eir
origin and nature, and in the fact of their opposition.

In the somewhat garish light of the War and the Peace, it would not be
difficult to feel a real and even poignant sympathy for two causes that
were prominent and popular in the first fourteen years of the present
century, namely, the philosophy that based itself on a mechanical system
of evolution which predicted unescapable, irreversible human progress,
and that religion which denied the reality of evil in the world. The
plausibility of each was dissipated by the catastrophic events though
both still linger in stubborn unconsciousness of their demise. The
impulse towards sympathy is mitigated by realization of the unfortunate
effect they exerted on history. This is particularly true of
evolutionary philosophy, which was held as an article of faith, either
consciously or sub-consciously, by the greater part of Western society.
Not only did it deter men from realizing the ominous tendency of events
but, more unhappily, it minimized their power to discriminate between
what was good and bad in current society, and even reversed their sense
of comparative values. If man was indeed progressing steadily from bad
to good, and so to better and best, then the vivid and even splendid
life of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, with its headlong
conquest of the powers of nature, its enormous industrial development,
its vast and ever-increasing wealth in material things, must be not only
an amazing advance beyond any former civilization but positively good in
itself, while the future could only be a progressive magnifying of what
then was going on. "Just as" to quote Mr. Chesterton's admirable Dr.
Pelkins, "just as when we see a pig in a litter larger than the other
pigs, we know that by an unalterable law of the Inscrutable, it will
some day be larger than an elephant...so we know and reverently
acknowledge that when any power in human politics has shown for any
period of time any considerable activity, it will go on until it reaches
the sky."

Nothing but a grave inability to estimate values, based on a
pseudo-scientific dogma, can explain the lack of any just standard of
comparative values that was the essential quality in pre-war society.
Extraordinary as were the material achievements of the time, beneficent
in certain ways, and susceptible in part of sometime being used to the
advantage of humanity, they were largely negatived, and even reversed in
value,