Civilisation : Its Cause and Cure 



of the cells. The rationale of sea-anemones and 

 mud-fish and flying foxes and elephants has to 

 be looked for in man : he alone underlies them. 

 And man is not a vertebrate because his ancestors 

 were vertebrate ; but the animals are vertebrate, 

 because or in so far as they are forerunners and 

 offshoots of Man. 



It has been frequently said that great material 

 changes are succeeded by intellectual and finally 

 by moral revolutions — as the conquests of Alexan- 

 der passed on into the literary expansion of the 

 Alexandrian schools and thence into the estab- 

 lishment of Christianity, or as the mechanical 

 developments of our own time have been followed 

 by immense literary and scientific activities, and 

 are obviously passing over now into a great social 

 regeneration ; but a reconsideration of the matter 

 might, I take it, lead us not so much to look on 

 the later changes as caused by the earlier, as to look 

 on the earlier as the indications and first outward 

 and visible signs of the coming of the later. When 

 a man feels in himself the upheaval of a new moral 

 fact, he sees plainly enough that that fact cannot 

 come into the actual world all at once — not with- 

 out first a destruction of the existing order of 

 society — such a destruction as makes him feel 

 Satanic ; then an intellectual revolution ; and 

 lastly only, a new order embodying the nev/ impulse. 

 When this new impulse has thoroughly materialised 

 itself, then after a time will come another inward 

 birth, and similar changes will be passed through 

 again. So it might be said that the work of each 



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