296 



FOOT-NOTES TO EVOLUTION. 



fill. The thirst for culture has produced a great hungry 

 intellectual proletariat. The forces of darkness are still 

 strong, and it seems sometimes as if the middle ages 

 would swallow up everything won by modern struggles. 

 It is true that many alarms have proved false, but it 

 is the steady strain that tells on the mood. It is pa- 

 thetic to see on the Continent how men fear to face the 

 future. No one has the heart to probe the next decade. 

 The outlook is bounded by the next Sunday in the park 

 or the theatre. The people throw themselves into the 

 pleasures of the moment with desperation of doomed 

 men who hear the ring of the hammer on the scaffold. 

 Ibsen, applying an old sailor's superstition to the Euro- 

 pean ship of state, tells how one night he stood on the 

 deck and looked down on the throng of passengers, each 

 the victim of some form of brooding melancholy or 

 dark presentiment. As he looked he seemed to hear 

 a voice crying, ' There's a corpse on board ! ' " 



The record of degeneration in music, in art, in litera- 

 ture, in religion as traced by Nordau, is the record of 

 loss of hope and loss of illusion. In so far as it is 

 honest, not a mere affectation, it is the cry called out by 

 the misery of personal or social decay. It is the ex- 

 pression of mental dyspepsia and physical impotence. 

 It finds a large part of its explanation in the fact that, 

 with the class affected by it, sense-impressions, feelings, 

 and impulses have far outrun the opportunities for ac- 

 tion. The cure for this condition is found in ambition, 

 effort, individual development. It is not the swift rush 

 and whirl of modern civilization which has brought all 

 this to pass. It has come rather from attaining the 

 results of this rush* without taking part in its effort. 



* A similar thought is expressed by Kant, as quoted by Mark 

 Pattison. Of " Schw'armerei," or philosophical revery, he says: 

 "This mental disease arises from the growth of a class which has 



