Faith & Spirit Quote by Robert Browning Hamilton

Progress is pitched here less as a trophy than as a diagnosis: the one feature that makes a human unmistakable. Hamilton draws a three-part taxonomy with the clean snap of Victorian confidence. God simply is - complete, finished, outside the churn of time. Beasts, in this scheme, are what they are - bound to instinct and repetition, not self-revising in any conscious way. Humans sit in the uncomfortable middle: only partly formed, yet uniquely compelled by the idea of becoming.

That hinge word, hopes, does the real work. It casts progress as an inner pressure, not a guaranteed outcome. You can hear the era in it: late-19th/early-20th-century faith in development (industrial, moral, national) colliding with the dawning knowledge that history does not automatically arc upward. By defining humanity as aspiration rather than attainment, Hamilton gives progress a spiritual charge without granting it divine certainty. It's a secular theology of self-improvement: we are not redeemed by what we are, but by the fact that we reach.

The subtext is bracingly double-edged. "Man's distinctive mark" flatters the reader with elevation above the animal, yet it also strips away excuses. If you are the creature of progress, stagnation becomes a kind of betrayal of species. The line's rhythm reinforces that tension: declarative absolutes ("God is") abruptly yield to partiality ("Man partly is") and then to a forward-leaning clause that can't rest ("wholly hopes to be"). Human dignity, Hamilton suggests, is an unfinished sentence.