THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION 



which all manifestations of the human mind should apj 

 as correlated, should fall into their proper places as parts of a 

 complex organism, remained the difficulty. 



Honour should here be rendered to M. Taine, who was 

 among the first to apply natural physiological principles to 

 the study of what is understood as culture. His method 

 drew attention to the milieu, the ethnological conditions, the 

 climatic and social environments, which modify each par- 

 ticular product of human genius in art and literature. He 

 was on the right track ; but there remained something stiff 

 and formal, a something inconsistent with the subtlety of 

 Nature, in his philosophy of culture. In particular, it did 

 not make sufficient allowances for the resistance which the 

 individual offers to his milieu, for the emergence in him of 

 specific strains of atavism, and for the peculiar phenomena 

 of mental hybrids. 



Just then Darwin's and Spencer's publication of the 

 Evolution theory made its decisive impact on the mind of 

 Europe. We felt that here was the right way toward living 

 and thinking in the whole. The steady determination to regard 

 all subjects of inquiry from the point of view of development 

 delivered criticism from the caprice of connoisseurship and 

 the whims of dilettantism. It superseded the attractive but 

 too often vaporous generalisations of the logician by a sound 

 method of analysis. It lent the charm of biography or 

 narrative to what had previously seemed so dull and lifeless 

 the history of art or letters. Illuminated by this idea, 

 every stage in the progress of culture acquired significance. 

 The origins and incunabula of art, viewed in their relation 

 to its further growth, ceased to have a merely antiquarian 

 interest. Periods of decadence were explicable and intelligible 

 on the principle that every organism, expanding from the 

 germ, passing through adolescence to maturity, is bound at 

 last to exhaust its motive force and perish by exaggerating 

 qualities implicit in the mature type. Hybrids, in like manner, 

 obtained a fresh instructiveness and value for students of the 

 unmixed species. 



It might perhaps be objected that I am claiming too much 



