he only arresting point is this: that if we suppose
improvement to be natural, it must be fairly simple. The world
might conceivably be working towards one consummation, but hardly
towards any particular arrangement of many qualities. To take
our original simile: Nature by herself may be growing more blue;
that is, a process so simple that it might be impersonal. But Nature
cannot be making a careful picture made of many picked colours,
unless Nature is personal. If the end of the world were mere
darkness or mere light it might come as slowly and inevitably
as dusk or dawn. But if the end of the world is to be a piece
of elaborate and artistic chiaroscuro, then there must be design
in it, either human or divine. The world, through mere time,
might grow black like an old picture, or white like an old coat;
but if it is turned into a particular piece of black and white art--
then there is an artist.

If the distinction be not evident, I give an ordinary instance. We
constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern humanitarians;

I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one
who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity.
They suggest that through the ages we have been growing more and
more humane, that is to say, that one after another, groups or
sections of beings, slaves, children, women, cows, or what not,
have been gradually admitted to mercy or to justice. They say
that we once thought it right to eat men (we didn't); but I am not
here concerned with their history, which is highly unhistorical.
As a fact, anthropophagy is certainly a decadent thing, not a
primitive one. It is much more likely that modern men will eat
human flesh out of affectation than that primitive man ever ate
it out of ignorance. I am here only following the outlines of
their argument, which consists in maintaining that man has been
progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves,
then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants. I think it wrong
to sit on a man. Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse.
Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair.
That is the drive of the argument. And for this argument it can
be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or
inevitable progress. A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer
things might--one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency,
like that of a species to pro