Never one fold and one shepherd, never one uniform culture for all mankind, never universal nobleness.  Our virtue and happiness can only flourish amid an active conflict with wrong.  If every stumbling-block were smoothed away, men would no longer be like men, but like a flock of innocent brutes, feeding on good things provided by nature as at the very beginning of their course. [Footnote:  Microcosmus, Bk. vii. 5 ad fin. (Eng. trans. p. 300).  The first German edition (three vols.) appeared in 1856-64, the third, from which the English translation was made, in 1876.  Lotze was optimistic as to the durability of modern civilisation:  “No one will profess to foreknow the future, but as far as men may judge it seems that in our days there arc greater safeguards than there were in antiquity against unjustifiable excesses and against the external forces which might endanger the continued existence of civilisation.”]

But even if we reject with Spencer the old dictum, endorsed by Lotze as by Fontenelle, that human nature is immutable, the dictum of ultimate harmony encounters the following objection.  “If the social environment were stable,” it is easy to argue, “it could be admitted that man’s nature, variable ex HYPOTHESI, could gradually adapt itself to it, and that finally a definite equilibrium would be established.  But the environment is continually changing as the consequence of man’s very efforts to adapt himself; every step he takes to harmonise his needs and his conditions produces a new discord and confronts him with a new problem.  In other words, there is no reason to believe that the reciprocal process which goes on in the growth of society between men’s natures and the environment they are continually modifying will ever reach an equilibrium, or even that, as the character of the discords changes, the suffering which they cause diminishes.”

In fact, upon the neutral fact of evolution a theory of pessimism may be built up as speciously as a theory of optimism.  And such a theory was built up with great power and ability by the German philosopher E. von Hartmann, whose philosophy of the unconscious appeared in 1869.  Leaving aside his metaphysics and his grotesque theory of the destiny of the universe, we see here and in his subsequent works how plausibly a convinced evolutionist could revive the view of Rousseau that civilisation and happiness are mutually antagonistic, and that Progress means an increase of misery.

Huxley himself, [Footnote:  See Agnosticism in Nineteenth Century (Feb. 1889); Government:  Anarchy or Regimentation, ib. (May 1890); Essays on Evolution and Ethics (1894).] one of the most eminent interpreters of the doctrine of evolution, did not, in his late years at least, entertain very sanguine views of mankind.  “I know of no study which is so saddening as that of the evolution of humanity as it is set forth in the annals of history. . . .  Man is a brute,