The Fabian told a mirth-provoking anecdote of a Tory candidate. The scientific man, who possessed an imagination and was a member of the Society for Psychical Research, gave a brief account of Thomson's new Theory of Corpuscles, and hazarded the prediction that the next quarter-century would see remarkable things. "We'll know more about radiation--gravity--the infinitely little and the infinitely big. And then--my hobby. There's a curious increase of interest in the question of a Fourth Dimension. It's a strange age, and it's going to be stranger still--or merely beautifully simple and homecoming, I don't know which. Science and mysticism are fairly within hailing distance of each other." The talk went to Christopher's investigation, and then to mountain-climbing, and Cecil Rhodes's Will, and Marconi's astonishing feat of receiving in Newfoundland wireless signals from a station on the English coast, and M. Santos-Dumont's flight in a veritable airship. The writer of essays, who was a woman and an earnest and loving one, had recently published a paper upon a term that had hardly as yet come into general use--_Eugenics_; an article as earnest and loving as herself. Roger Michael had liked it greatly, and so had others at the table. Now they made the writer go over a point or two, which she did quietly, elaborating what she had first said.
Only the writer of plays--his last one being at the moment in the hands of the censor--chose to be strangely, deeply, desperately pessimistic. "I am going," he said, "to quote Huxley--not that I couldn't say it as well myself. Says Huxley, 'I know of no study which is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity.... Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the mark of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, more intelligent than other brutes; a blind prey to impulses which, as often as not, lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions which make his mental existence a terror and a burthen and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain degree of comfort and develops a more or less workable theory of life ... and then for thousands of years struggles with varying fortunes, attended by infinite wickedness, bloodshed, and misery, to maintain himself at that point against the greed and ambition of his fellow-men. He makes a point of killing and otherwise persecuting all those who first try to get him to move on; and when he has moved a step farther, foolishly confers _post-mortem_ deification on his victims. He exactly repeats the process with all who want him to move a step yet farther.'--That," said the writer of plays, "is what happens to brains, aspiration, and altruism in combination--rack and thumbscrews and auto-da-fés, and maybe in five hundred years or a thousand a picture skied by the Royal Academy--'Giordano Bruno going to the Stake,' 'Galileo Recanting,' 'Joan of Arc before her Judges.' My own theory of the world is that it is standing on its head. Naturally it resents the presence of people whose heads are in the clouds. Naturally it finds them rather ridiculous and contrary to all the proprieties, and violently to be pulled down. Moral: keep your brains close to safety and the creeping herb."