56 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



to see items on the debit side, and indeed to be so 

 horrifiedly fascinated by it as not to have eyes for 

 anything else. Human history is in one view but a 

 long record of suffering, oppression, and folly. Slavery, 

 torture, religious persecution, war, pestilence and 

 famine, the greed of those who possess power, the 

 dirt and sloth and ignorance of those who do not — 

 the elements of the picture keep on recurring, if not 

 in the old forms, then in new ones. Pain, disease, 

 disappointment, and death are inevitable. Even when 

 a civilization seems to be progressing, there always 

 comes a time when it passes its zenith and topples 

 through decay or defect to ruin. How is it possible 

 to speak of progress when at this present moment 

 there are vast poverty-stricken and slum populations 

 with all the great nations, and when these same great 

 nations have just been engaged in the most appalling 

 war in history ? 



It is a formidable indictment : but I venture to 

 assert that it can be met by the same argument with 

 which, in the realm of biology, was met the argument 

 from degeneration. 



Such facts show at once that any idea of inevitable 

 or of universal progress is untenable, the product of an 

 irrational idealism which prefers its own desires to 

 reality. They show further that, up to the present, 

 suffering and pain on the one hand, and on the other 

 degeneration in a certain number of individuals, are 

 as universal and apparently inevitable in human as 



