28 EVOLUTIONARY PRINCIPLES 



Professor Huxley, the most brilliant champion of Dar- 

 winism in the lists of polemical discussion, has recently stated 

 his great master's relation to evolutionary science in clear 

 and precise language. 1 While claiming venerable antiquity 

 and a widespread a priori acceptance for this philosophical 

 conception, he reserves for Darwin the merit of having 

 demonstrated its efficiency a posteriori in one department 

 of knowledge, and that the most immediately interesting to 

 human beings. 



Evolution, in its largest sense, may be defined as the 

 passage of all things, inorganic and organic, by the action- 

 of inevitable law, from simplicity to complexity, from an 

 undifferentiated to a differentiated condition of their common 

 stock of primary elements. We have accepted the evolu- 

 tionary theory for geology, or the history of the earth's crust. 

 We have accepted it for biology, or the history of life upon 

 this planet. The next question is, how we can apply it to' 

 the history of the human mind in social institutions, religions, 

 morality, literature, art, language. To this question the first 

 answer must be : certainly not in the same way as that in 

 which we have applied it to the history of the earth's crust, 

 and to the history of vegetable and animal life. The subject- 

 matter is different. Nothing can be gained by transferring 

 the language of biological science to the study of mental 

 products. Nothing can be gained by attempting to treat 

 successive stages of society and successive modes of thought 

 as though they were geological strata. In like manner, 

 nothing is gained by transferring the method of geology to 

 biology, and vice versd. Inorganic and organic matter being 

 still disconnected in our thought, each requires its own species 

 of analysis, a different system of investigation, and a separate 

 nomenclature. Yet biology and geology have this in common, 

 that both are evolutionary sciences. The question now is 

 whether mind, which is a function of the most highly organ- 

 ised animals, can be treated upon the principles which are 

 recognised in those two sciences. 



1 Life of Charles Darwin, vol. ii. pp. 180, 186. 



