spirochaeta pallida.

We dined as a rule on each other;
What matter? the toughest survived,

is a fair parody of this doctrine. In political science, by a portentous
snobbery, the actual evolution of European government was assumed to be
in the line of upward progress. Our histories contrasted the benighted
condition of past ages with the high morality and general enlightenment
of the present. In philosophy, the problem of evil was met by the
theory that though the Deity is not omnipotent yet, He is on His way to
become so. He means well, and if we give Him time, He will make a real
success of His creation. Human beings, too, commonly make a very poor
thing of their lives here. But continue their training after they are
dead and they will all come to perfection. We have been living on this
secularised idealism for a hundred and fifty years. It has driven out
the true idealism, of which it is a caricature, and has made the deeper
and higher kind of religious faith abnormally difficult. Even the hope
of immortality has degenerated into a belief in apparitions and voices
from the dead.

Nature knows nothing of this precious law. Her figure is not the
vertical line, nor even the spiral, but the circle--the vicious circle,
according to Samuel Butler. 'Men eat birds, birds eat worms, worms eat
men again.' Some stars are getting hotter, others cooler. Life appears
at a certain temperature and is extinguished at another temperature.
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 ar