o to
intertwine and oscillate that it is very gratuitous to designate the
total process as being one or the other. Spencer confesses that the
entire universe oscillates between extremes of integration and
disintegration. Why we should consider the universe at present to be
rising rather than falling, waxing rather than waning, one cannot say.
The easier presumption is that it is equally one and the other, and
always has been. Even were we rash enough to pronounce progress to be on
the whole prevalent within the narrow field of our own experience,
surely it were nothing but the inevitable "provincialism" of the human
mind to pass _per saltum_ from that, to a generalization for all
possible experience. Our optimism, our faith that right, truth, and
order will eventually prevail, can find only a delusive basis in actual
experience, and must draw its life from some deeper source.

Why then should we so presume that our moral and religious ideas are
really progressive and not regressive, as to regard their interpretation
as approximating to the truth? The answer is simply that our argument
from adaptability does not require the assumption in question, but only
that we should be able to distinguish higher from lower tendencies,
progressive from regressive movements, without holding the optimistic
view that on the whole the forward tendency is at present prevailing. It
is not because we live in the nineteenth century that we consider our
moral perceptions truer than those of the ancient Hebrews, but because
we at once comprehend and transcend their ideas (in some respects), as
the greater does the less. In many points surely the relation is
inverted and we feel ourselves transcended (or may at least suspect it),
by those who lived or live in ruder conditions than our own. David has
perhaps taught us more than we could have taught him; and there are
other vices than those proper to semi-barbarism. It is not by reference
to date or country, or grade of material progress, that we assess the
value of moral judgments, but by that subjective standard with which our
own moral attainments supply us in regard to all that is equal or less,
similar or dissimilar. To deny this discernment is to throw the doors
open to unqualified scepticism; to admit it, is all that we need for the
validity of our inference.

4. If Evolution is really of this oscillatory character; if at all times
much the same processes have been going on in different p