Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/298



" the other hand, after observing how the processes that have brought things to their present stage are still going on, not with a decreasing rapidity indicating approach to cessation, but with an increasing rapidity that implies long continuance and immense transformations; there follows the conviction that the remote future has in store, forms of social life higher than any we have imagined: there comes a faith transcending that of the Radical, whose aim is some re-organisation admitting of comparison to organisations which exist. And while this conception of societies has naturally evolved, beginning with small and simple types which have their short existences and disappear, advancing to higher types that are larger, more complex, and longer-lived, coming to still-higher types like our own, great in size, complexity, and duration, and promising types transcending these in times after existing societies have died away—while this conception of societies implies that in the slow course