824 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In the second place and this is the more important point as 

 regards evolution at large, Mr. Spencer is not in the remotest 

 degree beholden for the origin of his ideas to Darwin. So far as 

 those ideas are not quite original with him and no human idea 

 is ever wholly original they are derived from the direct line of 

 Kant, Laplace, and the English geologists. For many years pre- 

 vious to Mr. Spencer's philosophic activity the progress of human 

 thought had been gradually leading up to the point where a 

 cosmic evolutionism such as Mr. Spencer's became almost of 

 necessity the next forward step. But to say this is not to detract 

 in any way from Mr. Spencer's greatness ; rather the other way ; 

 for it needed a man of cosmic intellect and of cosmic learning to 

 make the advance which had thus become inevitable. The mo- 

 ment had arrived, and waited for the thinker ; Mr. Spencer was 

 the thinker who came close upon the moment. The situation is 

 this : Kant and Laplace had suggested that suns and stars might 

 have grown and assumed their existing distribution and move- 

 ments by the action of purely natural laws without the need for 

 direct creative or systematizing effort from without. The geolo- 

 gists had suggested that the crust of the earth might have 

 assumed its existing stratification and sculpture through the 

 agency of causes at present in action. Erasmus Darwin and 

 Lamarck had suggested that plants and animals might have been 

 developed and specialized from a common original by the direct 

 action of the environment, aided in part by their own volition, 

 where such existed. But all these thinkers, great and able in 

 their day, had addressed themselves as Charles Darwin later 

 addressed himself to one set of phenomena alone ; had regarded 

 the process which they pointed out, in isolation only. It re- 

 mained for a man of commanding intellect and vast grasp of 

 generalizing faculty to build up and unify these scattered evo- 

 lutionary guesses into a single consistent concept of evolution. 

 Herbert Spencer was that man. He gave us both the concept 

 and the name by which we habitually know it. The words 

 " theory of evolution " occur already, seven years before Darwin, 

 in the Leader essay. 



This point, again, Mr. Clodd has excellently elaborated. 

 " Contact with many sorts and conditions of men," he says, 

 " brings home the need of ceaselessly dinning into their ears 

 the fact that Darwin's theory deals only with the evolution of 

 plants and animals from a common ancestry. It is not concerned 

 with the origin of life itself, nor with those conditions preceding 

 life which are covered by the general term, inorganic evolution. 

 Therefore it forms but a very small part of the general theory of 

 the origin of the earth and other bodies, ' as the sand by the sea- 

 shore innumerable,' that fill the infinite spaces." It is evolution 



