Progress (n.) is a melancholy notion — the eighteenth century's ruling idea: each condition stays an evil compared with the better one ahead, so infinite advance is an unending series of evils.
Progress (n.) is an escape from the particular, meaningless in itself, to the universal from which it borrows its meaning.
Progress (n.) is a datable idea, and men have always acted long before it appeared — against Kant's claim that without it no action is possible.
Progress (n.) as a standard for judging history reverses the old principle that a story's meaning reveals itself only at its end: what matters now is the horizon it opens.
Progress (n.) is against human dignity: dignity demands each of us be seen in our particularity, reflecting mankind without comparison and independent of time.
Progress (n.) means the story never ends; there is no point where we might stand still and look back with the historian's backward glance.