id with "The Age of Louis
the Great"; some men foresaw so clearly the possibility of man's control
over nature that they dreamed of terrestrial Utopias as Francis Bacon did
in "New Atlantis"; some men, like Descartes, sought to grasp the
intellectual conditions of human improvement; and others, like Condorcet,
became the fervid prophets of human perfectibility; some, like Turgot,
re-examined history in terms of the new ideas; and some, like Saint Simon
and Comte, sought to discover the law by which all progress moves. This
new idea of life and history came "by divers portions and in divers
manners," but no one can doubt its arrival. The life of man upon this
earth was no longer conceived as static; it was progressive and the
possibilities that lay ahead made all the achievements of the past seem
like the play of childhood.

At last, in the nineteenth century, the climactic factor was added which
gathered up all the rest and embraced them in a comprehensive philosophy
of life. Evolution became a credible truth. No longer a dim conjecture,
it was established in biology, and then it spread its influence out into
every area of human thought until all history was conceived in genetic
terms and all the sciences were founded upon the evolutionary idea.
Growth became recognized as the fundamental law of life. Nothing in the
universe without, or in man's life within, could longer be conceived as
having sprung full-statured, like Minerva from the head of Jove. All
things achieved maturity by gradual processes. The world itself had thus
come into being, not artificially nailed together like a box, but growing
like a tree, putting forth ever new branches and new leaves. When this
idea had firmly grasped the human mind, the modern age had come indeed,
and progress was its distinctive category of understanding and its
exhilarating phrasing of human hope. Then came the days of mid-Victorian
optimism with songs like this upon men's lips:

"Every tiger madness muzzled, every serpent passion kill'd,
Every grim ravine a garden, every blazing desert till'd,

"Robed in universal harvest up to either pole she smiles,
Universal ocean softly washing all her warless isles." [11]

IV

Any one, however, who has lived with discerning thought through the
opening years of the twentieth century, must be aware that something has
happened to chasten and subdue these wildly enthusiastic hopes of the
mid-Victorian age. Others bes