Page:A hundred years hence - the expectations of an optimist (IA hundredyearshenc00russrich).pdf/77

 garded as incident to complicated civilisations have perhaps been too hastily considered by despairing moralists. Vice is essentially stupid. It is only in occasional, in sporadic instances that we are presented with the terrible spectacle of great intelligences depraved by gross immorality and animalism: and even then, this combination is only possible where a high degree of culture is in contact with a widespread unintelligence. Most likely it will be found, when the abstract laws of vice come to be mapped out with more exactness than, so far as I am aware, they have yet been, that the degeneracies and immoralities of greatly-civilised ages are in reality only the product of luxury seated upon degradation. The French moralists of the eighteenth century had a glimmering of this in their idyllic pictures of reformed society, when the old morality of the simple life was to return with the abolition of oligarchic splendour and popular misery.

In one direction we may see means by which intelligent recreation may be supposed capable of vast developments. Already the study of the psychical side of man has been the means of extraordinary discoveries. Our knowledge of hypnotism, suggestion, thought-transference and similar psychological wonders, obscured though it has unhappily been by charlatanism and the importation into the subject of irrelevant follies, has great promise