Heredity \ Variation a7id Genius 91 



busy or sheep-like in placid routine of automatic 

 existence. 



Mankind are for the most part short-sighted 

 mentally and indolently shirk the pains to improve 

 their sight ; they seldom look backwards beyond 

 a link in the chain of causation, or forwards 

 beyond a link or two in the sequence of events. 

 That which they, innately prejudiced by the 

 universal bias of human egotism — every one, too, 

 in particular by his high - priced self- valuation 

 — think evil from their standpoint is just as natural 

 and necessary, as righteous altogether, in the con- 

 catenation of things and their eternal evolutions 

 and dissolutions as that which they think good, 

 being no more at worst than the disorder which 

 is new order to be ; and it is not yet proved, 

 although implicitly assumed or openly asserted, 

 that mortal perfection is a more likely end of 

 humanity on earth than extinctive degeneracy. 

 " Progress onward and upward for ever," a 

 pleasing phrase of bigger sound than sense, shows 

 more like a delirious vision of ecstatic imagina- 

 tion than the inference of sober reason, when the 

 dazzling picture is rationally faced. So far from 

 being a scientific certainty, the notion contradicts 

 the morphological law of the fixed constitution 

 of the physiological type of organism. No process 

 of natural evolution stretched to its utmost would 

 suffice, the human body being constituted as it 

 i s, to make even a remote step towards the fulfil- 

 ment of that irrational expectation. Man, being 



