HISTORY OF EVOLUTION — PETRONItiVICS. 333 



evidenced in his celebrated law of three stages — also remained a 

 declared opponent of organic transformation. 



Finally, at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth 

 century, Darwin succeeded in definitely establishing the doctrine of 

 organic transformation in his celebrated work, "Origin of Species," 

 1859. The arguments brought forward by Darwin in support of 

 this doctrine are so numerous and for the most part so original that 

 they place this scientist quite above Lamarck, and it is not at all 

 astonishing to see that the doctrine of transformation was adopted 

 by the scientific world only after his vigorous and decisive arguments 

 were published. Just as remarkable as this reasoning is the theory 

 of natural selection which Darwin proposed (at the same time as 

 Wallace) to support his theory of the evolution of the organic world; 

 but upon this point the principle of Lamarck is perhaps of equal 

 importance with that of Darwin. Darwin also holds an important 

 place in the development of the theory of intellectual and social 

 evolution through his work on the origin of man, "The Descent of 

 Man," 1871. 



Before Darwin, the great English geologist, Lyell, definitely 

 destroyed the theory of cataclysms in geology and introduced instead 

 the theory of slow and continuous changes due to agents still in action 

 to-day at the surface of the earth. But after the triumph of the 

 Darwinian theory of transformation, the idea of evolution was defi- 

 nitely adopted by geologists in a more precise sense than that of 

 Lyell. 



It was only when the doctrine of organic transformation was 

 proposed and elaborated by Lamarck and Darwin that the philoso- 

 phers began to glimpse the universal importance of the principle of 

 evolution. Herbert Spencer was the first to grasp this importance, 

 and while giving the formula of a general law of evolution, he 

 applied this formula to the entire field of empirical reality, and even 

 to the totality of things in the universe, but he never tried to ex- 

 amine the conditions necessary to a total evolution of the world. 



Ed. Hartmann was the first among speculative philosophers to set 

 forth clearly, in his celebrated " Philosophic des Unbewussten," 1869, 

 the problem of the world evolution, and while determining some of 

 the essential conditions of that evolution, to try to give for the first 

 time a positive solution of this problem. 



Finally, H. Bergson, in "Involution Creatrice," 1907, tried to 

 state the principle of world evolution as identical with that of or- 

 ganic evolution, and with the actual duration of psychic time. Thus 

 Bergson's doctrine is an example of a phenomenon which is not at all 

 rare in the history of general ideas, a universal truth which has been 

 found and elaborated according to scientific research (Laplace, La- 



