OH. VI.] THE ATTITUDE OF PHILOSOPHY. 477 



seems barbaric or childish to those who have reached a highei 

 stand-point. 



This higher stand-point is furnished by what I have called 

 the dynamical habit of looking at things as continually 

 changing in a definite and irreversible order of sequence. 

 That this habit should not have been acquired, save by two 

 or three isolated minds, until the present century, is not to 

 be wondered at, since for the full acquirement of it there is 

 needed a familiarity with scientific conceptions of genesis 

 which could not have been gained at any earlier date. But 

 as soon as the tendency to contemplate all phenomena as 

 the products of preceding phenomena has become fairly 

 established, a marked change is noticeable in the current 

 style of criticism. The comparative method is found to be 

 as applicable to religious beliefs and social or political in- 

 stitutions as it is to placental mammals or to pluperfect 

 tenses. And so the habit of regarding the existing order of 

 things as on the one hand ordained of God or on the other 

 hand maliciously contrived by the Devil gradually fades 

 away, and is replaced by the habit of regarding it as evolved 

 from some preceding order of things, and as in turn destined 

 normally to evolve some future order. Hence the evolutionist 

 perceives that it is not by mere controversial argument that 

 mankind can be led to exchange the mythological for the 

 scientific point of view. He regards the process as one, not 

 of sudden conversion, but of slow growth, which can be 

 accomplished only by the gradual acquirement of new habits 

 of thought, — habits that are formed day by day and year by 

 year, in the course of a long contact, whether immediate or 

 not, with the results of scientific inquiiy. Thus the evolu- 

 tionist owns no fellowship with Jacobins and Infidels, for 

 he has learned that engrained habits of thought and favourite 

 theories of the world, being the products of circumstances, 

 must be to a certain extent adapted to the circumstances 

 amid which they exist j and he knows that they cannot be 



