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Updated: June 10, 2025
But we must take into account retrogressions, arrests, accidents of every kind. And we must remember, above all, that each species behaves as if the general movement of life stopped at it instead of passing through it. It thinks only of itself, it lives only for itself. Hence the numberless struggles that we behold in nature.
The war with Prussia gave me the effect of a great upheaval of nature, one of those cataclysms that happen every six thousand years; while the insurrection in Paris is, to my eyes, a very clear and almost simple thing. What retrogressions! What savages! How they resemble the people of the League and the men in armor!
I would suggest, as also possible, that there may among some people, have been retrogressions, customs and habits found out as beneficial, and perhaps for long practised, have by some tribes been forgotten. There can be no hard and fast rule of progress for any race. The whole subject is thorny and obscure, and the evidence on the question is often contradictory.
If the species was adapted to its conditions of existence, if the BEST in this respect had been attained and secured by natural selection, fresh variations affecting the species as a species would be retrogressions, and thus could have no prospect of prevailing.
Of course, there were inventions and changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and then forgotten again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life was the same, there were already priests and lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and rulers doctors, wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they were doing much the same things and living much the same life as they were in Europe in A.D. 1500.
They are simply the result of so many advances and retrogressions in the developing power of the human mothers, these advances and retrogressions being, as we have formerly seen, the immediate effect of external conditions in nutrition, hardship, &c., and also, perhaps, to some extent, of the suitableness and unsuitableness of marriages, for it is found that parents too nearly related tend to produce offspring of the Mongolian type, that is, persons who in maturity still are a kind of children.
That is a very natural explanation of their action; but if we for our part were to accept the assertion lately made by the House of Lords an assertion which is the furthest point to which aristocratic privilege has attained in modern times that assertion itself would become only the starting-point for a whole new series of precedents and of constitutional retrogressions; and worse than that, if by any chance, having raised this issue, we were to be defeated upon it if having placed this Resolution on the records of the House we were to fail to give effect to it, or were to suffer an electoral reverse as the conclusion of it then good-bye to the power of the House of Commons.
But related to, and very intimately connected with this advancement is the retrogressive evolution. It is equally universal, perhaps never failing. No great changes have been attained, without acquiring new qualities on one side, and reducing others to latency. Everywhere such retrogressions may be seen.
To penetrate it, she would have to become an excavating tool once more and resume the cast-off rags which she left behind in the exit window; she would have to retrace her steps, to be reborn a pupa; and life knows none of these retrogressions.
There have been mutual injuries, degradations, retrogressions, such as darken all the pages of human history; the manifest evil which often defies all interpretation, and which only a profound faith can regard as "good in the making." Together with these influences we must also reckon the special action of strong personalities.
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