When we speak of progress in connection with our individual endeavors or any organized human effort, we mean an advance toward a known goal. It is not in this sense that social evolution can be called progress, for it is not achieved by human reason striving by known means toward a fixed aim. It would be more correct to think of progress as a process of formation and modification of the human intellect, a process of adaptation and learning in which not only the possibilities known to us but also our values and desires continually change. As progress consists in the discovery of the not yet known, its consequences must be unpredictable. It always leads into the unknown, and the most we can expect is to gain an understanding of the kind of forces that bring it about. Yet, though such a general understanding of the character of this process of cumulative growth is indispensable if we are to try to create conditions favorable to it, it can never be knowledge which will enable us to make specific predictions. The claim that we can derive from such insight necessary laws of evolution that we must follow is an absurdity. Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist in finding out where it has been wrong.
Even in the field where search for new knowledge is most deliberate, i, e, in science, no man can predict what will be the consequences of his work. In fact, there is increasing recognition that even the attempt to make science deliberately aim at useful knowledge—that is, at knowledge whose future uses can be foreseen—is likely to impede progress. Progress by its very nature cannot be planned. We may perhaps legitimately speak of planning progress in a particular field where we aim at the solution of a specific problem and are already on the track of the answer. But we should soon be at the end of our endeavors if we were to confine ourselves to striving for goals now visible and if new problems did not spring up all the time. It is knowing what we have not known before that makes us wiser man.
But often it also makes us sadder men. Though progress consists in part in achieving things we have been striving for, this does not mean that we shall like all its results or that all will be gainers. And since our wishes and aims are also subject to change in the course or process, it is questionable whether the statement has a clear meaning that the new state of affairs that progress creates is a better one. Progress in the sense of the cumulative growth of knowledge and power over nature is a term that says little about whether the new state will give us more satisfaction than the old. The pleasure may be solely in achieving what we have been striving for, and the assured possession may give us little satisfaction. The question whether, if we had to stop at our present stage of development, we would in any significant sense be better off or happier that if we had stopped a hundred or a thousand years ago is probably unanswerable.
The answer, however, does not matter. What matters is the successful striving for what at each moment seems attainable. It is not the fruits of past success but the living in and for the future in which human intelligence proves itself. Progress is movement for movement’s sake, for it is in the
process of learning, and in the effects of having learned something new, that man enjoys the gift of his intelligence.
1.Which of the following statements does the passage most strongly support?
2.Progress, in the view of the writer（ ）,
3.When considering the search for knowledge,（ ） .
4.Progress, according to this argument,（ ） .
5.The author suggests that （ ）.
