ABSTRACT
The idea behind the verb to regress is that of returning to an earlier place or state, to retrace one’s steps or to retrogress, as is sometimes also said. But the idea behind the noun is that a regress is a series whose earlier members repressed a prior thing or condition of things in some sort of ordering, be it temporal or logical or structural. On this basis, regression is a process of repeated steps backwards. Such a process is infinite whenever there is a stepwise process leading to prior stages that one can carry on as long as one pleases, and it never transpires that after some series of retrosteps one is returned to just the same place where one has been before.
