time: the refreshing river 



to superior organisation. There had been a time when a certain level 

 of organisation had not existed, there would come a time when far 

 higher levels would appear. Time was the inevitable datum. 



Time and Herbert Spencer, 



We have now to give some consideration to the thought of the 

 great "synthetic philosopher" himself. With much of what has so far 

 been said, he would surely have been in definite agreement, since for 

 him also the importance of the time-continuum, in which the irrever- 

 sible world-process takes place, was cardinal. 



"Evolution under its most general aspect," he wrote, is the inte- 

 gration of matter and the concomitant dissipation of motion; while 

 Dissolution is the absorption of motion and concomitant disintegra- 

 tion of matter."^ Sometimes the word integration as used by him 

 seems to mean litde more than a mere aggregation of undifferentiated 

 matter,^ but as soon as he comes to give examples of its function in 

 evolution, we see that he means much what we mean when we speak 

 of successive, and higher, levels of organisation. Total mass, he says, 

 passes from a more diffused to a more consolidated state,^ and the 

 same process happens in every part that has a distinguishable individu- 

 ality and finally there is an increase of combinations among such 

 parts. Less coherence gives place to more coherence.^ As his examples 

 he takes, of course, the formation of solar systems from nebulae,* 

 the development of the earth from a ball of hot gases,^ the develop- 

 ment of plants and animals in phylogeny and ontogeny,^ and the rise 

 of social relationships from primitive animal gregariousness to human 

 communities of lower or higher order. '^ Then with perhaps some 

 weakening of the imagination he goes on to say,^ "Of the European 

 nations, it may be further remarked, that in the tendency to form 

 alliances, in the restraining influence exercised by governments over 

 one another, in the system of settling international arrangements by 

 congresses, as well as in the weakening of commercial barriers and 

 the increasing facilities of communication, we see the beginnings of a 

 European federation — a still larger integration than any now estab- 

 lished." So throughout the range of levels, the same processes are 

 seen — increase in the degree to which the parts constitute a co- 

 operative assemblage, increase in the co-ordination of parts, increase 



^ FP, p. 261. 2 pp^ pp 258, 259. ^ FP, p. 299. 



4 FP, p. 281. 5 FP, p. 282. 6 pp^ p, 284. 



' FP, p. 288. 8 pp^p. 290. 



246 



