228 CONTINUITY. 



why organisms should have this nisus formativus, or why the 

 acquired habit or exceptional quality of the individual should 

 reappear in the offspring. 



Philosophy ought to have no likes or dislikes truth is her 

 only aim ; but if a glow of admiration be permitted to a . 

 physical enquirer, to my mind a far more exquisite sense of 

 the beautiful is conveyed by the orderly development, by the 

 necessary inter-relation and inter-action of each element of 

 the cosmos, and by the conviction that a bullet falling to the 

 ground changes the dynamical conditions of the universe, 

 than can be conveyed by mysteries, by convulsions, or by 

 cataclysms. 



The sense of understanding is to the educated more grati- 

 fying than the love of the marvellous, though the latter need 

 never be wanting to the nature-seeker. 



But the doctrine of continuity is not solely applicable to 

 physical enquiries. 



The same modes of thought which lead us to see con- 

 tinuity in the field of the microscope as in the universe, in 

 infinity downwards as in infinity upwards, will lead us to see 

 it in the history of our own race ; the revolutionary ideas of 

 the so-called natural rights of man, and a priori reasoning 

 from what are termed first principles, are far more unsound 

 and give us far less ground for improvement of the race than 

 the study of the gradual progressive changes arising from 

 changed circumstances, changed wants, changed habits. Our 

 language, our social institutions, our laws, the constitution of 

 which we are proud, are the growth of time, the product of 

 slow adaptations, resulting from continuous struggles. Happily 

 in this country practical experience has taught us to improve 

 rather than to remodel ; we follow the law of nature and avoid 

 cataclysms. 



[My own impression is that the philosophy of the future, 

 not merely as applied to physical forces and the science of 

 organisms, but to the history of the human race, its habits, 

 laws, languages, and possibly thoughts themselves, will be 

 mainly based on the doctrine of continuity, and that instead 

 of enquiries as to why a thing is in the sense of ascertaining 

 its ultimate causation, the research will be into the question 



