PROGRESS, the advancement of the world, moral, mental and material, as exhibited in his tory. Physical science, which has so recently demonstrated the gradual improvement of ma terial types in the animal and vegetable world, has compelled metaphysical speculation to con form its general principles to the axioms formu lated by physical observation and experiment. The result of science, of historical inquiry, of inductive activity in every area of investiga tion may favor neither optimism nor pessimism. They have brought into philosophy a third term, and that is mehorism, a term employed to de note a doctrine so firmly based on fact that none can controvert it. Meliorism embodies the truth that as far as human experience and observation can extend there has been improve ment in things, progress in the universe, ad vancement in the world. Pessimism becomes a contradiction in terms ; for the physicist in his laboratory, the historian in his study, the sociologist in his inquiry among men, declares that things have been once worse than they are now, and that from the flower in the field to the beast in the stall, and from the beast in the stall to the working man, the ruler and the general condition of nations, things have been growing better. The lapse of centuries shows a sensible amelioration in the lot of humanity. The slave has been enfranchised, woman has been raised and enlightened, the rights of labor have been more and more recognized. These, however,
are only social and political examples of that universal amelioration and progress by which a nebula is changed into a star, and a star into a peopled and conscious world. Meliorism is the principle that underlies all existence, or ganic or inorganic, and comprehends in its widely extending connotation the discovery of drugs that abolish pain, of economic institutions that diminish poverty, of intellectual institutions that make ignorance and incompetency more and more rare and of tolerance and enlightment which give more and more freedom to the creeds, tastes and idiosyncrasies of individual men. In whatever direction we look over the field of human activity we see this improvement manifesting itself, and the phenomena which are the basis of meliorism furnish the best argument for that hopeful optimism which, as many believe, alone can give the mind a philos ophical creed that renders life tolerable.
Meliorism is the doctrine of the positivist, because it is no metaphysical system which in terprets facts by a priori assumption ; it is sim ply an induction from a summary of those facts which physical science has most recently set forth as the proud results of the newest, the most unbiased, and the most uncontrovertible deductions from experiment and observation, in the whole world of material, social and political phenomena. See MELIORISM.