A Simple Faith

When I was a youth I had a plain simple faith in progress. It seemed to me impossible that once man had passed a milestone of progress in one way that he could ever pass the same milestone again the other way. Once the telephone was invented, it would stay invented. If past civilizations had faded away it was just because they had not learned the secret of progress. But Science meant permanent progress, with no going back. [...] It may be, as some indeed suspect, that the science we see as the dawn of recorded history was not science at its dawn, but represents the remnants of the science of some great and as yet untraced civilization.