SIGNIFICANCE OF EVOLUTION 99 



gradually interpreting the physical world of 

 matter and energy in terms of the biological 

 conception of organism. No lower claim than 

 this will satisfy the ideals of biological investi 

 gation : of this we may be well assured. 



At the time of Kant and his immediate 

 successors biology had hardly begun to be 

 conscious of her strength. Living organisms 

 seemed, as it were, to be at the best only 

 dotted about here and there in the midst of 

 a totally foreign physical universe. Kant 

 assigned to them a very doubtful place in his 

 philosophy, and Hegel in his Philosophy of 

 Nature represented Nature as a sort of waste 

 in which any and every kind of existence is 

 strewed about indiscriminately a conception 

 repugnant to true science. Meanwhile the 

 advance of the natural sciences has pro 

 foundly changed our outlook on Nature. 

 First and foremost we have come to realise 

 the fact of evolution. The true significance 

 of this fact is a very different one from what 

 is still very generally supposed. At first 

 evolution appeared in popular thought, em 

 bodied, for instance, in the writings of 

 Herbert Spencer, as a derivation of the 



