n 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 multiplied 

 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 pres- 

 ent 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 refinement of emotion, which 

 brought such a wealth of pleasures, w^ere fatally 

 attended by a proportional enlargement of the ca- 

 pacity 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 anx- 

 iety for the future.^ Finally, the inevitable pen- 

 alty of over-stimulation, exhaustion, 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 ex- 

 cept to escape the bore of dying. 



