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 are more humane than the hordes of Timour the Tartar.  If there is to be any improvement in human nature itself we must look to the infant science of eugenics to help us.