Philosophic Evolution. 193 



cannot be merely the result of the inheritance of the 

 habitual actions, feelings, and imaginations of brutes. 

 Conceptions of time and space may be with apparent 

 plausibility (though not without real absurdity) repre- 

 sented as the results of structural modifications induced 

 in a practically infinite brute ancestry, which had been 

 ever submitted to conditions of time and space ; but at 

 any rate such ancestry was never at any time submitted 

 to conditions of moral responsibility. It is in this way 

 that the recognition of a power of choice in man, which 

 only those false to their own reason can deny, renders 

 the belief that man has been developed from a brute a 

 true absurdity a physical superstition which must vanish 

 before the light spread abroad by a more diffused know- 

 ledge of the powers and declarations of the human in- 

 tellect. 



III. With respect to "nature," the modern conception 

 of it is in many respects, as has been lately said, a re- 

 turn to older views, or at least harmonises with such. 

 The prevailing views are indeed simply pantheistic, but 

 all that is positive in such views may be easily assimi- 

 lated with philosophic theism. Indeed, it may be affirmed 

 that much in modern physiology demands the philo- 

 sophy of Aristotle as its logical complement, and the 

 doctrine of biological evolution needs pre-eminently the 

 aid of the peripatetic doctrine of " matter " and " form." 



Mr. Spencer's view of evolution itself may be taken 



O 



