86 THE EVOLUTION OF MATTER 



science, must from its very nature be but transitory. 

 We are spending improvidently in a year the 

 physical means of life that would have sufficed our 

 ancestors for a century, and the exhaustion of the 

 available supplies of energy, upon which the present 

 era of the world relies, is already no longer a re- 

 motely distant prospect. 



So long 1 as the world was supposed to be six 

 days older than man, and man a creature of the 

 last 6000 years, the idea that we were " the first 

 that ever burst" into the silent sea of science was 

 pardonable enough. Possibly we were not. Just 

 as no one would feel qualified to write a history 

 of this country from materials gleaned from the 

 newspapers of the present century, so no one ought 

 to be so bold as to attempt to write a history of 

 the human race from such written records as now 

 exist, the most ancient of which go back to a time 

 when the race was quite inappreciably younger 

 than it is to-day. Neither is there any very valid 

 ground for the belief that the startling advance 

 civilisation had made in the past hundred or so 

 years is in any way the climax or natural culmina- 

 tion of the slow and by no means even continuous 

 progress previously. It seems rather a sudden for- 

 ward leap apparently unconnected with and certainly 

 not culminating necessarily out of the periodic ebb 

 and flow of human fortune of which history tells. 

 It is the work of a mere handful of men. The mass 

 probably are little more scientific to-day than they 

 were two thousand years ago, and this being the 

 case, the advance does not appear to be the inaugura- 

 tion of the millennium, nor, indeed, of any other 

 prolonged period of stable regime. Nothing but 

 the most sublime egoism, the unconscious consti- 

 tutional disability of the natural man to conceive 

 of a universe not revolving around himself, can make 



