THE LAW OF EVOLUTION CONTINUED. 373 



degrees, has become more heterogeneous than it was. 

 Though greater homogeneity will be the eventual result, the 

 immediate result is the opposite. And yet this immediate 

 result is certainly not Evolution. Other instances 



are furnished by social disorders and disasters. A rebellion, 

 which, while leaving some provinces undisturbed, develops 

 itself here in secret societies, there in public demonstrations, 

 and elsewhere in actual conflicts, necessarily renders the 

 society, as a whole, more heterogeneous. Or when a dearth 

 causes commercial derangement with its entailed bank- 

 ruptcies, closed factories, discharged operatives, food-riots, 

 incendiarisms; it is manifest that, as a large part of the com- 

 munity retains its ordinary organization displaying the 

 usual phenomena, these new phenomena must be regarded 

 as adding to the complexity previously existing. But such 

 changes, so far from constituting further Evolution, are 

 steps towards Dissolution. 



Clearly, then, the definition arrived at in the last chapter 

 is an imperfect one. The changes above instanced as com- 

 ing within the formula as it now stands, are so obviously un- 

 like the rest, that the inclusion of them implies some distinc- 

 tion hitherto overlooked. Such further distinction we have 

 now to supply. 



129. At the same time that Evolution is a change 

 from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, it is a change 

 from the indefinite to the definite. Along with an advance 

 from simplicity to complexity, there is an advance from 

 confusion to order from undetermined arrangement to de- 

 termined arrangement. Development, no matter of what 

 kind, exhibits not only a multiplication of unlike parts, but 

 an increase in the distinctness with which these parts are 

 marked off from one another. And this is the distinction 

 sought. For proof, it needs only to re-consider the 



instances given above. The changes constituting disease, 

 have no such definiteness, either in locality, extent, or 



