36 A Century of Science 



been dropped by the way and forgotten ; and as 

 we look back to Newton s time we can see that 

 ever since then the drift of scientific thought has 

 been setting in this direction, and with increasing 

 steadiness and force. 



Now, what does all this drift of scientific opinion 

 during more than two centuries mean ? It can, of 

 course, have but one meaning. It means that the 

 world is in a process of development, and that 

 gradually, as advancing knowledge has enabled us 

 to take a sufficiently wide view of the world, we 

 have come to see that it is so. The old statical 

 conception of a world created all at once in its pre 

 sent shape was the result of very narrow experience ; 

 it was entertained when we knew only an extremely 

 small segment of the world. Now that our experi 

 ence has widened, it is outgrown and set aside for 

 ever ; it is replaced by the dynamical conception 

 of a world in a perpetual process of evolution from 

 one state into another state. This dynamical con 

 ception has come to stay with us. Our theories as 

 to what the process of evolution is may be more 

 or less wrong and are confessedly tentative, as 

 scientific theories should be. But the dynamical 

 conception, which is not the work of any one man, 

 be he Darwin or Spencer or any one else, but the 

 result of the cumulative experience of the last two 



