12 SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN PHILOSOPHY 



the Aristotelian tradition, and protected by its supposed 

 necessity for orthodox dogma, was suddenly swept away 

 for ever out of the biological world. The difference 

 between man and the lower animals, which to our human 

 conceit appears enormous, was shown to be a gradual 

 achievement, involving intermediate beings who could 

 not with certainty be placed either within or without the 

 human family. The sun and planets had already been 

 shown by Laplace to be very probably derived from a 

 primitive more or less undifferentiated nebula. Thus 

 the old fixed landmarks became wavering and indistinct, 

 and all sharp outlines were blurred. Things and species 

 lost their boundaries, and none could say where they 

 began or where they ended. 



But if human conceit was staggered for a moment by 

 its kinship with the ape, it soon found a way to reassert 

 itself, and that way is the " philosophy ' of evolution. 

 A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to 

 the philosophers to be obviously a progress ^though 

 whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not 

 known. Hence the cycle of changes which science had 

 shown to be the probable history of the past was 

 welcomed as revealing a law of development towards 

 good in the universe an evolution or unfolding of an 

 ideal slowly embodying itself in the actual. But such a 

 view, though it might satisfy Spencer and those whom 

 we may call Hegelian evolutionists, could not be accepted 

 as adequate by the more whole-hearted votaries of change. 

 An ideal to which the world continuously approaches is, to 

 these minds, too dead and static to be inspiring. Not only 

 the aspirations, but the ideal too, must change and develop 

 with the course of evolution ; there must be no fixed goal, 

 but a continual fashioning of fresh needs by the impulse 

 which is life and which alone gives unity to the process. 



