Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Donald E. Morse: The End of the World in American History and Fantasy: The Trumpet of the Last Judgement

Museum, Karl Marx formulated his Christian heresy of unlimited progress for the masses. "In Paris, the historian Gizot drew vast audiences to his masterly lectures on the history of Europe in which he argued that the fundamental idea embedded in the word 'civilization' is progress" (Whitrow 177). In fact, the work of nineteenth-century historians, from Edward Gibbon at the beginning of the century to the Edwardians, such as William Gordon Holmes, at the end, reflected their passionate commitment to recording human progress, English supremacy, and the positive goodness of science.

5 E. B. Taylor, the Oxford anthropologist, argued in 1871 "that the history of man, as revealed by a study of the implements he has used, is indubitably 'the history of an upward development'" (Whitrow 178). The nineteenthcentury missionary movement sent out men and women from England and America to save the souls and bring them into the light those in the dark of Africa, South America, and Asia. A member of one of the less fortunate races would, thanks to their efforts, be able to eat with knife and fork and "sit one day, his hair cut, washed, smoothed with macassar oil, in a huge armchair reading a paper" (Wertenbaker 30). Herbert Spencer summed up much of the current thinking in his highly influential, timely essay, "Universal Progress, Its Laws and Cause."

6 But it was Alfred Lord Tennyson, the poet laureate who best caught the temper of the times in his popular poem, "Locksley Hall": Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range. Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change, Through the shadow of the globe we sweep into the younger day; Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay. In contrast, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Emily Dickinson in the United States distrusted progress believing ' Holmes linear model of history supported his belief in "the ultimate culmination of Greece and Rome in resistance to the barbarian hordes from the East, and the birth of the British Empire" (Hart 21). "Spencer arrived at his concept of evolution

—as the trend towards increasing differentiation coupled with integration by giving greatest generality to the idea of progress as the product of advancing division of labor, which Adam Smith has made into a commonplace among economists" (Anderski 8nl). But Spencer's definition of the evolutionary process appears more applicable to human society than it does to the flora and fauna of nature. 221