Geography and World Power

ISBN: 9781330430736 出版年：2016 页码：367 James Fairgrieve Forgotten Books

But history is not all repetition. There has been an advance. If we go back a year or two we mav not notice it, but if we cast our thoughts back some centuries and look all over the world, we are conscious that some thing oi an advance has been made, and if we consider the whole history of the world the progress becomes most evident. We may be very doubtful how to express what we mean by advance, but none the less we feel it is there. We are conscious, for example, that during historic times men's ideas of what is right and wrong have undergone a change which, on the whole, is for the better. But this is only one side of the advance. There are other obvious ways in which a change for the better has taken place. We are better off not only morally and intellectually, but materially; we have better clothes; our food is better; we have more conveniences; we have more time for ourselves than had men who lived centuries ago. In a thousand ways we know that on the average it is a great deal better to be alive in the twentieth century a.d. Than to have lived five thousand years ago.