The Philosophy of Becoming 467 



science of social phenomena — that, namely, of the economists — had 

 resulted in laws which were called natural, and which were believed 

 to be eternal and universal, valid for all times and all places. But 

 this perpetuality, brother, as Knies said, of the immutability of the 

 old zoology, did not long hold out against the ever swelling tide of 

 the historical movement. Knowledge of the transformations that 

 had taken place in language, of the early phases of the family, of 

 religion, of property, had all favoured the revival of the Heraclitean 

 view : -rravra pel As to the categories of political economy, it was 

 soon to be recognised, as by Lassalle, that they too are only historical. 

 The philosophy of history, moreover, gave expression under various 

 forms to the same tendency. Hegel declares that "all that is real 

 is rational," but at the same time he shows that all that is real is 

 ephemeral, and that for history there is nothing fixed beneath the 

 sun. It is this sense of universal evolution that Darwin came with 

 fresh authority to enlarge. It was in the name of biological facts 

 themselves that he taught us to see only slow metamorphoses in the 

 history of institutions, and to be always on the outlook for survivals 

 side by side with rudimentary forms. Anyone who reads Primitive 

 Culture, by Tylor, — a writer closely connected with Darwin — will 

 be able to estimate the services which these cardinal ideas were 

 to render to the social sciences when the age of comparative re- 

 search had succeeded to that of ct priori construction. 



Let us note, moreover, that the philosophy of Becoming in passing 

 through the Darwinian biology became, as it were, filtered : it got 

 rid of those traces of finalism, which, under different forms, it had 

 preserved through all the systems of German Romanticism. Even 

 in Herbert Spencer, it has been plausibly argued, one can detect 

 something of that sort of mystic confidence in forces spontaneously 

 directing life, which forms the very essence of those systems. But 

 Darwin's observations were precisely calculated to render such an 

 hypothesis futile. At first people may have failed to see this ; and we 

 call to mind the ponderous sarcasms of Flourcns when he objected 

 to the theory of Natural Selection that it attributed to nature a 

 ! power of free choice. " Nature endowed with will ! That was the 

 final error of last century ; but the nineteenth no longer deals in 

 personifications 1 ." In fact Darwin himself put his readers on their 

 guard against the metaphors he was obliged to use. The processes 

 by which he explains the survival of the fittest are far from affording 

 any indication of the design of some transcendent breeder. Nor, if 

 we look closely, do they even imply immanent effort in the animal ; 



1 P. Flourens, Examen du Livre de M. Daruin sur VOrigine des Especes, p. 53, 

 Paris, 1864. See also Huxley, "Criticisms on the Origin of Species," Colleettd Euay, 

 Vol. n, p. 102, London, 1902. 



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