536 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of retrogression which history and natural history alike present. 

 " It admits of no doubt/' he says in one place, " that a law of de- 

 generation is manifest in human events ; that each individual, 

 each family, each nation, may take an upward course of evolution 

 or a downward course of degeneracy. Noteworthy " (he adds) " is 

 the fact that, when the organism — individual, social, or national — 

 has reached a certain state of complex evolution, it inevitably 

 breeds changes in itself which disintegrate and in the end destroy 

 it." * Turn now to Mr. Leslie Stephen, a writer as free from all 

 theological prepossessions as either Mr. Spencer or Dr. Maudsley. 

 Far from making the assumptions which Mr. Mallock attributes 

 to the whole liberal school, he criticises some of those assumptions 

 in terms that resemble very closely those used by Mr. Mallock 

 himself. For example, he tells us that, while speculations in re- 

 gard to a future Utopia for human society " may be useful in de- 

 fining an end toward which all well-wishers to their fellows may 

 desire to act," such speculations are nevertheless rash, and do not 

 solve the difficulty for us, inasmuch as "the knowledge — if we 

 co.uld attain the knowledge — that our descendants would be better 

 off than ourselves would not disprove the existence of the present 

 evil." Pushing the objection further, he says: "We can not tell 

 that progress will be indefinite. It seems rather that science 

 points to a time at which all life upon the planet must become 

 extinct, and the social organism may, according to the familiar 

 analogy, have its natural old age and death." f 



There is no use in taking up space with further citations. 

 The fact is, we would not, at this moment, know to what writer of 

 the several schools of thought referred to by Mr. Mallock we 

 could turn, to find that dogmatic assumption of progress which 

 he says is characteristic of them all. What characterizes them 

 all is a manly determination not to despair of the fortunes of 

 humanity because the former monopolizers of spiritual authority 

 have suffered an abatement of their prerogatives and now expend 

 a large portion of their energy in anathematizing the tendencies 

 of the age. What further characterizes them all is a conviction 

 that morality and. happiness must have sources independent of 

 human institutions and abstract philosophies, and that, certainly, 

 neither demonstrable falsehoods nor unverified theories of any 

 kind can be their absolutely necessary conditions. Mr. Leslie 

 Stephen expresses this well when he says : " It may be said that 

 the whole history of the world and its inhabitants represents a 

 problem of stupendous magnitude. . . . We work out the prob- 

 lem by living, or rather we work out our own little bit of the 

 problem. We are utterly incompetent to grasp the whole or to 

 rise above it, and say why such and such data must have been 



* « Body and Will," p. 238. f " Science of Ethics," p. 444. 



