30 



PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



11. 



23. 



Evolution 

 and the 

 power of 

 ■words. 



No better instance of the control — not to say the 

 tyranny — which language exerts over our thoughts can 

 be found than the modern use of the word Evolution. 

 In every department of literature, scientific, philosophical, 

 or general, systematic or unsystematic, the word occurs 

 again and again ; it seems to satisfy authors as well as 

 their readers. By it they seem to have found the right 

 position from which to treat or comprehend almost any 

 subject, to have gained the right attitude of contempla- 

 tion.^ In most cases, when the word is used on the title- 

 pages of books, in introductions, reviews, or leading 

 articles in the daily papers, it would be needless to ask 

 the question what is really meant by the term ; every- 



^ This refers mainly to English 

 literature, where the term has been 

 appropriated by Herbert Spencer 

 to characterise his synthetic philo- 

 sophy, and has since been generally 

 used to signify development, phy- 

 sical or mental, much on the 

 lines indicated by Schelling and 

 Hegel in Germany at an earlier 

 period. Latterly the term has 

 also been largely used in French 

 literature in a similar sense, 

 though it had been current 

 there already in the eighteenth 

 century. In Germany the word 

 has never become current in 

 philosophical literature, and re- 

 mains identified with the philosophy 

 of Spencer, although isolated in- 

 stances of its use are already to be 

 found in the writings of Herder. 

 On the history and the older mean- 

 ing of the word, see Huxley's 

 'Science and Culture ' (1888). "In 

 the former half of the eighteenth 



century the term ' Evolution ' was 

 introduced into biological writings 

 in order to denote the mode in 

 which some of the most eminent 

 physiologists of that time conceived 

 that the generation of living things 

 took place, in opposition to the 

 hypothesis advocated in the pre- 

 ceding century by Harvey, &c." 

 (p. 274). 



"Evolution, or development, is 

 at present employed in biology as 

 a general name for the history of 

 the steps by which any living being 

 has acquired the morphological and 

 the physiological characters which 

 distinguish it " (p. 282). 



' ' The terms ' Development,' 

 'Entwickelung,' and ' Evolutio,' 

 are now indiscriminately used . . . 

 by writers who would emphatically 

 deny . . . the sense in which 

 these words were usually employed 

 by Bonnet or by Haller " (Ibid.) 



