of nature encounters an obvious difficulty, which did not
escape some critics of Spencer, in the prominent fact of history that
every great civilisation of the past progressed to a point at which
instead of advancing further it stood still and declined, to become
the prey of younger societies, or, if it survived, to stagnate. Arrest,
decadence, stagnation has been the rule. It is not easy to reconcile
this phenomenon with the theory of mental improvement.

The receptive attitude of the public towards such a philosophy as
Spencer's had been made possible by Darwin's discoveries, which were
reinforced by the growing science of palaeontology and the accumulating
material evidence of the great antiquity of man. By the simultaneous
advances of geology and biology man's perspective in time was
revolutionised, just as the Copernican astronomy had revolutionised his
perspective in space. Many thoughtful and many thoughtless people were
ready to discern--as Huxley suggested--in man's "long progress through
the past, a reasonable ground of faith in his attainment of a nobler
future." and Winwood Reade, a young African traveller, exhibited it in
a vivid book as a long-drawn-out martyrdom. But he was a disciple of
Spencer, and his hopes for the future were as bright as his picture
of the past was dark. THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN, published in 1872, was so
widely read that it reached an eighth edition twelve years later,
and may be counted as one of the agencies which popularised Spencer's
optimism.

That optimism was not endorsed by all the contemporary leaders of
thought. Lotze had asserted emphatically in 1864 that "human nature will
not change," and afterwards he saw no reason to alter his conviction.

Never one fold and one shepherd, never one uniform culture for all
mankind, never universal nobleness. Our virtue and happiness can only
flourish amid an active conflict with wrong. If every stumbling-block
were smoothed away, men would no longer be like men, but like a flock
of innocent brutes, feeding on good things provided by nature as at the
very beginning of their course. [Footnote: Microcosmus, Bk. vii. 5
ad fin. (Eng. trans. p. 300). The first German edition (three vols.)
appeared in 1856-64, the third, from which the English translation
was made, in 1876. Lotze was optimistic as to the durability of modern
civilisation: "No one will profess to foreknow the future, but as far
as men may judge it seems that in our days there ar