_The next thing you will notice is that the change is of two kinds: there is a change which is involuntary on mankind’s part, and a change which is deliberate. All the progress of science, whether practical or speculative, is involuntary. We shall not go back to horses, nor to candles, nor to sewing-machines. And although all the theories of all these silly scientists are not (thank God!) eternal, but appear to go round in cycles, so that I am old enough to remember the days when they thought consumption was not infectious (or do I mean contagious?) and that there was no such person as Homer, yet it’s only fair to say that they do learn from their mistakes; they go up blind alleys, but they have the decency to blaze the trail behind them, so that their posterity shan’t make just the same kind of fools of themselves. And I suppose it’s true that as our scientific apparatus gets better, we come to depend on it more and grow physically inferior in consequence—I can say this with some pride, since I am sixty-nine and haven’t a tooth in my head that God didn’t put there.[2] But nobody is going to avoid all that, and I never heard that anybody except Ruskin thought you could._ _The lie you will find people telling all around you—and telling it without realizing that it is a lie, which makes it so much worse, as Plato says—is that the great movements of the human mind, whether in the arts or in politics or in morals or in religion, are similarly part of an irresistible progress; so that you could never go back on our present attitude of mind about (say) marriage any more than you could go back to sewing-machines. The truth is, of course, that the great movements of the human mind are just fashions. The reason why you don’t admire Whistler is just the same as the reason why you don’t wear elastic-sided boots. And it’s so with bigger things than that; generally it’s a catchword that starts the whole thing—look at Evolution! Look at what a bogy it was to our fathers’—I mean, to my father’s—generation: how all the clergymen went about thinking the world was coming to an end and wondering where their next collection was coming from: and all the dons tried to work evolution into their subjects, and pretend that they had detected it there long before they ever heard of Darwin, and the politicians—oh, Lord! And now where is it? It outlived crinolines, which it never deserved to, but it hasn’t outlived jumpers. You’ll see, it’ll be just the same with this relativity nonsense every one is talking about. They’re fashions, these things; it isn’t that any one person sits down and says, “Now, let’s all think like this”: it’s a collective impetus, as that bore Canon Dives would say. You’ll live through it._