448 The Doctrine of Evolution. 



tion than we can turn back the sun in his course. "What- 

 ever else the philosophy of future generations may be, it 

 must be some kind of a philosophy of evolution. 



It was not strange that among the younger men whose 

 opinions were molded between 1830 and 1840 there should 

 have been one of organizing genius, with a mind inexhaust- 

 ibly fertile in suggestions, who should undertake to elabo- 

 rate a general doctrine of evolution, to embrace in one grand 

 coherent system of generalizations all the minor general- 

 izations which workers in diiferent departments of science 

 were establishing. It is this prodigious work of construc- 

 tion that we owe to Herbert Spencer. He is the originator 

 and author of what we know to-day as the doctrine of evo- 

 lution, the doctrine which undertakes to formulate and put 

 into scientific shape the conception of evolution toward 

 which scientific investigation had so long been tending. In 

 the mind of the general public there seems to be dire con- 

 fusion with regard to Mr. Spencer and his relations to evo- 

 lution and to Darwinism. Sometimes, I believe, he is even 

 supposed to be chiefly a follower and expounder of Mr. 

 Darwin ! No doubt this is because so many people mix up 

 Darwinism with the doctrine of evolution, and have but the 

 vaguest and haziest notions as to what it is all about. As I 

 explained above, Mr. Darwin's great work was the discovery 

 of natural selection and the demonstration of its agency in 

 effecting specific changes in plants and animals ; and in that 

 work he was completely original. But plants and animals 

 are only a part of the universe, though an important part, 

 and with regard to universal evolution or any universal 

 formula for evolution Darwinism had nothing to say. Such 

 problems were beyond its scope. ' 



The discovery of a universal formula for evolution, and 

 the application of this formula to many diverse groups of 

 phenomena, have been the great work of Mr. Spencer, and 

 in this he has had no predecessor. His wealth of originality 

 is immense, and it is unquestionable. But as the most 

 original thinker must take his start from the general stock 

 of ideas accumulated at his epoch, and more often than not 

 begins by following a clew given him by somebody else, so 

 it was with Mr. Spencer when about forty years ago he was 

 working out his doctrine of evolution. The clew was not 

 given him by Mr. Darwin. Darwinism was not yet born. 

 Mr. Spencer's theory was worked out in all its parts, and 

 many parts of it had been expounded in various published 



