For though from our standpoint the evolution of these people seems suddenly to have come to an end in mid-career, looked at more intimately it shows all the signs of having fully run its course.

Development ceased, not because of outward obstruction, but from purely intrinsic inability to go on.

The intellectual machine was not shattered; it simply ran down.

To this fact the phenomenon owes its peculiar interest.

For we behold here in the case of man the same spectacle that we see cosmically in the case of the moon, the spectacle of a world that has died of old age.