372 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [PT. UL 



advanced social institutions, like monogamy, and highly 

 elaborated philosophical doctrines, such as monotheism, are 

 unhesitatingly referred back to the beginning of the world 

 and it is in general taken for granted that the thoughts 

 and feelings current in past ages were like the thoughts and 

 feelings current in our own. Until within the last three 

 or four generations this statical view of things was shared 

 by cultivated with uncultivated people, though with some 

 what different degrees of narrowness. On the other hand 

 the dynamic view of things, represented by the Doctrine of 

 Evolution, which regards the universe and all that is in 

 it as presenting a different aspect from epoch to epoch, obvi 

 ously results from the adjustment of our theories to longer 

 and longer sequences in the past. The progress of geologic 

 discovery, revealing the immense antiquity of the earth, was 

 one of the circumstances which began to arouse in educated 

 people a tendency to regard things as continually though 

 slowly changing ; and the theories of Goethe and Lyell, the 

 revolution in biology wrought by Lamarck and Cuvier, and 

 the application of the comparative method to the historic 

 and philologic interpretation of past states of society, deep 

 ened and strengthened this tendency. In no other respect 

 is the present age so widely distinguished from past ages as 

 in this habit of looking at all things dynamically. It is 

 shown in the literary criticism of Sainte-Beuve, and the art- 

 criticism of Taine, and in the historical criticism of Momm- 

 sen or Baur, no less than in Mr. Darwin s science, or Mr. 

 Spencer s philosophy. In our concluding chapter we shall 

 observe some of the practical bearings of this great differ 

 ence in mental habit between the eighteenth and nineteenth 

 centuries, with especial reference to the political Utopias of 

 Rousseau, and to the attempts of the Encyclopedists to over 

 throw Christianity. It is enough for us now to bear in 

 mind that this immense widening of the mental horizon 

 which modern times have witnessed; this power of criti- 



