284 Heredity. 



and we say with Herder, that humanity is like a drunken man, 

 who, after many a step forward and many a step backward, yet at 

 last reaches his destination. Progress, so understood, is a human 

 fact, restricted to the sphere of the moral and political sciences, 

 and limited to history, as having the same bounds as liberty. 



A more exact, and at the same time a broader, view would lead 

 us to see in human progress only a part of the total progress, and 

 to substitute for this equivocal expression the more appropriate 

 terms, evolution or development. This substitute is highly 

 important, for in the place of a human, subjective, hypothetical 

 opinion, it sets a cosmic, objective, scientific system. Progress no 

 longer appears as the law of humanity only, but as the law of 

 universal nature. 



The idea of evolution in this wide and true sense will doubtless 

 ever be considered one of the grandest philosophic conceptions of 

 the nineteenth century. Born of the study of the natural sciences, 

 of religions, languages, history, of all that changes and lives, it has 

 in turn given to these studies a new meaning, has quickened and 

 renovated them. Hegel was the first to attempt the grand syn- 

 thesis which must one day reduce all things under the law of a 

 perpetual coming into being. His metaphysical hypothesis may 

 have perished, as so many more have perished, but the radical idea 

 of his system remains. Better still, new aspects of the law of 

 evolution have since appeared in the whole field of science. To 

 cite only one instance, the bold hypothesis which takes its name 

 from Darwin has given a new shape to the question of the origin 

 of species, and has brought it to bear on the highest problems of 

 philosophy. 



The latest essay in philosophical synthesis based on the idea of 

 evolution is the work of Herbert Spencer. This synthesis, the 

 outlines of which are given in his essays, while its definite form is 

 given in his first principles, is intended to cover and explain in 

 detail the phenomena of biology, psychology, sociology, and 

 morals. It not only possesses the merit, as being recent, of includ- 

 ing a larger number of facts and of partial doctrines ; its true merit 

 consists in substituting for Hegel's subjective, metaphysical method 

 an objective, scientific one the method of the natural sciences. 

 Thus the law of evolution stripped of all teleological ideas, and 



