384 CREATIVE EVOLUTION CHAP. 



higher generalities, piled -up storeys of a magnifi 

 cent building. But then it leaves no play between the 

 explanations it suggests and the objects it has to 

 explain. It is the detail of the real, and no longer 

 only the whole in a lump, that it claims to illumine. 



That the thought of the nineteenth century called 

 for a philosophy of this kind, rescued from the arbitrary, 

 capable of coming down to the detail of particular facts, 

 is unquestionable. Unquestionably, also, it felt that 

 this philosophy ought to establish itself in what we call 

 concrete duration. The advent of the moral sciences, 

 the progress of psychology, the growing importance of 

 embryology among the biological sciences all this was 

 bound to suggest the idea of a reality which endures 

 inwardly, which is duration itself. So, when a phil 

 osopher arose who announced a doctrine of evolution, 

 in which the progress of matter toward perceptibility 

 would be traced together with the advance of the mind 

 toward rationality, in which the complication of corre 

 spondences between the external and the internal would 

 be followed step by step, in which change would become 

 the very substance of things to him all eyes were 

 turned. The powerful attraction that Spencerian evolu 

 tionism has exercised on contemporary thought is due 

 to that very cause. However far Spencer may seem to 

 be from Kant, however ignorant, indeed, he may have 

 been of Kantianism, he felt, nevertheless, at his first 

 contact with the biological sciences, the direction in 

 which philosophy could continue to advance without 

 laying itself open to the Kantian criticism. 



But he had no sooner started to follow the path 

 than he turned off short. He had promised to retrace 

 a genesis, and, lo ! he was doing something entirely 



