56 The Outline of Science 



Organic evolution means that the present is the child of the 

 pa.st and the parent of the future. It is not a power or a princi- 

 ple; it is a process a process of becoming. It means that the 

 present-day animals and plants and all the subtle inter-relations 

 between them have arisen in a natural knowable way from a pre- 

 ceding state of affairs on the whole somewhat simpler, and that 

 again from forms and inter-relations simpler still, and so on 

 backwards and backwards for millions of years till we lose all clues 

 in the thick mist that hangs over life's beginnings. 



Our solar system was once represented by a nebula of some 

 sort, and we may speak of the evolution of the sun and the 

 planets. But since it has been the same material throughout that 

 has changed in its distribution and forms, it might be clearer to 

 use some word like genesis. Similarly, our human institutions 

 were once very different from what they are now, and we may 

 speak of the evolution of government or of cities. But Man 

 works with a purpose, with ideas and ideals in some measure con- 

 trolling his actions and guiding his achievements, so that it is 

 probably clearer to keep the good old word history for all pro- 

 cesses of social becoming in which man has been a conscious agent. 

 Now between the genesis of the solar system and the history of 

 civilisation there comes the vast process of organic evolution. 

 The word development should be kept for the becoming of the 

 individual, the chick out of the egg, for instance. 



Organic evolution is a continuous natural process of racial 

 change, by successive steps in a definite direction, whereby dis- 

 tinctively new individualities arise, take root, and flourish, some- 

 times alongside of, and sometimes, sooner or later, in place of, the 

 originative stock. Our domesticated breeds of pigeons and poultry 

 are the results of evolutionary change whose origins are still with 

 us in the Rock Dove and the Jungle Fowl; but in most cases in 

 \ViId Nature the ancestral stocks of present-day forms are long 

 since extinct, and in many cases they are unknown. Evolu- 

 tion is a long process of coming and going, appearing and dis- 



