planned progression

"This has been a planned progression.

Such planned progression was a feature of many of the proposals made by centres; the scale of this is shown in Table 2.

Were we to suppose that life was purposive, that everything was part of a planned progression due to culminate in the appearance of man or some other creature that might rival him in dominating the world, then the echinoderms could be dismissed as of no consequence.

But the odds are that the injury is just another spring training brush fire, that Pedro will be Pedro when he resumes pitching and that the Mets' planned progression from the middling team they steadfastly were last season will depend more on others in the rotation.