Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/167

 always takes on some new and unknown factor, it is impossible to rely wholly upon the laws that can only generalize our past experiences. Evolution is no longer taken to signify the smooth unfolding of back urges in causation, but admits the play of movements and events in front as well as those behind.

Without some such theory in our mind, it is impossible to seek to understand or to evaluate the many unexpected changes of human conduct and values in the ambit of economics, politics, ethics, religion, philosophy which I have cited here. History has shown other epochs marked by changes as wonderful and as various in their significance. But none of the earlier changes has been so startling in its revelation of the possible contribution of science to the latent brutality of man as disclosed in modern arts and deeds of destruction.

In his old age, some time before the rise of Nazism and Fascism, Lord Bryce came to doubt the triumph of democracy as a principle of government. His arresting phrase, “Another ice age may be settling down upon the human mind,” goes even deeper into the nature of “our present discontents,” for it suggests a decline of those human qualities, interests, passions, and abilities which are summed up in the term “progress of humanity.”

On the other hand, may not this peril be exaggerated in the minds of the old among us by a lifelong belief in the growth of reason and humanity which