V IN HUMAN SOCIETY 199 



Chinese fashion, the present generation could pay 

 its debts to its ancestors ; otherwise it is not clear 

 what compensation the Eohippus gets for his 

 sorrows in the fact that, some millions of years 

 afterwards, one of his descendants wins the Derby. 

 And, again, it is an error to imagine that evolution 

 signifies a constant tendency to increased perfec 

 tion. That process undoubtedly involves a constant 

 re-modelling of the organism in adaptation to new 

 conditions ; but it depends on the nature of those 

 conditions whether the direction of the modifi 

 cations effected shall be upward or downward. 

 Retrogressive is as practicable as progressive 

 metamorphosis. If what the physical philosophers 

 tell us, that our globe has been in a state of fusion, 

 and, like the sun, is gradually cooling down, is 

 true ; then the time must come when evolution 

 will mean adaptation to an universal winter, and 

 all forms of life will die out, except such low and 

 simple organisms as the Diatom of the arctic and 

 antarctic ice and the Protococcus of the red snow. 

 If our globe is proceeding from a condition in 

 which it was too hot to support any but the lowest 

 living thing to a condition in which it will be too 

 cold to permit of the existence of any others, the 

 course of life upon its surface must describe a 

 trajectory like that of a ball fired from a mortar ; 

 and the sinking half of that course is as much a 

 part of the general process of evolution as the rising. 

 From the point of view of the moralist the 



