We would be very prone to think that what an old father has to say to his boy over fifty centuries ago would have, at most, only an antiquarian interest for us. It is not easy even to imagine that the old gentleman could have known human nature so well and written from so close to the heart of humanity because of his love for his boy, that his words would always have a practical application in life. Such, however, is actually the case. Any father of the modern time would be proud to be able to give to his boy the eminently practical maxims that this old father has written down. If there is any advice that will be helpful for youth, for the young usually demand that they shall have their own experience and not take it at second hand, this is the advice that is of value. Only fools, it is said, learn by their own experience, but then there is good Scripture warrant for believing that they were not all wise men in the olden time, and we are pretty well agreed that all the fools are not dead yet. If advice can be of service, however, from one generation to another, then here is the wisdom of age for the inexperience of youth. At least it will serve after the event to show youth that it was properly warned and that it is entirely its own fault if it has been making a fool of itself—as other generations have done before.
It might be expected that at least in form these old-time maxims would be rude and crude, expressed with an old man’s loquaciousness and with many personal foibles. Fortunately for us, while to his son Ptah Hotep was very probably an old man, he was not what most of us would call old. In Egypt they married comparatively young. This boy was probably the oldest son. It is usually for the oldest that such advice is treasured up and written out. The father then, giving his advice just as his son was leaving the paternal household when he had married a wife and was about to set up a home of his own, was probably not more than forty. To seventeen or eighteen, forty is quite ancient. To most of the rest of us it is entirely too young to be trusted absolutely in serious matters. Aristotle declared that a man’s body reaches physical perfection at thirty-five and his mind reaches intellectual maturity at forty-nine. His students were inclined to think that this age was entirely too old, his philosophic contemporaries of his own generation and the members of national academies and learned societies of most of the generations since, have been quite sure that the term set was entirely too young.
Ptah Hotep’s son, then, very probably looked on his father as most sons under twenty are prone to do, as a dear old-fashioned gentleman (he does not like to use the word old fogy for his father, reserving it for the fathers of others), who would be quite tolerable if he only had a little more sympathy with the wonderful advance that is in the world in this new generation. The real young man of the time, however, was the father who wrote his maxims, the condensed wisdom of his experience of life, with a directness, an absolute clarity, an occasional appeal to figures of speech and a variety of expression so striking as to make his work literature. As such it has come down to us. It is eminently human in every way, and while there is here and there an unfortunate tendency to repeat words of similar sound and different meaning, after the fashion of what we call punning, this is pardonable enough since so many of our friends indulge in it and give us practice in pardoning, while, on the whole, the old man wrote as wisely as Polonius, and in a style not quite as artificial as that which Shakespeare has invented as suitable to the old Danish Prime Minister, whom the ancient vizier of Egypt recalls so vividly in many ways.
No idea is probably more ingrained in modern thinking, no opinion is more generally accepted, no conclusion is surer to most people, than that we are in the midst of marvellous progress in this little world of ours, and that our generation is somewhere at the apex of the Pyramid of Progress, elevated thereto by the attainments of the generations that have preceded us. As the Poet Laureate put it at the close of the nineteenth century, “we are the heirs of all the ages in the foremost files of time”; and because we have the advantage of our predecessors’ progress in their time, we are, of course, in all that makes for human happiness and fulness of life, very far ahead of those gone before us. The farther back we go in history, then, the lower down men are supposed to be found in all that stands for intellectuality and in all that represents the possibilities of human achievement at its best. It is now well understood that the generations of the past are not so much to be blamed for their backwardness as to be pitied for the misfortune that, having come earlier in the world’s history, they could not have the advantages that we enjoy, and therefore could only attain much lower stages in human progress than ours.
Apparently, there are very few people who do not share in the opinions thus expressed. The nineteenth century has been proclaimed the century of evolution; and the idea of evolution has become so much a part of the thought of our time that man also is assumed to be in the midst of it, and history is presumed to show distinctly the wonderful advance that humanity has made. As a matter of fact, it is extremely difficult to point out definitely where progress in humanity may be observed. Ambassador Bryce was asked, two years ago, to deliver an address before Phi Beta Kappa at Harvard, and took for his subject “What is Progress?” Phi Beta Kappa is the fraternity that admits into its classes only the best students,—men who have proved their ability by success. Mr. Bryce, speaking to the most intelligent university graduates, might be expected to make much of our wonderful recent progress. The address subsequently appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for August, 1907. Far from any glorification of progress, the historian of the American Commonwealth, who has demonstrated his breadth of view and his notable lack of British insularity by the large way he has written about us, so that we have adopted his work as a text-book of information about ourselves, is very dubious as to whether there is any progress in the world. There is certainly no progress in man’s highest expressions of his intelligence. As Mr. Bryce says: “The poetry of the early Hebrews and of the early Greeks has never been surpassed and hardly ever equalled. Neither has the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, nor the speeches of Demosthenes and Cicero.” No one pretends that there is any progress in art. The masterpieces of architecture, sculpture, and painting date as a rule from long before our time, some of them nearly twenty-five hundred years back.
As has been very well said, the man who talks much about progress in our time usually knows only the history of human thought in his own generation, and not very much about that. In nearly every important phase of human achievement, we are, in present accomplishment, far behind the great predecessors. In our generation, we are confessedly imitators in every phase of aesthetic expression. In painting, sculpture, art and literature, our models are all in the past, and we are quite frank in confessing that we are doing no work at all so good as the work of our forefathers of many generations and sometimes many centuries ago. Whence, then, comes the idea of progress? It has obtained most of its vogue from the theory of evolution; and the lack of evidence for evolution in general, in spite of the persuasion on the part of many educated people that there are proofs for it, can be very well judged from the corresponding lack of evidence with regard to progress in humanity. There is complete absence of proof for this latter, when the situation with regard to human achievement in the really great things of human life is examined. Indeed, it would be amusing were it not amazing to think how readily we have come to accept notions for which there is so little substantiation. To many this will doubtless seem a surprising declaration to make, after all that has been written, and universally accepted as most people think, with regard to evolution by the great minds of the nineteenth century. What evolution means, however, is summed up in the theory of descent, that is that living things as we know them now, have all come from simpler forms and perhaps all from a single form. The only other phase of interest in evolution is what concerns the theory of natural selection, which is supposed by many people to have been demonstrated in the nineteenth century. It may be well for those who think thus to have recalled to them what a recent writer on the subject, himself a distinguished investigator in biology, a professor at Leland Stanford University, where