2. PHYLOGENETIC POSSIBILITIES 



DOES history always gain its importance from what it 

 is not ? Must history always lose its " historical " aspect, 

 in order to become of importance to human knowledge ? 

 And can it always become " science ' by such a transforma- 

 tion ? We afterwards shall resume this discussion on a 

 larger scale, but at present we shall apply what we have 

 learned to hypothetic phylogeny. What then are the 

 possibilities of phylogeny, to what class of history would it 

 belong if it were complete ? Of course, we shall not be able 

 to answer this question fully ; for phylogeny is not com- 

 plete, and scarcely anything is known about the factors 

 which act in it. But in spite of that, so much, it seems to 

 me, is gained by our analysis of the possible aspects of history 

 and of the factors possibly concerned in transformism, that 

 we are at least able to formulate the possibilities of a 

 phylogeny of the future in their strict logical outlines. 



Darwinism and Lamarckisin, regarding organic forms as 

 contingent, must at the same time regard organic history 

 as a cumulation ; they indeed might claim to furnish an 

 historical explanation in the realm of biology if only their 

 statements were unimpeachable, which as we have seen, 

 they are not. 



But any transformistic theory, which locates the very 



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