504 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



52. 

 Relation to 

 Darwin's 

 discovery. 



before, in his own country, Comte's historical method 

 was recognised or practised at all. It had to lie 

 explained and recommended by careful thinkers like 

 Mill in England before it was, as it were, reintro- 

 duced into France in a more sober and practical form. 

 But nothing contributed more to make Comte's es;prit 

 d'ensemUe, or his co-ordinating process, popular than 

 the special application of it which came from a quite 

 unexpected quarter, but exactly from those sciences 

 which had given Comte his original suggestion. This 

 was the revolution which the biological sciences under- 

 went through the publication of Darwin's great work 

 in the year 1859, two years after Comte's death. 

 This revolution has by historians of science and by the 

 followers of Darwin been traced, in a one - sided way, 

 to the discovery of what is called the law of natural 

 selection. There is no doubt that this constituted the 

 most startling among Darwin's discoveries ; that it was, 

 in fact, a signal instance of a co - ordination such as 

 Comte desired to introduce into the study of biological 

 as well as social phenomena. As a brilliant example 

 of this more general process of reasoning, as a splendid 

 fruit of a more universal method, it did, in a large 

 realm of research, as much or more than Hegel's 

 method had done in a very different region.^ 



But the discovery of Darwin, like other discoveries of 

 his own and his followers, was really the outcome of that 



^ As an example of the latter we 

 may refer, e.g., to the celebrated 

 work of David Strauss, the ' Life 

 of Jesus,' which attempts to explain 

 the main features of the sacred 



narrative as an outcome of an in- 

 tellectual feature, the " mythenbil- 

 dende Phantasie," or myth-forming 

 propensity of the human imagina- 

 tion. 



