Certainly civilization has its bad points, and it requires no great cleverness to discover them, to point them out and to exaggerate them. Certainly many of its most boasted, supposed benefits are not really a blessing, but either merely imaginary or else unimportant--little, superfluous things which may be pleasant, but lacking which we can live without great deprivation, and for which we undoubtedly pay far too dearly. But, on the whole, it is a mighty achievement of man's struggling intellect, an invaluable improvement of the lot of man, and if anyone denies this he forfeits any claim to serious refutation. Rousseau's state of nature may be a very pleasant change for a summer holiday, but every man of sound common sense would decline it as a permanent abode. We may therefore freely concede the fact of progress in civilization in so far as the latter implies greater safety, facility, order and equability of life, deeper and more widely diffused knowledge and more perfect adaptation of man to the natural conditions in which he finds himself. For it is no reservation to note in the course of evolution both individual deviations from the path which leads to the goal of civilization, the amelioration of the constitution of mankind, and occasional relapses into bygone barbarisms. To make use of Gumplowicz's expression, it is not an acrochronic and acrotopic illusion (that is, a form of self-deception which consists in thinking the time when one lives and the place where one lives the best of all times and the most wonderful of all places) if we place the present far above all past ages and declare our civilization to be incomparably richer and more perfect than anything that has preceded it. The _laudator acti_, the cross-grained Nestor who praises the past at the expense of the present, the enthusiast for "the good old times," is a figure that has always been familiar. But it proves nothing. This tender love of the past is not the outcome of objective comparison and consideration, but an impulse of subjective psychology. It is simply the emotion and longing which fill an old man's heart when he looks back on his youth. He remembers the pleasurable emotions which once accompanied all his impressions and which are now unknown to his worn-out organism, and he thinks the world was better because he found more joy in it. The aged man is convinced that in his youth the sky was bluer, the rose more odorous, the women more beautiful than now, but an impartial observer would pityingly shake his head at this.