LECTURES IN BIOLOGICAL SCIENCES 



marvelous designs of living bodies have not arisen all at once; 

 they reached their present state of near-perfection only gradu- 

 ally. 



The doctrine of progress is certainly older than Darwin. In 

 fact, it was the congruence of Darwin's theories with the spirit 

 of his time, to which a belief in progress was fundamental, which 

 accounts for their enthusiastic reception. Belief in progress is a 

 part of our heritage from the Age of Enlightenment, the eight- 

 eenth century. During the eighteenth and the nineteenth cen- 

 turies most people were getting materially better off, at least in 

 the parts of the world swayed by the industrial revolution. It 

 was a gratifying and even a thrilling thought that this improve- 

 ment is not only a natural but also an inevitable process, that 

 people are becoming better as well as better off, and that this 

 progress will eventually result in something like heavenly bliss, 

 formerly promised only to an elect few and only beyond the 

 grave. 



This doctrine was stated with a most refreshing directness by 

 Condorcet in 1793. Condorcet saw in human history a succession 

 of ten stages, rising from primitive barbarism to ever greater 

 perfection, and he dreamed that the tenth and last stage was 

 drawing near while he wrote about it. The positive philosophy 

 of Comte, published between 1830 and 1842, saw the progress in 

 three stages, from a primitive theological, through a metaphysi- 

 cal, to a scientific one. This progress will "transform artificially 

 the species into a single individual, immense and eternal, en- 

 dowed with a constantly progressive action on exterior nature." 

 Spencer, who managed to be both a predecessor and a successor 

 of Darwin, wrote in 1850 that progress ". . . is not an accident, 

 but a necessity. Instead of civilization being artificial, it is a 

 part of nature; all of a piece with the development of the em- 

 bryo or the unfolding of a flower. The modifications mankind 

 have undergone, and are still undergoing, result from the law 

 underlying the whole organic creation; and provided the human 

 race continues, and the constitution of things remains the same, 

 these modifications must end in completeness." 4 



4 For a discussion of Comte's and Spencer's philosophies of progress, see 

 J. C. Greene, "Biology and Social Theory in the Nineteenth Century: Au- 

 guste Comte and Herhert Spencer,'' in M. Clagett's Critical Problems in the 

 History of Science (Madison, 1959). 



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