"There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change"
About this Quote
Stevenson’s line lands like a cold splash on the Victorian face: an era drunk on railways, telegraphs, empire, and “improvement” being told that its prized progress is basically costume changes. The jab isn’t anti-invention so much as anti-self-congratulation. Yes, the “outward form” evolves - tools, fashions, systems, even moral vocabularies - but Stevenson insists the core materials of human life stay stubbornly familiar: appetite, fear, status-seeking, tenderness, violence, boredom. It’s a demotion of history from triumphant march to recurring drama.
The rhetoric is doing quiet work. “No progress whatever” is deliberately absolute, a provocation designed to puncture the complacent narrative that modernity equals moral advancement. Then he pivots to time scales that dwarf any single century - “thousands, and tens of thousands” - dragging the reader out of Victorian timetables and into deep time, where our achievements look like surface ripples. “Essence” is the trapdoor word: it suggests a stable human nature underneath our changing institutions, and it dares the reader to argue otherwise without sounding naive.
Context matters. Stevenson wrote in a period when science and industry were recasting daily life, while imperial violence and urban misery exposed the costs of “progress.” His adventure fiction often stages that split: polished surfaces, primitive impulses. The subtext is skeptical, not despairing: if the essence doesn’t change, then the real task isn’t worshipping novelty; it’s managing old desires with better humility and fewer illusions.
The rhetoric is doing quiet work. “No progress whatever” is deliberately absolute, a provocation designed to puncture the complacent narrative that modernity equals moral advancement. Then he pivots to time scales that dwarf any single century - “thousands, and tens of thousands” - dragging the reader out of Victorian timetables and into deep time, where our achievements look like surface ripples. “Essence” is the trapdoor word: it suggests a stable human nature underneath our changing institutions, and it dares the reader to argue otherwise without sounding naive.
Context matters. Stevenson wrote in a period when science and industry were recasting daily life, while imperial violence and urban misery exposed the costs of “progress.” His adventure fiction often stages that split: polished surfaces, primitive impulses. The subtext is skeptical, not despairing: if the essence doesn’t change, then the real task isn’t worshipping novelty; it’s managing old desires with better humility and fewer illusions.
Quote Details
| Topic | Truth |
|---|
More Quotes by Robert
Add to List
