_I wish I knew what it all meant. But I think this: I think it is the result of man being born immortal, and thinking (like an ass) that he has only this world to satisfy his immortal instinct with. Despairing of immortality in this world, and forgetting it in the next, he makes the human race the immortal unit, and so endows it with life. And, because he has been told that life means growth, he cannot be happy until he believes that the world in which he lives is growing, from something to something else. That is human vanity’s favourite dogma, and there is no atom of proof for it. Everything we know about history and natural history shows that there is a kind of progress in the world which is a progress from the less to the more complicated, from the less to the more organized: nothing suggests, except to our vanity, that there is a progress from the worse to the better—and what other kind of progress would any sensible person give a tinker’s curse for? That’s it, I believe. Sweating away on the treadmill, humanity fancies that it is mountaineering, and that the dawn is just going to show above the next slope. There’s an epigram for you. Let me finish now, before I spoil it...._ The rest of Miss Linthorpe’s statement, though equally curious, was entirely private. I am afraid I have got well past her age without ever acquiring her truculent directness of thought and of expression. But I sometimes hope she was right. Meanwhile, it looked for a short time, for a few months after her death, as if I was to defeat all her prophecies of my longevity. I got into the doctor’s hands; and it must be remembered that in those days, when doctors were not paid by results, but were allowed to charge what they liked for various kinds of treatment which might prove wholly unsuccessful, it was more easy to get into the doctors’ hands than to get out of them. More particularly, since this was just the crisis of the conflict between the physicist and the psychicist schools of medicine, and a person of decent means (as I now found myself) was not easily satisfied until she had tried all that either branch could do towards a cure of the malady. It is clear to me now—I shall not enter into the symptoms, for reasons which will readily be understood—that I was suffering from a comparatively mild attack of Hilton’s disease, the very nature of which was then only dimly suspected, while no steps had been taken at all towards the discovery of a remedy for it. Nowadays the doctors would have known what to do with me, and if my system had responded properly to treatment I should have been well again in six weeks. At the time, the very difficulty of diagnosis left me a prey to every conceivable theory which the physician of the moment might be trying to verify or to popularize.