ABSTRACT
Throughout the nineteenth century, with the spirit of progress that so plainly animates the minds of the larger number of philosophers and social scientists, there is to be seen slowly but certainly developing a kind of malaise affecting the very premises on which the spirit of progress rested. The art of the century reveals the malaise describing as sensitively as any medium could. The author suggests that the highly visible malaise takes the form of an inversion of the spirit of progress. One final attribute of the malaise is writing of degeneration: the running-down of things, the replacement of processes of genesis and development by those of decay and decline. But in whatever form, however worked into the structure of sociological thought, the theme of degeneration has been a signal one from the time when Comte—believing profoundly in what he called "the spiritual crisis of our age".
