16 
THURSDAY, DECEMBER t1Tu. 
Progress—and its Illusions. 
Part II. 
THE ARGUMENT from the HISTORY OF HUMANITY. 
“* Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it 
gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes ; tt is barbarous, 
it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scientific; but this 
change ts not amelioration. For everything that ts given something 
ts taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts... . 
Lf the traveller tell us truly, strike the savage with a broad axe, 
and tn a day or two the flesh shall unite and heal as if you struck 
the blow into soft pitch, and the same blow shall send the white to 
his grave... . Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but 
the water of which it ts composed does not. The same particle does 
not rise from the valley to the ridge. The persons who make up a 
nation to-day, next year die, and their expertence dies with them.” — 
EMERSON. 
UST as Geology informs us that those dominant types of 
animal life characteristic of an epoch have gradually arrived 
at maturity and then quickly, almost suddenly, disappeared, so 
the historian of humanity shows us how large groups or 
communities of individuals, having a special character of their 
own, emerge from the general mass of humanity, attain to pre- 
eminence, and then pass away. They are ousted in the conflict 
of life by lower and more virile races. These social organisms 
become exhausted in the effort to produce that civilization which 
is their claim to remembrance. What is there in a great social 
organization inimical to its continued existence? What militates 
against the continuance of its life? The socrat life is necessary 
for the development of humanity, necessary for the development 
of those finer feelings, for that larger knowledge which we take to 
be characteristic of progress. And yet the conditions, the 
NECESSARY conditions of this advance are fatal to the very 
organism which they have produced. Organization entails cost, 
says the physiologist, as he sees the wear and tear of the delicate 
machinery of life under the stress and strain of outward circum- 

