THE FOUNDATION OF EVOLUTION 



Haeckel's much-boasted law of substance is merely 

 the law of persistence of force under another name. 

 There is this difference: that Haeckel, pledged as 

 he is to the old-fashioned materialism the de- 

 struction of which has left him, as Sir Oliver 

 Lodge remarks in the Hibbert Journal, stranded 

 high and dry still persists in asserting the per- 

 manence of matter, despite the recent discoveries 

 with which all are familiar. His dilemma is obvi- 

 ous : he has so framed the law of substance that if 

 the doctrine of the conservation of matter be dis- 

 credited, the law of substance falls also, and with 

 it the whole of " Haeckelismus " as a coherent sys- 

 tem. If Haeckel had been more than a brilliant 

 biologist he might have avoided this disaster, as 

 did his tutor and predecessor. 



I do not propose again to use Spencer's phrase, 

 the persistence of force, but shall simply speak 

 of the conservation of energy: firstly, because the 

 term is so familiar, and, secondly, because evo- 

 lution has been illustrated in the meaning of the 

 word energy, so that it now connotes exactly what 

 Spencer desired to express when he substituted for 

 it the term force. 



Now what is this doctrine of the conservation 

 of energy ? In its fullest meaning, as it is accepted 

 by practically every competent student to-day, it 

 asserts that everything in the world save mind 

 is from eternity to eternity ("eternal and un- 

 created"), that nothing is lost, and nothing is 

 made from nothing, or "created." It is the 

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