II EVOLUTION AND ETHICS 55 



Two thousand five hundred years ago, the value 

 of civilization was as apparent as it is now ; then, 

 as now, it was obvious that only in the garden of 

 an orderly polity can the finest fruits humanity 

 is capable of bearing be produced. But it had 

 also become evident that the blessings of culture 

 were not unmixed. The garden was apt to turn 

 into a hothouse. The stimulation of the senses, 

 the pampering of the emotions, endlessly mul- 

 tiplied the sources of pleasure. The constant 

 widening of the intellectual field indefinitely 

 extended the range of that especially human 

 faculty of looking before and after, which adds 

 to the fleeting present those old and new worlds 

 of the past and the future, wherein men dwell the 

 more the higher their culture. But that very 

 sharpening of the sense and that subtle refine- 

 ment of emotion, which brought such a wealth of 

 pleasures, were fatally attended by a proportional 

 enlargement of the capacity for suffering ; and 

 the divine faculty of imagination, while it created 

 new heavens and new earths, provided them with 

 the corresponding hells of futile regret for the 

 past and morbid anxiety for the future.^ Finally, 

 the inevitable penalty of over-stimulation, ex- 

 haustion, opened the gates of civilization to its 

 great enemy, ennui ; the stale and flat weariness 

 when man delights not, nor woman neither ; when 

 all things are vanity and vexation ; and life seems 

 not worth living except to escape the bore of dying. 



