ON TEE ORIGIN OF REASON. 



>45 



from the lowest indications of conscious feeling, 

 and follows the growth of thought through every 

 variety of perception, i magination, and concep- 

 tion, to the latest work of philosophy. 



OBJECTIVE EVOLUTION. 



Noire is a true evolutionist, subjectively and 

 objectively. But he is a follower of Cuvier, not 

 of Lamarck. He avails himself of all the new 

 light which modern science, particularly through 

 Robert Mayer and Charles Darwin, has shed on 

 that oldest of all problems; but he is not a Dar- 

 winian, in the ordinary sense of the word. With 

 Robert Mayer, he holds' that " there is but one uni- 

 versal force of Nature in different forms, in itself 

 eternal and unchangeable. Whatever we perceive, 

 •whether in the form of light, heat, sound, or any- 

 thing else, is due to motion, and must be solved 

 as a purely mechanical problem. Nor can any 

 motion be lost ; it can only be changed into a 

 new kind of motion." 



Even organic life is looked upon as a me- 

 chanical process, though it is fully admitted that 

 science has not yet mastered it. In this respect 

 we have, in fact, advanced but little beyond Des- 

 cartes, who likewise looked upon animals, and 

 even on the human body, as mere machines, 

 though in the case of man the machine was con- 

 nected with a new substance, the soul. Physical 

 science is no doubt fully justified in always keeping 

 the solution of the problem of life before its eyes ; 

 nay, in representing such a solution as the high- 

 est triumph which mechanical or chemical science 

 could achieve. But it should never allow the 

 anticipation of that triumph to influence philo- 

 sophical speculation. We know exactly what a 

 cell is composed of, but no synthesis has yet pro- 

 duced anything like a living cell, absorbing, 

 growing, and generating, if only by self-division. 

 We may laugh at the occult quality of vital force, 

 but we cannot confess too openly that as yet vital 

 force is to us an occult quality. 



Leaving the origin of organic life as an open 

 question, and remembering that even Charles 

 Darwin requires a Creator to breathe life into 

 matter, we may afterward follow the progress 

 from the lowest to the highest forms of life, with 

 all the new light that patient research has thrown 

 upon it. Noire here goes entirely with the evo- 

 lutionists, he believes even in the Bathybios Hae- 

 clcelii. To me he does not seem to lay sufficient 

 stress on the many gaps which the most laborious 

 members of the evolutionist school are the most 

 ready to acknowledge, nor to dwell sufficiently on 



1 " Grundlegung," pp. 6, 11. 



71 



the indications, supplied by Nature herself, that 

 she may have had more than one arrow in her 

 quiver. He differs, however, most decidedly from 

 the evolutionists in the explanation of the pro- 

 cess of evolution. He looks upon the struggle 

 for life, the old iriKep-os ircrn;p iravTuv, the bellurn 

 omnium contra omnes, on the survival of the fit- 

 test, on natural selection, influence of environ- 

 ment, and all the rest, as merely concomitant 

 agencies, and places the original impulse in what 

 Schopenhauer called Will — a word, as it seems 

 to me, as badly chosen as could be to express 

 what Schopenhauer wished to express. What he 

 means by Will is simply the subjective form of 

 what appears objectively as Force. Where other 

 philosophers would say that everything is what 

 it is by its own nature, what the Hindoos call 

 svabhdvdt, Schopenhauer says it is so by its will, 

 wishing to indicate thereby that the nature of 

 everything, from a stone to an animal, is not de- 

 termined by any other higher will, but by itself 

 alone. He is thus driven to speak of an uncon- 

 scious will in stones and plants, and he dates the 

 beginning of a conscious will from its first mani- 

 festation in the animal kingdom. 



It is not quite easy to see how far Noire 

 adopts Schopenhauer's theory of will. Will, as 

 used by Schopenhauer, does not differ much from 

 fact, however, or — from another point of view — 

 from accident. The broader question is really 

 this, whether we are to admit that each thing is 

 a law to itself, or that there is a higher, universal 

 law for all. Schopenhauer ends with a republic 

 of separate wills, without a supreme ruler — nay, 

 without a superintending law. Hence the aver- 

 sion he felt and expressed to the theory of evolu- 

 tion. " What has philosophy to do with becom- 

 ing? " he writes ; " it ought to try to understand 

 being." l No doubt, what exists, and is what it 

 is by its own will, cannot easily be conceived as 

 changing, and yet what greater change can be 

 imagined than that from an unconscious will in 

 stones and plants to a conscious will in animals 

 and men ? Here it is where Noire separates him- 

 self decidedly from Schopenhauer. To him all 

 being is becoming, and all becoming is deter- 

 mined from the first. There could be no con- 

 sciousness in the animal world unless its unde- 

 veloped germs existed in the lower stages from 

 which animal life proceeds. Here is the funda- 

 mental difference between Lamarck's chaotic, pan- 

 genetic evolution, and that development which is 

 from beginning to end the fulfillment of a will, a 

 purpose, a law, or a thought. 



» " Einleitunp," p. 193. 



