It gave to life, in some inexplicable way, a continuity--as if it were progressing.
If you cage prisoners like animals, deny them the chance to do anything productive with their time or feel as if they are progressing towards a useful goal, you should expect them to respond in the same spirit.
Laurence Sterne's "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy" (1759) toyed with the conventions of the novel, presenting blacked-out and blank pages, as if it were a work in progress, with the reader in on the joke.
This rotation does not affect the topology of the tree, so why keep placing humans or primates at the end of the sequence as if it were a march of progress or a chain of being?
To trumpet its progress as if it were Baudelaire's "Les Fleurs du Mal" or "Lady Chatterley's Lover," or, for that matter, "Last Tango in Paris," which premièred later the same year, is to shrink the potency of art and to invest in the monopoly of junk.
Such was his influence as a food writer that when, in the late 1970's, Mr. Claiborne was advised by his doctor to limit fat and salt in his diet, the nation followed his progress as if it were a soap opera.
To the question "why must we choose to view human history as if it were moving in the direction of progress?" Kant responds, in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays (PPOE), that otherwise the sight of human history would become unbearable.
Michael Connelly begins "The Drop" as if it's a work already in progress.
Unfortunately the media does, and it treats scientific progress as if it is a series of pronouncements coming out of the blue, just like the ranting of a televangelist or a candidate for president.
There is a tendency to develop a theory about how patients progress as if it is not messy... and they all go differently, and go backwards and forwards... [laugh] if only life was so simple.
It is almost as if it is reacting against the very virtues of progress and technological prowess that Westerners otherwise venerate in entrepreneurs, dot-coms, and Nobel scientists.
