ON THE GENETIC VIEW OF NATURE. 



279 



country with a special philosophical teaching, that of 

 Mr Herbert Spencer, which, whilst in many points 

 coinciding with scientific views of development, has 

 some special and peculiar features which will occupy 

 us further on in our survey of thought. Having sought 

 therefore for a term which is to comprise all the con- 

 tributions to scientific thought which deal with the 

 change and development of natural objects and events, 

 I propose to use the older word " genesis," and to call 

 this view " the genetic view of nature " : it is, in general, 

 the view which seeks to give answer to the question, 



shown to be untenable, the words 

 retained their application to the 

 process by which the embryos of 

 living beings gradually make their 

 appearance ; and the terms ' de- 

 velopment,' ' Entwickelung,' and 

 ' evolutio ' are now indiscriminately 

 used for the series of genetic changes 

 exhibited by living beings, by 

 writers who would emphatically 

 deny that ' development ' or ' Ent- 

 wickelung' or 'evolutio,' in the 

 sense in which these words were 

 usually employed by Bonnet or by 

 Haller, ever occurs." The word 

 evolution has, however, acquired 

 in the English language, mainly 

 through the influence of Mr 

 Spencer's writings, a much wider 

 sense than evolution in biology 

 implies : in fact, it takes the place 

 of the German " Werden," a word 

 much used in the philosophical 

 writings influenced by the Hegelian 

 doctrine, which indeed taught a 

 logical or dialectic development of 

 things, as Herbert Spencer and his 

 school teach a mechanical develop- 

 ment. There seem to be given to 

 us by observation only two elemen- 

 tary processes of change, or of 

 " Werden " (in Greek yiyvforOai, in 

 French " devenir," in English " be- 



coming, " in Latin "fieri," in German 

 also the synonym " geschehen "). 

 These are, on the one hand, the 

 process of mechanical motion, and 

 on the other hand the process 

 of logical thought : the one being 

 the movement of external things, 

 ultimately of atoms, the other the 

 spontaneous movement of what 

 Hume called ideas. When the 

 thinking mind fixes its attention- on 

 the " fieri " rather than the " esse " 

 of things there are accordingly two 

 clues available, the mental or the 

 physical, the logical or the mechan- 

 ical. Many times taken up in 

 earlier ages, both have been con- 

 sistently applied only in the nine- 

 teenth century, the latter by Her- 

 bert Spencer, the former fifty 

 years earlier by Hegel, whose 

 philosophy is fundamentally as 

 much a logical as the former is a 

 mechanical system of evolution. 

 The narrower meaning of evolution 

 in biology is usually given in 

 French by the word " transfer m- 

 isme," in German by " Entwick- 

 elungslehre" or " Darwinismus. " 

 See on the general subject Prof. 

 James Sully's able article on 

 " Evolution " in the 9th ed. of 

 the ' Ency. Brit. ' 



3. 



' Genesis. 



