that I wish primarily to call attention.

The only arresting point is this: that if we suppose improvement to be
natural, it must be fairly simple. The world might conceivably be
working towards one consummation, but hardly towards any particular
arrangement of many qualities. To take our original simile: Nature by
herself may be growing more blue; that is, a process so simple that it
might be impersonal. But Nature cannot be making a careful picture made
of many picked colours, unless Nature is personal. If the end of the
world were mere darkness or mere light it might come as slowly and
inevitably as dusk or dawn. But if the end of the world is to be a piece
of elaborate and artistic chiaroscuro, then there must be design in it,
either human or divine. The world, through mere time, might grow black
like an old picture, or white like an old coat; but if it is turned
into a particular piece of black and white art--then there is an artist.

If the distinction be not evident, I give an ordinary instance. We
constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern
humanitarians; I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as
meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of
humanity. They suggest that through the ages we have been growing more
and more humane, that is to say, that one after another, groups or
sections of beings, slaves, children, women, cows, or what not, have
been gradually admitted to mercy or to justice. They say that we once
thought it right to eat men (we didn't); but I am not here concerned
with their history, which is highly unhistorical. As a fact,
anthropophagy is certainly a decadent thing, not a primitive one. It is
much more likely that modern men will eat human flesh out of affectation
than that primitive man ever ate it out of ignorance. I am here only
following the outlines of their argument, which consists in maintaining
that man has been progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then
to slaves, then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants. I think it
wrong to sit on a man. Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse.
Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair. That is
the drive of the argument. And for this argument it can be said that it
is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress.
A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might, one feels,
be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that o