47o THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



was, unquestionably, an important influence tending to prepare men's 

 minds for the acceptance of the conception of evolution; but the two 

 doctrines were by no means synonymous, nor did the adoption of the 

 former necessarily imply adherence to the latter. The lex continui is 

 historically important because it led to one of the early notable depar- 

 tures in modern thought from what may be called a Platonistic habit of 

 mind, that had, in a hundred subtle ways, dominated most European 

 philosophy and science for many centuries; it meant, in some degree, 

 the abandonment of the fashion of thinking of the universe as tied up in 

 neat and orderly parcels, the rejection of rigid categories and absolute 

 antitheses, as inadequate instruments for the description of the complex- 

 ity and fluidity and individuatedness of things. In other words, the 

 principle of continuity, though itself the product of the extreme of 

 philosophical rationalism, tended in a mild way towards a sort of anti- 

 rationalism, towards a distrust of over-sharp distinctions and over- 

 simple conceptions, towards a sense of certain incommensurability be- 

 tween the richness of reality and the methods of conceptual thought. 

 And in the nineteenth century this same tendency, in vastly more ex- 

 treme forms, has been far more conspicuously furthered by the influence 

 of the doctrine of evolution. But the idea of continuity as generally 

 held in the time of Buff on had no reference to temporal sequences 

 and by no means involved, in the minds of those who accepted it, 

 any definite belief in the descent of what are commonly called species 

 from other species. 14 If the presupposition of continuous gradations 

 and imperceptible transitions had been explicitly brought to bear upon 

 genetic problems in biology, it would naturally though not necessarily 

 have suggested some sort of theory of descent. But, curious as the fact 

 may appear, the presupposition was ordinarily not brought into con- 

 nection with genetic jjroblems at all; it was taken in an essentially 

 static sense. 



And it seems to have been taken in this sense by Buffon in the 

 introductory discourse in his first volume. A single obscure phrase, 

 which I have already quoted, might be regarded as hinting at the con- 

 ception of organic evolution, if the general tenor of the essay lent any 

 confirmation to such an interpretation. But nowhere else in this 

 writing is it even' remotely suggested that the conception of the con- 

 tinuity of forms involves the conception of the descent of so-called 

 species from one another. It is scarcely conceivable that if Buffon 



14 This fact has often been overlooked by interpreters of eighteenth century 

 writers. When we find such a writer saying that ' ' nature passes from one 

 species to another by gradual and almost imperceptible transitions, " it is by 

 no means safe to assume that the phrase contains any reference to genealogical 

 transitions, or that the writer meant by his words to affirm the transformation 

 of species through the summation of slight individual variations. Misappre- 

 hension upon this point has caused some eighteenth century authors to be quite 

 undeservedly set down as evolutionists. 



