1 86 CHARLES DARWIN 



and fundamentally a single broad psychological revolu- 

 tion of the human mind, than the fact that Lyell him- 

 self, who more than any one man had introduced the 

 evolutionary conception into the treatment of geology, 

 should have stood out so long and fought so blindly 

 against the evolutionary conception in the organic 

 world. Indeed, it was not until the various scattered 

 and many-coloured strands of evolutionary thought had 

 been gathered together and woven into one by the vast 

 catholic and synthetic intelligence of Herbert Spencer 

 that the idea of evolution as a whole, as a single con- 

 tinuous cosmical process, began to be apprehended and 

 gradually assimilated by the picked intelligences of the 

 several distinct scientific departments. 



Observe also that the evolutionary method has 

 invaded each of the concrete sciences in the exact order 

 of their natural place in the hierarchy of knowledge. 

 It had been applied to astronomy by Kant and Laplace 

 before it was applied to geology by Lyell ; it had been 

 applied to geology by Lyell before it was applied to 

 biology by Darwin ; it had been applied to biology (in 

 part, at least) by Lamarck and the Darwins before it was 

 applied to psychology by Spencer; and it is only at 

 the very end of all that it has been applied to sociology 

 and the allied branches of thought by a hundred different 

 earnest workers in contemporary Europe. Each stage 

 helped on the next ; each was dependent only on those 

 that went naturally before it, and aided in turn the 

 subsequent development of those that naturally came 

 after it. 



Nevertheless, the popular instinct which regards 

 Darwinism and evolution as practically synonymous is 



