DARWINISM AND EVOLUTION 185 



schel ; just as tlie evolutionary movement in geology is 

 rightly associated with the far lesser yet brilliant and 

 effective personality of Lyell ; just as the evolutionary 

 movement in the derivative sciences is rightly associated 

 with so many great still living thinkers; so the evo- 

 lutionary movement in biology in particular rightly 

 sums itself up in the honoured name of Charles Darwin. 

 For what others suspected, he was the first to prove; 

 where others speculated, he was the first to observe, to 

 experiment, to demonstrate, and to convince. 



It should be noted, too, that while to us who come 

 after, the great complex evolutionary movement of the 

 two last centuries justly reveals itself as one and in- 

 divisible, a single grand cosmical drama, having many 

 acts and many scenes, but all alike inspired by one 

 informing and pervading unity, yet to those whose half 

 unconscious co-operation slowly built it up by episodes, 

 piecemeal, each act and each scene unrolled itself 

 separately as an end in itself, to be then and there 

 attained and proved, quite apart from the conception of 

 its analytic value as a part in a great harmonious 

 natural poem of the constitution of things. Though 

 evolution appears to us now as a single grand continu- 

 ous process, a phase of the universe dependent upon a 

 preponderating aggregation of matter and dissipation of 

 energy, yet to Kant and Laplace it was the astronomical 

 aspect alone that proved attractive, to Darwin it was 

 the biological aspect alone, and to many of the modern 

 workers in the minor fields it is the human and socio- 

 logical aspect that almost monopolises the whole wide 

 mental horizon. No greater proof can be given of the 

 subjective distinctness of parts in what was objectively 

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