5o8 Edward Livingston Youmans. 



living forms, or of the action of natural agencies in their 

 production, was as completely barred to science as it had 

 formerly been under the literal Mosaic interpretation ; and, 

 as questions of origin were thus virtually interdicted, the 

 old traditional opinions regarding the genesis of the present 

 constitution of things remained in full force. 



It is in relation to this great crisis in the course of ad- 

 vancing thought that Herbert Spencer is to be regarded. 

 Like many others, he assumed, at the outset, that the study 

 of the whole phenomenal sphere of Nature belongs to sci- 

 ence ; but he may claim the honour of being the first to 

 discern the full significance of the new intellectual posi- 

 tion. It had been proved that a vast course of orderly 

 changes in the past has led up to the present, and is lead- 

 ing on to the future : Mr. Spencer saw that it was of 

 transcendent moment that the laws of these changes be 

 determined. If natural agencies have been at work in 

 vast periods of time to bring about the present condition 

 of things, he perceived that a new set of problems of im- 

 mense range and importance is opened to inquiry, the effect 

 of which must be to work an extensive revolution of ideas. 

 It was apparent to him that the hitherto forbidden ques- 

 tion as to how things have originated had at length come 

 to be the supreme question. When the conception that the 

 present order had been called into being at once and in all 

 its completeness was found to be no longer defensible, it 

 was claimed that it makes no difference how it originated 

 — that the existing system is the same whatever may have 

 been its source. Mr. Spencer saw, on the contrary, that 

 the question how things have been caused is fundamental ; 

 and that we can have no real understanding of what they 

 are, without first knowing how they came to be what they 

 are. Starting from the point of view made probable by 

 the astronomers, and demonstrated by the geologists, that, 

 in the mighty past, Nature has conformed to one system 



