Omega by Camille Flammarion — Read

While these great changes in the planets were taking place, humanity had continued to advance; for progress is the supreme law. Terrestrial life, which began with the rudimentary protozoans, without mouths, blind, deaf, mute and almost wholly destitute of sensation, had acquired successively the marvellous organs of sense, and had finally reached its climax in man, who, having also grown more perfect with the lapse of centuries, had risen from his primitive savage condition as the slave of nature to the position of a sovereign who ruled the world by mind, and who had made it a paradise of happiness, of pure contemplation, of knowledge and of pleasure.

Men had attained that degree of intelligence which enabled them to live wisely and tranquilly. After a general disarmament had been brought about, so rapid an increase in public riches and so great an amelioration in the well-being of every citizen was observed, that the efforts of intelligence and labor, no longer wasted by this intellectual suicide, had been directed to the conquest of new forces of nature and the constant improvement of civilization. The human body had become insensibly transformed, or more exactly, transfigured.