It is significant too that at the same time an octogenarian mathematician of Aberdeen was composing a book on the same subject.  Hamilton’s progress of society is now utterly forgotten, but it must have contributed in its day to propagating the same moderate view of Progress, consistent with orthodoxy, which Southey held.  “The belief of the perfectibility of human nature and the attainment of a golden age in which vice and misery have no place, will only be entertained by an enthusiast; but an inquiry into the means of improving our nature and enlarging our happiness is consistent with sober reason, and is the most important subject, merely human, that can engage the mind of man."[Footnote:  P. 13.  The book was published posthumously by Murray in 1830, a year after the author’s death.] [Footnote:  “Progress of Society.”  The phrase was becoming common; e.g.  Russell’s History of Modern Europe (1822) has the sub-title A view of the Progress of Society, etc.  The didactic poem of Payne Knight, The Progress of Civil Society (1796), a very dull performance, was quite unaffected by the dreams of Priestley or Godwin.  It was towards the middle of the nineteenth century that Progress, without any qualifying phrase, came into use.]

2.

We have been told by Tennyson that when he went by the first train from Liverpool to Manchester (1830) he thought that the wheels ran in grooves.

“Then I made this line: 

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.” [Footnote:  See Tennyson, Memoir by his Son, vol. i. p. 195.]

Locksley Hall, which was published in 1842, illustrates how the idea of Progress had begun to creep into the imagination of Englishmen.  Though subsidiary to a love story, it is the true theme of the poem.  The pulsation of eager interest in the terrestrial destinies of humanity, the large excitement of living in a “wondrous Mother-age,” dreams of the future, quicken the passion of the hero’s youth.  His disappointment in love disenchants him; he sees the reverse side of civilisation, but at last he finds an anodyne for his palsied heart in a more sober version of his earlier faith, a chastened belief in his Mother-age.  He can at least discern an increasing purpose in history, and can be sure that “the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns.”  The novelty of the poem lay in finding a cathartic cure for a private sorrow, not in religion or in nature, but in the modern idea of Progress.  It may be said to mark a stage in the career of the idea.

The view of civilisation which Tennyson took as his motif had no revolutionary implications, suggested no impatience or anger with the past.  The startling prospect unfolding itself before “the long result of time,” and history is justified by the promise of to-day: 

The centuries behind me like a fruitful land reposed.