i.i TRANSFORMISM 25 



ference or by experiment, to have arisen by a discontinuous 

 process, of which to-day we have no idea. Would the 

 doctrine be affected in so far as it has a special interest 

 or importance for us? Classification would probably 

 remain, in its broad lines. The actual data of embryology 

 would also remain. The correspondence between com- 

 parative embryogeny and comparative anatomy would 

 remain too. Therefore biology could and would continue 

 to establish between living forms the same relations and 

 the same kinship as transformism supposes to-day. It 

 would be, it is true, an ideal kinship, and no longer a 

 material affiliation. But, as the actual data of paleontology 

 would also remain, we should still have to admit that it is 

 successively, not simultaneously, that the forms between 

 which we find an ideal kinship have appeared. Now, the 

 evolutionist theory, so far as it has any importance for 

 philosophy, requires no more. It consists above all in 

 establishing relations of ideal kinship, and in maintaining 

 that wherever there is this relation of, so to speak, logical 

 affiliation between forms, there is also a relation of chrono- 

 logical succession between the species in which these forms 

 are materialized. Both arguments would hold in any 

 case. And hence, an evolution somewhere would still 

 have to be supposed, whether in a creative Thought in 

 which the ideas of the different species are generated by 

 each other exactly as transformism holds that species them- 

 selves are generated on the earth ; or in a plan of vital organi- 

 zation immanent in nature, which gradually works itself out, 

 in which the relations of logical and chronological affiliation 

 between pure forms are just those which transformism 

 presents as relations of real affiliation between living 

 individuals; or, finally, in some unknown cause of life, 

 which develops its effects as if they generated one another. 

 Evolution would then simply have been transposed, made 



