ore truth need be sought.

It's a comforting thing to believe cosmic search nicely settled.

Thus the mold will be hardened. So new truths, when they come, can but
break it. Then men will feel distraught and disillusioned, and
civilizations will fall.

Thus each cycle will run. So long as men intertwine falsehoods with
every seer's visions, both perish, and every civilization that is built
on them must perish too.

_EIGHTEEN_

If men can ever learn to accept all their truths as not final, and if
they can ever learn to build on something better than dogma, they may
not be found saying, discouragedly, every once in so often, that every
civilization carries in it the seeds of decay. It will carry such seeds
with great certainty, though, when they're put there, by the very race,
too, that will later deplore the results. Why shouldn't creeds totter
when they are jerry-built creeds?

On stars where creeds come late in the life of a race; where they
spring from the riper, not cruder, reactions of spirit; where they grow
out of nobly developed psychic powers that have put their possessors in
tune with cosmic music; and where no cheap hallucinations discredit
their truths; they perhaps run a finer, more beautiful course than the
simians', and open the eyes of the soul to far loftier visions.

_NINETEEN_

It has always been a serious matter for men when a civilization
decayed. But it may at some future day prove far more serious still.
Our hold on the planet is not absolute. Our descendants may lose it.

Germs may do them out of it. A chestnut fungus springs up, defies us,
and kills all our chestnuts. The boll weevil very nearly baffles us.
The fly seems unconquerable. Only a strong civilization, when such foes
are about, can preserve us. And our present efforts to cope with such
beings are fumbling and slow.

We haven't the habit of candidly facing this danger. We read our
biological history but we don't take it in. We blandly assume we were
always "intended" to rule, and that no other outcome could even be
considered by Nature. This is one of the remnants of ignorance certain
religions have left: but it's odd that men who don't believe in Easter
should still believe this. For the facts are of course this is a hard
and precarious world, where every mistake and infirmity must be paid
for in full.

* * * * *

If mankind ever is swept aside as a failure however