5 88 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



or subjunctive moods, or tribal confederacies were the things 

 studied, the scholars who studied them most deeply and most 

 fruitfully were those who studied them as phases in a process of 

 development. The work of such scholars has formed the strong 

 current of thought in our time, while the work of those who did 

 not catch these new methods has been dropped by the way and 

 forgotten. And as we look back to Newton's time we can see that 

 ever since then the drift of scientific thought has been setting in 

 this direction, and with increasing steadiness and force. 



Now, what does all this drift of scientific opinion during more 

 than two centuries mean ? It can, of course, have but one meaning. 

 It means that the world is in a process of development, and that 

 gradually, as advancing knowledge has enabled us to take a suffi- 

 ciently wide view of the world, we have come to see that it is so. 

 The old statical conception of a world created all at once in its 

 present shape was the result of very narrow experience ; it was 

 entertained when we knew only an extremely small segment of 

 the world. Now that our experience has widened, it is out- 

 grown and set aside forever ; it is replaced by the dynamical con- 

 ception of a world in a perpetual process of evolution from one 

 state into another state. This dynamical conception has come to 

 stay with us. Our theories as to what the process of evolution is 

 may be more or less wrong and are confessedly tentative, as sci- 

 entific theories should be. But the dynamical conception, which 

 is not the work of any one man, be he Darwin or Spencer or any 

 one else, but the result of the cumulative experience of the last 

 two centuries, this is a permanent acquisition. "We can no more 

 revert to the statical conception than we can turn back the sun in 

 his course. Whatever else the philosophy of future generations 

 may be, it must be a philosophy of evolution. 



It was not strange that among the younger men whose opin- 

 ions were molded between 1830 and 1840 there should have been 

 one of organizing genius, with a mind inexhaustibly fertile in 

 suggestions, who should undertake to elaborate a general doc- 

 trine of evolution, to embrace in one grand coherent system of 

 generalizations all the minor generalizations which workers in 

 different departments of science were establishing. It is this 

 prodigious work of construction that we owe to Herbert Spencer. 

 He is the originator and author of what we know to-day as the 

 doctrine of evolution, the doctrine which undertakes to formulate 

 and put into scientific shape the conception of evolution toward 

 which scientific investigation had so long been tending. In the 

 mind of the general public there seems to be dire confusion with 

 regard to Mr. Spencer and his relations to evolution and to Dar- 

 winism. Sometimes, I believe, he is even supposed to be chiefly a 

 follower and expounder of Mr. Darwin ! No doubt this is because 



