human faculties do not all develop at the same pace, and everything requires time. One cannot expect perfect fruit from an imperfect civilization.
The evils associated with developing societies do not prove that progress is false. They belong to a transitional condition. Primitive life may be free of certain complications, but it also lacks the broader development toward which humanity is called. The disorders of an incomplete civilization are part of a movement that eventually carries within itself their remedy.
The Purification of Civilization
Civilization will be purified when morality becomes as developed as intelligence.
The order of growth matters. The fruit does not come before the blossom. Intellectual advancement may prepare the way, but moral transformation must complete the work. As civilization becomes more perfected, it gradually corrects the very evils it once produced. In time, moral progress will cause those evils to disappear.
Real progress is therefore measured not only by what a society can invent, build, or accumulate, but by what it becomes in character. A people may be highly skilled, ingenious, and outwardly refined, yet still remain only at the first phase of civilization if vice continues to dishonor social life.
The Signs of a Completed Civilization
A completed civilization is recognized by its moral development.
External advances are not enough. Better clothing, greater comfort, scientific discovery, and technical achievement do not by themselves prove that a people is truly civilized. Civilization reaches maturity when social life is governed by fraternity, when people live toward one another as brothers and sisters, and when charity is practiced in earnest.
Where civilization is more advanced in the true sense, selfishness, greed, and pride are less powerful. Customs are more intellectual and moral than merely material. Intelligence develops more freely because it is not suffocated by prejudice or domination.
Such a society is marked by kindness, good faith, mutual benevolence, and generosity. Distinctions of caste and birth lose their force, because those prejudices are incompatible with genuine love of neighbor. Laws do not create unjust privilege. They are the same for the lowest and the highest.
Justice is administered with the least possible partiality. The weak find protection against the strong. Human life is more fully respected, and so are beliefs and opinions. There are fewer people abandoned to misery. Those of good will can count on not being deprived of the minimum necessary to live.
True Advancement Among Peoples
When comparing two societies that appear equally elevated on the social scale, the truly more advanced one is not the one with the greater display of power, luxury, or invention. It is the one in which moral corruption has diminished the most and human dignity is better honored.
The most civilized society is the one in which people are less driven by selfishness, less divided by inherited privilege, less brutal in law or custom, and more sincerely united by justice and generosity. True civilization is measured by the progress of conscience.
Civilization, like all things, passes through stages. Its present imperfections do not cancel its value. They show only that humanity is still on the way. As moral life rises to meet intellectual development, civilization becomes what it is meant to be: not merely enlightened, but just, humane, and truly fraternal.
The Progress of Human Legislation
Natural law would be enough to govern society if human beings truly understood it and lived by it.
Its principles are sufficient in themselves. Yet society has practical needs that call for specific rules adapted to social life. For that reason, human laws arise alongside natural law. They are not meant to replace it, but to apply justice within the changing conditions of human communities.
The instability of human laws comes from the imperfection of those who make them.
In barbarous times, the strongest impose the law and shape it to their own interests. As the human sense of justice grows clearer, such laws must be revised. Human legislation becomes more stable as it approaches true justice—that is, as it is made for everyone rather than for a few, and as it comes into harmony with natural law.
Civilization creates new conditions of life and with them new social needs. Different positions in society bring different rights and duties, and these must often be regulated through human legislation. But passion and self-interest have frequently led people to invent supposed rights and duties that natural law does not justify. As societies advance, they gradually remove these distortions from their legal codes.
Natural law does not change. It is the same for all. Human law, by contrast, is variable and progressive. Its changes reflect the gradual development of humanity. In earlier stages of social life, legislation could even recognize the right of the strongest, because human beings had not yet risen above that crude condition. Progress consists precisely in leaving such principles behind.
Harsh Laws and Moral Reform
Severe criminal laws may appear necessary in a corrupt society, but they reveal a deeper failure.
Such laws punish wrongdoing after it has already been committed. They do not reach the source of the evil. Fear of punishment may restrain some acts, yet it does not transform character. The true remedy is education, because education works on causes rather than only on effects.
As human beings become morally reformed, the need for harsh penalties diminishes. A society shaped by better principles requires fewer severe punishments because it produces fewer crimes that call for them.
How Laws Progress
The reform of laws comes gradually.
It advances through circumstances themselves, as changing conditions expose what is unjust or outdated, and through the influence of morally developed people who help direct society toward what is better. Legal progress is therefore not accidental. It follows the broader movement of human improvement.
Much has already been corrected, and more remains to be corrected. Human legislation advances step by step, becoming more just as humanity learns to reflect more faithfully the unchanging principles of natural law.
Spiritism’s Influence on Progress
Spiritism is destined to become a widely accepted belief and to mark a new era in human history.
Its strength lies in the fact that it belongs to the natural order of things. Because of that, it is called to take its place among the branches of human knowledge rather than remain the conviction of only a few. Its spread, however, does not occur without resistance.
The greatest opposition comes less from sincere conviction than from personal interest. Some resist out of self-concern, others from attachment to material advantages. As Spiritism advances, such opponents become increasingly isolated, until persistence in denial exposes them more than it protects them.
Progress Happens Gradually
Ideas do not change all at once. They are transformed slowly, weakening from generation to generation until old ways of thinking disappear with those who held them and are replaced by new principles.
This is true in religion, philosophy, and politics alike. Ancient pagan beliefs, once dominant, did not vanish immediately after the rise of Christianity. They lingered for centuries and left traces long afterward. In the same way, Spiritism advances steadily, but for two or three generations incredulity may still remain as a social fact. Time is needed to dissolve deeply rooted habits of thought.
Its advance, however, can be more rapid than that of Christianity. Christianity had to clear the ground and break down what stood in its way. Spiritism finds paths already opened and has chiefly to build.
No doctrine, however true, acts like a magic power that instantly transforms humanity. Human beings do not abandon indifference, selfish interests, or attachment to material things in a moment. Change takes place little by little, step by step, and each generation lifts part of the veil that has hidden deeper realities.
Even when only one person is corrected, real progress has already occurred. A first step is a genuine good, because it makes the next steps easier.
Spiritism’s Contribution to Human Progress
Spiritism contributes to progress above all by weakening materialism, one of the deep wounds of society.
When people understand that life continues beyond bodily existence, their true interests appear in a clearer light. The future life is no longer obscured by doubt, and present actions are seen in relation to their lasting consequences. Human beings then better understand that their future is prepared by the use they make of the present.
Spiritism also works against the prejudices that divide human beings. By undermining distinctions of sect, caste, and color, it teaches the great solidarity that should unite all people as brothers and sisters.
Its influence is therefore not limited to belief about invisible realities. It reaches moral life, social life, and the way human beings understand one another.
Why These Teachings Were Not Given Earlier
Truth is given according to humanity’s capacity to receive it.
Children are not taught as adults are taught, and newborns are not given food they cannot digest. In the same way, spiritual teachings are disclosed in proportion to human readiness. Many truths were taught earlier in forms that were partial, misunderstood, or distorted. Yet even incomplete teaching had its purpose: it prepared the ground.
What once seemed obscure was not useless. It was preparation. The soil had to be worked before the seed could be received and bear fruit.
Why Progress Is Not Forced by Miracles
It may seem that overwhelming manifestations would quickly compel belief and accelerate human progress. But belief imposed by spectacle is not the way divine wisdom ordinarily guides humanity.
What people call miracles are already spread abundantly throughout creation, yet many still refuse to see them. Even striking and visible events do not convince everyone. There are always those who deny what is before their eyes, and some would remain unconvinced even if they personally witnessed extraordinary facts.
For that reason, progress is not founded on prodigies meant to overpower disbelief. God leaves human beings the merit of being convinced through reason.
Reasoned conviction is more durable than astonishment. It respects freedom, fosters genuine understanding, and produces a deeper and more lasting transformation than belief forced by marvels alone.