39 



travelled over by humanity we state that there 

 has really been progress, amelioration on the 

 whole, not following a straight ascending 

 line, however, but as Goethe has said, a 

 spiral with rhythms of advance and retro- 

 gression, of evolution and dissolution. 



Every cycle of evolution in the individual 

 as in the collective life carries in itself the 

 germs of the corresponding cycle of dissolution, 

 and the latter inversely by the decay of the 

 already worn out form prepares in the eternal 

 laboratorynewevolutionsandnew forms of life. 

 It is thus that in the social human world 

 every phase of civilisation carries within itself 

 and always develops further the germs of its 

 own dissolution whence is derived a new phase 

 of civilisation whose geographical seat will 

 be more or less changed in the eternal 

 rhythm of living humanity. The ancient 

 ecclesiastical civilisations of the East dissolve 

 and give birth to the Graeco- Roman world to 

 which succeeds the feudal and aristocratic 

 civilisation of Central Europe ; this also being 

 dissolved through its own excesses, like the 

 preceding civilisations, is replaced by the 

 bourgeois civilisation which has attained its 

 culminating point in the Anglo-Saxon world. 

 But this already feels the first shiverings of 

 the fever of dissolution, whilst a socialist 

 civilisation is being born and is developing 

 itself, a civilisation which will flourish over 

 a vaster domain than that of the other 

 civilisations which have preceded it.* 



* One of the most characteristic phases of social dis- 

 solution is that of parasitism, cf Massart and Vander- 

 velde, Parasitism, Organic and Social, London, 1895. 



