62 ESSAYS OF A BIOLOGIST 



civilization/ and quotes them with approval. He 

 bitterly criticizes what we may sum up as Millenar- 

 ianism (although this after all is but a crude and 

 popular aspiration after what the Christian would 

 call the Kingdom of God on earth). And, after 

 exalting Hope as a virtue, closes with the somewhat 

 satirical statement, 'It is safe to predict that we 

 shall go on hoping.' 



He has been so concerned to attack the dogma of 

 inherent and inevitable progress in human affairs 

 that he has denied the fact of progress — whether 

 inevitable we know not, but indubitable and actual 

 — in biological evolution : and in so doing he has 

 cut off himself and his adherents from one of the 

 ways in which that greatest need of man which we 

 spoke of at the outset can be satisfied, from by far the 

 greatest manifestation in external things of * some- 

 thing, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness.' 



One word more, and I have done. There remains 

 in some ways the hardest problem of all. The 

 greatest experiences of human life, those in which 

 the mind appears to touch the Absolute and the 

 Infinite — what of their relation to this notion of 

 progress ? They are realized in many forms — in 

 love, in intellectual discovery, in art, in religion ; 

 but the salient fact about all is that they are felt as of 

 intensest value, and that they seem to leave no more 

 to be desired. Doubtless when we say that at such 

 moment we touch the Infinite or the Absolute we 



