When we try combing the dictionaries—Greek, Latin, English, and others—for words expressing a sense of the “march of history”, or indeed of a past or future differing at all essentially from the present, we are forced to the conclusion that this kind of outlook on time is a surprisingly recent growth. We saw how the Greek ‘historia’ could mean practically any kind of knowledge; in the same way, when ‘periodos’ (literally ‘way round’) was used of time, it meant a cycle, one of a recurring series; it was not till the eighteenth century that a _period_ of history acquired its modern sense of an indefinite portion cut from a continuous process. Labels like _Middle Ages_, _Renaissance_, ... are none of them earlier than the eighteenth century, which also saw the new expressions _develop_ and _development_, and the fact that the significant words _anachronism_,[48] _evolution_,[48] and _prehistoric_, with the new perspectives they denote, only appeared during the nineteenth century may make us doubtful whether the mists of time have even yet fallen wholly from our eyes. In order to enter sympathetically into the outlook of an educated medieval gentleman, we have to perform the difficult feat of undressing, as it were, our own outlook by divesting it of all those seemingly innate ideas of progress and evolution, of a movement of some sort going on everywhere around us, which make our cosmos what it is. This is more difficult even than it sounds, because so many of these thoughts and feelings have become sub-conscious. We have imbibed them with our vocabulary and cannot without much labour and research disentangle the part that is due to them from the rest of our consciousness. Let us try, for a moment, to realize with our imaginations as well as with our intellects the world in which our fathers dwelt—a world created abruptly at a fixed moment in time, and awaiting a destruction equally abrupt, its inhabitants for ever to be the same, and for ever struggling, not to _progress_ or to _evolve_ into something different, but merely to become once more exactly like the first man and woman. Where we speak of _progress_ and _evolution_, the Middle Ages could speak only of _regeneration_ and _amendment_. Their evolution was like Alice’s race with the Red Queen. It took all their energies to keep still; and even in this they had very little hope of succeeding, for they believed that the world was getting steadily worse.