42 COSMIC PHILOSOPHY. [pt. 1 



or hybridity, or adaptation, or, if we endeavour, with Mt 

 Darwin, to determine the agency of natural selection in 

 modifying the characteristics of species ; we are still no 

 doubt within the territory of science, but we have arrived at 

 a region in which the inquiries take so wide a sweep, and the 

 results have so immediate a bearing upon other inquiries 

 outside of biology, that our study may seem to demand some 

 especially descriptive name. Accordingly we find the phrase 

 " transcendental biology " employed by French writers, and 

 elsewhere we meet with the significant title "philosophical 

 biology." Still more significantly Mr. Spencer, whose treatise 

 on biology is occupied with researches of this high order, 

 speaks of them as constituting a domain of "special philo- 

 sophy." That is to say, just where this science has reached 

 the widest generality consistent with its being called biology 

 at all, it is characterized as a special kind of philosophy. But 

 one more step is needed to reach the level of that philosophy 

 which need not be qualified as special. If, pursuing the 

 same line of advance, we proceed — as I shall hereafter 

 do — with the aid of the most general principles of heredity, 

 adaptation, and natural selection, to elucidate some com- 

 prehensive theory of life ; and if we contemplate this theory 

 of life, on the one hand, as dependent on certain universal 

 laws of matter, motion, and force, and on the other hand, as 

 furnishing a basis for sundry doctrines relating to intellectual, 

 moral, and social phenomena ; then we have clearly come into 

 the domain of philosophy, strictly so called. And the result 

 would have been the same had we started from astronomy, 

 or physics, or any other science; save that nowhere else, 

 perhaps, could the true character of the process have been so 

 fully illustrated as in the case of biology — the great central 

 science upon the theorems of which so closely depend the 

 views which we must hold concerning ourselves and our 

 relations to the universe about us. 



That such transcendental inquiries as those last mentioned 



