Evolutionary social revolutionists expect the great day to come as the culmination of a process of economic evolution. This is what is meant by "evolutionary and revolutionary socialism." The wish-fancy is here rationalized as a doctrine of evolution by revolution. Thus the difference between the social revolutionist and the Second Adventist is much smaller than either of them suspects. As Freud would doubtless say, the difference extends only to the "secondary elaboration of the manifest dream formation"--the latent dream thought is the same in both cases. The Adventist expresses the wish in the terminology of a prescientific age, while the social revolutionist makes use of modern scientific jargon. Each alike finds escape from reality in the contemplation of a new-world system. The faith of each is a scheme of redemption--that is, of "compensation." Each contemplates the sudden, cataclysmic destruction of the "present evil world," and its replacement by a new order in which the meek shall inherit the earth. To both alike the great event is destined, in the fullness of time, to come as a thief in the night. In the one case it is to come as the fulfillment of prophecy; in the other the promise is underwritten and guaranteed by impersonal forces of "economic evolution."
This determinism is in the one case what Bergson calls "radical finalism," and in the other "radical mechanism." But whether the universe exists but to reel off a divine plan conceived before all worlds, or be but the mechanical swinging of the shuttle of cause and effect, what difference is there if the point arrived at is the same? In both cases this point was fixed before the beginning of time, and the meaning of the universe is just that and nothing else, since that is what it all comes to in the end.
Whether the hand which turns the crank of the world-machine be called that of God or merely "Evolution," it is only a verbal difference; it is in both cases "a power not ourselves which makes for righteousness." And the righteousness? Why, it is just the righteousness of our own crowd--in other words, the crowd's bill of rights painted in the sky by our own wish-fancy, and dancing over our heads like an aurora borealis. It is the history of all crowds that this dazzling pillar of fire in the Arctic night is hailed as the "rosy-fingered dawn" of the Day of the Lord.