OF THE GOOD. 211 



country the philosophic mind has always restored its 

 vigour by returning to the datum-line of common-sense. 

 The influence I refer to is the special expression and 

 exact definition which the idea of development, long 

 familiar to German thinkers, acquired through Dar- 

 win's ' Origin of Species,' and the support it received 

 in Herbert Spencer's philosophy of Evolution. The 

 principle of natural selection, suggested to Darwin 

 by Malthus' ' Essay on the Principles of Population,' 

 joined to the facts of variation and inheritance, was the 

 spark which was to illuminate and give life to Spencer's 

 long prepared system ; it was to convert in Germany 

 the vague indications contained in the writings of 

 Leibniz, of Lessing and Herder, of Kant, Schelling, and 

 Hegel, into useful formula3 which could guide research 

 as much in the fields of nature as in those of history ; 

 it furnished a constructive principle and broke the 

 one - sided and depressing rule of the purely critical 

 spirit which was becoming more and more negative and 

 unpromising. Thinkers in Germany who coined the si. 



^ <-> " Darwinian 



name of Darwinism, with Ernst Haeckel at their head, ^'^olutionas 



' a corrective 



infused a spirit of hopefulness and cheery confidence fn^ow^ny! 

 into German thought, and this operated in many in- 

 stances as a wholesome and effective antidote to the 

 deadening ravages of scepticism and pessimism ; in fact 

 it worked, though in a one-sided way, a restoration of 

 faith in the powers of the human mind to attack afresh 

 the eternal problems. 



There were three principal features in Darwinism 

 which influenced philosophical thought in Germany. 

 The first was the study of the genesis of natural 



