Note 2 — Chapter IV · THE CULT OF PLEASURE

It would be ignoring the most obvious characteristics of mankind to suppose that the pleasures of the new age will be limited to a mere mechanical development of those which we enjoy at present. There can be no doubt that new delights will be invented. With a general improvement in intelligence and in the standard of comfort; with a moneyed class compelled, by the enactments which we have imagined, to enjoy a considerable accession of leisure; with conditions which will, as we have hoped, reduce materially the necessary hours of labour for the worker; with some of the most engrossing amusements of the present age abolished for sentimental reasons; we may take it for granted that a great demand for new recreations will develop. Some of these considerations might easily give us pause. We might perhaps fear that vice—either the extension of existing vices or (if that indeed be possible) the invention of new ones—might be a terrifying problem of the next century, if we had not foreseen, concurrently with the other developments anticipated, a marked moral improvement in human nature. There is in the calculations of the pessimist and the reactionary no fallacy more mischievous than the oft-recited aphorism that human nature is the same in all places and at all times. That is precisely what human nature is not. Spectacles which delighted ancient Rome would revolt modern civilisation. Spectacles which are still keenly enjoyed in Spain would revolt England or the United States, and probably awaken the activity of the police. Human morality has demonstrably advanced in historic time: it has very perceptibly advanced, as I showed in an earlier chapter,2 during the nineteenth century. But the improvement in this respect which the next hundred years will show must, in all human probability, greatly excel that of the past time. And thus, though a sane and reasonable anticipation will not exclude the possibility of regrettable accidents in the future moral history of mankind, it will also regard them as probably transient. The vices regarded as incident to complicated civilisations have perhaps been too hastily considered by despairing moralists. Vice is essentially stupid. It is only in occasional, in sporadic instances that we are presented with the terrible spectacle of great intelligences depraved by gross immorality and animalism: and even then, this combination is only possible where a high degree of culture is in contact with a widespread unintelligence. Most likely it will be found, when the abstract laws of vice come to be mapped out with more exactness than, so far as I am aware, they have yet been, that the degeneracies and immoralities of greatly-civilised ages are in reality only the product of luxury seated upon degradation. The French moralists of the eighteenth century had a glimmering of this in their idyllic pictures of reformed society, when the old morality of the simple life was to return with the abolition of oligarchic splendour and popular misery.