ABSTRACT
The idea of progress postulates a goal for the historical and its significant subordination to a teleological principle. The doctrine of progress is the 'herald of expectation', necessarily concerned with the 'revelation of the invisible', with the future. It is the fundamental moral contradiction that invalidates the doctrine of progress, turning it into a religion of death instead of resurrection and eternal life. The nineteenth-century doctrine of progress is no more than the temporary reflection of the nineteenth-century European consciousness, with all the limitations of its age. The heinous contradiction at the core of the doctrine of progress constitutes its essential instability and the spuriousness of its humanist hypothesis. The conclusion of the metaphysics of history is relatively pessimistic in so far as it breaks with the illusory apotheosis of the future and refutes the doctrine of progress.
