lg THE BIOCOSMOS GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 



many profound insights, makes us conscious 

 of the externality of his method, when he claps 

 his abstract logical categories upon the pro- 

 cesses of Nature. Not so many years before 

 Darwin he declares that ''the rise of the more 

 developed animals out of the lower must be 

 rejected by the thinker. " Thus he denies 

 Evolution as immanent in Nature, it holds 

 with him only of Thought. This is a bad mis- 

 take of Hegel, which Darwin is to correct. 

 Indeed it contradicts Hegel himself, who 

 therein undermines his own principle of Evo- 

 lution as universal. Still he brings sharply to 

 light the inherent difficulty of every Philoso- 

 phy of Nature, which applies abstract cate- 

 gories externally to natural processes. It may 

 be here added that a Psychology of Nature 

 proceeds in a very different way. 



Darwin, therefore, in the spiritual move- 

 ment of the century, supplements Hegel 's log- 

 ical or metaphysical Evolution with organic 

 or biological Evolution, which is immanent 

 in Nature. To be sure, Darwin knew nothing 

 of Hegel, and did his work of his own inner 

 impulse in a different country with a wholly 

 different environment. Still it is a point of 

 supreme interest to see the Spirit of the Age 

 uttering itself through both, though in dif- 

 ferent ways and in different, yea opposite 

 spheres. The sphere of the one was the Ore- 



