MR. MALLOCK ON OPTIMISM. 535 



If, therefore, Mr. Mallock would really make the position of an 

 independent, non-theological thinker of the present day unten- 

 able, he must show, not that the theory of progress in general is 

 without logical support, but that, taking the world as it is known 

 to us, there is no support outside of theology for intellectual or 

 moral effort. Let Mr. Mallock show that, because we can not 

 share his views in regard to the government of the world, we can 

 not desire the good of our neighbor or draw the distinction which 

 the poet draws between " a higher and a lower," and we shall at 

 once acknowledge our situation to be a very serious one. It is 

 simply because he can not show anything of the kind that he 

 adopts his present tactics, which are to saddle on the liberal 

 schools doctrines which they do not hold, and then to attack those 

 doctrines with his heaviest logical ordnance. In regard to the 

 doctrine of progress, Mr. Spencer is perhaps the most authorized 

 exponent of modern ideas, and how far he is from maintaining it 

 in anything like an absolute form may be gathered from his works 

 at large and very conclusively from the eighth chapter of the first 

 volume of his "Principles of Sociology/' A quotation or two 

 may be permitted : " If, on the one hand, the notion that savagery 

 is caused by lapse from civilization is irreconcilable with the evi- 

 dence, there is, on the other hand, inadequate warrant for the 

 notion that the lowest savagery has always been as low as it is 

 now. It is quite possible, and, I believe, highly probable, that ret- 

 rogression has been as frequent as progression. ... Of all exist- 

 ing species of animals, if we include parasites, the greater number 

 have retrograded from a structure to which their remote ancestors 

 had once advanced. ... So with super-organic evolution. Though, 

 taking the entire assemblage of societies, evolution may be held to 

 be inevitable as an ultimate effect of the co-operating factors, in- 

 trinsic and extrinsic, acting on them all through indefinite periods 

 of time ; yet it can not be held inevitable in each particular soci- 

 ety or even probable. . . . Direct evidence forces this conclusion 

 on us. Lapse from higher civilization to lower civilization, made 

 familiar during school days, is further exemplified as our knowl- 

 edge widens." 



Any candid person can judge from these passages how far Mr; 

 Spencer must be from basing any theory of human conduct upon 

 the abstract notion of the progress of the human race. His moral 

 system, as is well known, has nothing to do either with a general 

 theory of progress or with the sympathetic interest which indi- 

 vidual men may take now or hereafter in the fortunes of humanity 

 at large. If we turn to another writer of very " advanced " opin- 

 ions, but whose standpoint differs materially from Mr. Spencer's 

 — Dr. Maudsley — we find that he too lays no great stress upon the 

 idea of progress, and very fully recognizes the many evidences 



