his surroundings had also changed in that interval between dreamslike background sets in a theatre productionas he was no longer relegated to the nebulous and infantile thinking of some prehistoric timeon the contrary , in the course of that intermission , time had advanced with alarming rapidity , propelling him centuries and millennia forward to an age in which mankind had already shrugged off its own slow beginnings , scoffed upon its primitive ancestors , and begun to deem as infallible that notion that human achievement was what made life more fulfilling and the universe more comprehensible and that advancement of his own species was , in lieu of a god , the only true virtue worthy of his worship .