The Metaphysics of Darwinism. 103 



ism, the foundations of which were laid in his 

 law of continuity, his theory of insensible percep 

 tions, his principle of the infinitely little, and his 

 profound insight into the truth that &quot; the present 

 is big with the future.&quot; And yet the evolution 

 ism of Leibnitz implies final causes, and is char 

 acterized by its antagonism to the geometrical 

 mechanism of Descartes and Spinoza. Schelling 

 and Hegel were evolutionists, but as remote from 

 the mechanism of the French school of their day 

 and the English school of ours as they were near 

 to the hylozoism of the ancient Greek cosmologists. 



Evolutionism, then, is not mechanism. Nor, as 

 I think it can be shown, does the Darwinian doc 

 trine of descent with modifications necessarily 

 imply fortuity. Perhaps nothing in the &quot; Origin 

 of Species &quot; has lent more color to that view than 

 the account given of the formation of the eye 

 and of the origin of the peculiar instinct of the 

 cuckoo. And we may be sure that if not here, 

 then nowhere in Darwin, does the fortuitous 

 really play the role of a veritable artist, a dens 

 absconditus, a creator of order and design. 



It is well known that the European cuckoo lays 

 her eggs in other birds nests. The American 

 cuckoo, however, makes her own nest. But in 

 rare instances she has been known to follow the 



