TRANSFORMISM 215 



in the evolution of living things, must have been 

 inevitably determined by the stages preceding it. 

 Such a mechanistic explanation must assume that a 

 superhuman intellect, but still a finite intellect like 

 our own, such a calculator as that imagined by Laplace 

 or Du Bois-Reymond, would be able to deduce any 

 state of the world, or universal system, from any other 

 state, by means of an immense system of differential 

 equations. It would be able, as Huxley says, to 

 calculate the fauna of Great Britain from a knowledge 

 of the properties of the primitive nebulosity with as 

 much certainty as we can say what will be the fate 

 of a man's breath on a frosty day. Such a fine 

 notion as that of an universal mathematics must ever 

 remain as the ideal towards which science strives to 

 approximate. 



Or we may suppose that a plan or design has been 

 superposed on nature, is immanent in matter and 

 energy, and works itself out, so to speak. Such a 

 ideological explanation of inorganic and organic evolu- 

 tion inevitably forces itself upon us if we reject the 

 notion of radical mechanism. We think of an uni- 

 versal system of matter and energies as consisting of 

 elements which, when assembled together, interact 

 in a certain way, and with results which are definite 

 and calculable. The assembling together of the 

 elements of the system would be the result of the 

 previous phases of the system. That is radical 

 mechanism. But let us think of the elements of the 

 system as being differently assembled — thus involving 

 the idea of an agency, external to the system, which 

 rearranges them — then the same energies inherent 

 in this system, as in that previously imagined, will 

 also work out by themselves. But the result will 

 be different, and will depend on the manner in which 



