THE CONCEPT OF EVOLUTION 355 



where mechanism is in many departments transcended or 

 sublimed, where even the science of the individual is tran- 

 scended, for human beings in societies behave in a way which 

 cannot be formulated in terms of individual Biology and 

 Psychology. The homing bird transcends the boomerang, 

 and a purely Natural History account of social activity or 

 social evolution leaves much out. 

 So we have: 



the Kingdom of Man 

 the Realm of Organisms 

 and the Domain of the Inorganic 



well marked off from one another, and it seems on the face 

 of it likely that fallacy will result from using the same 

 word 'evolution' for all the processes of becoming that are 

 observable in these diverse fields. We hear of the evolution 

 of the solar system, of scenery, of chemical elements, the 

 evolution of organisms, of species, of consciousness, of mind, 

 of man, the evolution of societary forms, of institutions, of 

 language, of religions, the evolution of evolution-theories. 

 Now the use of the same word, especially a semi-technical 

 word, suggests that we have to do throughout with a similar, 

 perhaps a continuous process. But this begs several ques- 

 tions. No matter how convinced we may be as to Continuity, 

 we must not assume that the processes that have led to the in- 

 organic domain being what it is are also those which account 

 for the becoming of organisms, or that human history is 

 nothing more than a continuation of organic evolution. A 

 staircase is continuous, but there are successive steps, and so 

 in evolution there seem to have been epoch-making steps of 

 ' creative synthesis '. 



The following suggestions as to terms are offered. For 

 the process of becoming in the inorganic domain, when there 



