The Doctrine of Evolution. 447 



some stage in its shrinkage a portion of the equatorial sur- 

 face is detached as a ring of fragments which ultimately 

 coalesce into a satellite globe this fundamental conception 

 still remains as a good working hypothesis. 



As we now look back over the illustrations here cited 

 and they are, of course, scanty enough in comparison with 

 what might be adduced it appears that about half a cent- 

 ury ago the foremost minds of the world, with whatever 

 group of phenomena they were occupied, had fallen and 

 were more and more falling into a habit of regarding things 

 not as having originated in the shape in which we now find 

 them, but as having been slowly metamorphosed from some 

 other shape through the agency of forces similar in nature 

 to forces now at work. Whether planets, or mountains, or 

 mollusks, or subjunctive moods, or tribal confederacies were 

 the things studied, the scholars who studied them most 

 deeply and most fruitfully were those who studied them as 

 phases in a process of development. The work of such 

 scholars has formed the strong current of thought in our 

 time, while the work of those who did not catch these new 

 methods has been dropped by the way and forgotten. And 

 as we look back to Newton's time we can see that ever since 

 then the drift of scientific thought has been setting in this 

 direction, and with increasing steadiness and force. 



Now, what does all this drift of scientific opinion during 

 more than two centuries mean? It can, of course, have but 

 one meaning. It means that the world is in a process of 

 development, and that gradually, as advancing knowledge 

 has enabled us to take a sufficiently wide view of the world, 

 we have come to see that it is so. The old statical conception 

 of a world created all at once in its present shape was the result 

 of very narrow experience ; it was entertained when we knew 

 only an extremely small segment of the world. Now that 

 our experience has widened, it is outgrown and set aside 

 forever; it is replaced by the dynamical conception of a 

 world in a perpetual process of evolution from one state into 

 another state. This dynamical conception has come to stay 

 with us. Our theories as to what the process of evolution is 

 may be more or less wrong and are confessedly tentative, as 

 scientific theories should be. But the dynamical conception, 

 which is not the work of any one man, be he Darwin or 

 Spencer or any one else, but the result of the cumulative 

 experience of the last two centuries, this is a permanent 

 acquisition. "We can no more revert to the statical concep- 



