e is indeed a possible truth hidden somewhere within somewhat
clumsy approximations, it must modify some of our generally accepted
ideas. The life-process will appear, not a slow, interrupted, but
substantially forward development from lower and simpler organisms to
higher and more complex, with the end (if there be an end), beyond the
very limits of eternity, but rather a swift creation of some of the
highest forms through the first energy of the creative force, with the
throwing off of ever lower and lower forms as the curve of the
trajectory descends. So through a mass of low and static vitality comes
the sudden and enormous power that produces at the very beginnings of
our own recorded history of man, the almost superhuman intelligence and
capacity of the Greeks and the Egyptians. So each of the definite eras
of civilization opens with the releasing of great energies, the
revealing of great figures of paramount character and force. So,
conversely, as the energy declines, men appear less and less potent and
in a descending scale. This is the case with the Greek states, with the
Roman Republic and the Empire, with Byzantium, with

Mediaevalism, and with our modern era. I do not know of any other theory
that claims to explain the perpetual and rhythmical fluctuations of
history, as violent in their degree as they are approximately regular in
their rhythm.

Following the idea a little further, it may even appear that many of the
lower, and particularly the more distorted, forms of animal life,
instead of being abortive or undeveloped stages in a continuous
evolutionary progress, are actually the product of a diminishing energy,
stages in a process of degeneration, and therefore leading not upward to
ever higher stages of development having issue at last in a completed
perfection, but rather downward to ultimate extinction. Geology records
this process in sufficient quantity, so far as many members of the
animal kingdom are concerned, and we, in our own day, have seen the
extinction of the dodo as well as the threatened disappearance of other
species. Creeping and crawling creatures too, that we could crush with
the heel, are but the last and puny descendants of mighty and terrible
monsters that once rolled and crashed through the fetid forests of the
carboniferous era. So there are races of men today, amongst others the
pygmies of Africa and the Australian bushmen, as well as some nearer in
a certain degree to the domi