While thus trying to explain why a color dignified as imperial in
other centuries should have become offensive in our own, I found
myself wondering whether most of our actual refinements might not in
like manner become the vulgarities of a future age. Our standards
of taste and our ideals of beauty can have only a value relative to
conditions which are constantly changing. Real and ideal alike are
transitory,--mere apparitional undulations in the flux of the perpetual
Becoming. Perhaps the finest ethical or æsthetical sentiment of
to-day will manifest itself in another era only as some extraordinary
psychological atavism,--some rare individual reversion to the conditions
of a barbarous past.
What in the meantime would be the fate of sensations that are even
now becoming intolerable? Any faculty, mental or physical, however
previously developed by evolutional necessities, would have a tendency
to dwindle and disappear from the moment that it ceased to be either
useful or pleasurable. Continuance of the power to perceive red would
depend upon the possible future usefulness of that power to the race.
Not without suggestiveness in this connection may be the fact that it
represents the lowest rate of those ether-oscillations which produce
color. Perhaps our increasing dislike to it indicates that power to
distinguish it will eventually pass away--pass away in a sort of
Daltonism at the inferior end of the color-scale. Such visual loss would
probably be more than compensated by superior coincident specializations
of retinal sensibility. A more highly organized generation might
enjoy wonders of color now unimaginable, and yet never be able to
perceive red,--not, at least, that red whose sensation is the spectral
smouldering of the agonies and the furies of our evolutional past, the
haunting of a horror innominable, immeasurable,--enormous phantom-menace
of expired human pain.