THE THE OKI A GENERA TIOJVIS. 283 



differently estimated by different workers, till we are in posses- 

 sion of some means of mathematically measuring differentia- 

 tion and variation. The demand for mathematical measurement 

 is already being made in certain quarters, and this demand 

 progressing science will undoubtedly supply. At present we 

 are quite adrift in our discussions, so long as we ignore the 

 more general and philosophical aspect of the question and 

 thereby overestimate its simplicity. Even if we accept differ- 

 entiation and the interaction of differentiated products as the 

 root ideas of the evolution of the individual and of the race, 

 we are still at a loss to understand how the initial differentia- 

 tion arose — how the homogeneous first became the heteroge-' 

 neous. Lloyd Morgan has recently expressed this hopeless 

 and baffling search for initial differentiation as follows ^ : — 



" Assuming, with the nebular hypothesis, a primitive fire-mist, we 

 must assume also an environment from which it is already differen- 

 tiated and to which its heat energy is communicated by radiation. 

 Or if we accept the meteoric hypothesis, we must grant the existence 

 of already differentiated cosmic dust and the interaction of its con- 

 stituent meteors. If we give yet freer rein to the speculative tend- 

 ency, which, chastened or running riot, is man's blessing or curse, 

 and, straining our mental vision, search deeper still into the begin- 

 nings of our universe, to find in the homogeneous substance that 

 Sir William Crookes calls protyle, the stuff from which the chemical 

 elements were differentiated ; even in this dim and wholly hypothet- 

 ical region we are forced to assume, as the antecedent conditions of 

 differentiation, transformations and redistributions of energy, imply- 

 ing a prior differentiation to render such interaction conceivable. 

 Or if, once more, we conceive the elemental atoms as vortex rings, 

 differentiated from the ether and thenceforth interacting, even here 

 at the very threshold of differentiation, we seek for an answer to the 

 question : Under what physical conditions did such vortex motion 

 originate ? " 



'to' 



1 Morgan, Lloyd, "The Philosophy of Evolution," Monist, July, 1S98, 

 p. 489. Weismann, too, expresses this difificulty in his "Germinal Selection": 

 " Die sog. ' epigenetische ' Theorie mit gletchen Keimeseinheiten ist deshalb 

 eigentlich nichts Anderes, als eine Evolutionstheorie mit unbewusster Zuriick- 

 verlegung der Anlagen in die Molekiile und Atome, eine, wie mir scheint, unstatt- 

 hafte Vorstellung. Eine wirkliche Epigenese aus voUig gleichartigen, nicht bloss 

 aus untereinander ^/^?V,^^« Einheiten ist nicht denkbar." 



