ABSTRACT
THE identification of progress with evolution seems so palpable a confusion to a generation that has witnessed the terrors of a world war, and the anxieties of a world peace, that it seems difficult to understand how it ever arose. And yet we have only to think of the complacency of the early Victorian era, of the stupendous industrial changes, of the astounding scientific discoveries, of the rapid spread of popular education and of the striking social changes in every other department of life, to realize how natural this identification was. Science, whose promulgations were considered absolute, gave the sanction of its authority to the union of progress with evolution. It was forgotten that evolution was an ethically neutral concept, and that the transformation of science into social philosophy, of the evolution of ethics into the ethics of evolution, was fraught with great danger. And, in fact, an aftermath of disillusionment soon followed, and progress was dismissed as an illusion-a tragic illusion. Civilization itself, through immanent decay of the "Weltgeist " was rapidly passing to its doom-a doom that neither the will nor the energy of the people could prevent. Fatalism, mysticism, political quietism found their apotheosis in Oswald Spengler.
