178 CHARLES DARWIN 



slow growth of the past two centuries, a progressive 

 development of the collective scientific and philosophical 

 mind of humanity, not due in its totality to any one 

 single commanding thinker, but summing itself up at 

 last in our own time more fully in the person and 

 teaching of Mr. Herbert Spencer than of any other 

 solitary mouthpiece. Indeed, intimately as we all now 

 associate the name of Darwin with the word ' evolution,' 

 that term itself (whose vogue is almost entirely due to 

 Mr. Spencer's influence) was one but rarely found upon 

 Darwin's own lips, and but rarely written by his own 

 pen. He speaks rather of development and of natural 

 selection than of evolution : his own concern was more 

 with its special aspect as biological modification than 

 with its general aspect as cosmical unfolding. Let us 

 ask, then, from this wider standpoint of a great and 

 far-reaching mental revolution, what was Charles 

 Darwin's exact niche in the evolutionary movement of 

 the two last centuries ? 



Evolutionism, as now commonly understood, may 

 be fairly regarded as a mode of envisaging to ourselves 

 the history of the universe, a tendency or frame of 

 mind, a temperament, one might almost say, or habit 

 of thought rather than a definite creed or body of 

 dog-mas. The evolutionist looks out upon the cosmos 

 as a continuous process unfolding itself in regular order 

 in obedience to definite natural laws. He sees in it 

 all, not a warring chaos restrained by the constant 

 interference from without of a wise and beneficent ex- 

 ternal power, but a vast aggregate of original elements, 

 perpetually working out their own fresh redistribution, in 

 accordance with their own inherent energies. He regards 



