necessary part of its progress, developing a higher degree of mental
vigor. I need hardly observe that all belief in democracy as a final
solution of social ills, all confidence in education as a means to
attaining to universal justice, and all hope of approximating to the rule
of moral right in the administration of law, was held to hinge on this
great fundamental dogma, which, it followed, it was almost impious to
deny, or even to doubt. Thus, on the first page of my book, I observe, as
if it were axiomatic, that, at a given moment, toward the opening of the
sixteenth century, "Europe burst from her mediaeval torpor into the
splendor of the Renaissance," and further on I assume, as an equally self-
evident axiom, that freedom of thought was the one great permanent advance
which western civilization made by all the agony and bloodshed of the
Reformation. Apart altogether from the fact that I should doubt whether,
in the year 1919, any intelligent and educated man would be inclined to
maintain that the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were, as contrasted
with the nineteenth, ages of intellectual torpor, what startles me in
these paragraphs is the self-satisfied assumption of the finality of my
conclusions. I posit, as a fact not to be controverted, that our universe
is an expression of an universal law, which the nineteenth century had
discovered and could formulate.

During the past thirty years I have given this subject my best attention,
and now I am so far from assenting to this proposition that my mind tends
in the opposite direction. Each day I live I am less able to withstand the
suspicion that the universe, far from being an expression of law
originating in a single primary cause, is a chaos which admits of reaching
no equilibrium, and with which man is doomed eternally and hopelessly to
contend. For human society, to deserve the name of civilization, must be
an embodiment of order, or must at least tend toward a social equilibrium.
I take, as an illustration of my meaning, the development of the domestic