Evolution and involution balance each other and go on concurrently. The
normal condition of every species on this planet is not progress but
stationariness. 'Progress,' so-called, is an incident of adaptation to
new conditions. Bees and ants must have spent millennia in perfecting
their organisation; now that they have reached a stable equilibrium, no
more changes are perceptible. The 'progress' of humanity has consisted
almost entirely in the transformation of the wild man of the woods, not
into _homo sapiens_ but into _homo faber_, man the tool-maker, a process
of which nature expresses her partial disapproval by plaguing us with
diverse diseases and taking away our teeth and claws. It is not certain
that there has been much change in our intellectual and moral endowments
since pithecanthropus dropped the first half of his name. I should be
sorry to have to maintain that the Germans of to-day are morally
superior to the army which defeated Quintilius Varus, or that the modern
Turks are more humane than the hordes of Timour the Tartar. If there is
to be any improvement in human nature itself we must look to the infant
science of eugenics to help us.

It is not easy to say how this myth of progress came to take hold of
the imagination, in the teeth of science and experience. Quinet speaks
of the 'fatalistic optimism' of historians, of which there have
certainly been some strange examples. We can only say that secularism,
like other religions, needs an eschatology, and has produced one. A more
energetic generation than ours looked forward to a gradual extension of
busy industrialism over the whole planet; the present ideal of the
masses seems to be the greatest idleness of the greatest number, or a
Fabian farm-yard of tame fowls, or (in America) an ice-water-drinking
gynæcocracy. But the superstition cannot flourish much longer. The
period of expansion is over, and we must adjust our view of earthly
providence to a state of decline. For no nation can flourish when it is