DARWINISM AND PHILOSOPHY 7 



tion of change, we must seek them in some trans 

 cendent and supernal region. The human mind, 

 deliberately as it were, exhausted the logic of the 

 changeless, the final, and the transcendent, before 

 it essayed adventure on the pathless* wastes of 

 generation and transformation. We dispose all 

 ~too easily of .the efforts of the schoolmen to in 

 terpret nature and mind in terms of real essences, 

 hidden forms, and occult faculties, forgetful of 

 the seriousness and dignity of the ideas that lay 

 behind. We dispose of them by laughing at the 

 famous gentleman who accounted for the fact that 

 opium put people to sleep on the ground it had a 

 dormitive faculty. But the doctrine, held in our 

 own day, that knowledge of the plant that yields 

 the poppy consists in referring the peculiarities 

 of an individual to a type, to a universal form, 

 a doctrine so firmly established that any other 

 method of knowing was conceived to be unphilo- 

 sophical and unscientific, is a survival of precisely 

 the same logic. This identity of conception in 

 the* scholastic and anti-Darwinian theory may well 

 suggest greater sympathy for what has become 

 unfamiliar as well as greater humility regarding 

 the further unfamiliarities that history has in 

 store. 



Darwin was not, of course, the first to question 

 the classic philosophy of nature and of knowledge. 

 The beginnings of the revolution are in the phys- 



