EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



great thoughts ; at any rate, I received a negative 

 answer when I addressed this question to the one 

 person of my acquaintance of whom such an in- 

 quiry might be made. Whatever the conditions 

 of poetic thought, I fancy that the great ideas of 

 philosophy have seldom flashed across the brain, 

 but are rather the final products of long excogita- 

 tion and contemplation. 



A priori thinking has enslaved the human mind 

 for so many centuries that some people in our time 

 are inclined altogether to deny its claims, forget- 

 ful, apparently, of the triumphs of mathematics 

 the one purely deductive science. In other fields 

 induction is, of course, supreme; all progress in 

 biology, to take an instance, has resulted from 

 the inductive method, which begins by observing 

 facts, and then proceeds to reason from them. 

 Hence we find the explanation of a certain objec- 

 tion which has been taken to the synthetic philoso- 

 phy by that lower order of workers whom one 

 may call the hodmen of science. Their argument 

 is perfectly intelligible. They say that the formu- 

 la of evolution was an arbitrary invention of its 

 author, across whose brain this idea presumably 

 "flashed," and who then proceeded to explain all 

 orders of facts by this a priori assertion. Now, if 

 it were true that the formula had been arrived at 

 by a purely introspective and mystic process, 

 that fact would not of itself invalidate the applica- 

 tion of the formula, though it would certainly 

 leave us hopelessly in the dark as to the process 

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