608 



SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



36. 

 Darwin. 



publication of the ' Origin of Species ' that the phenomena 

 of variation — i.e., of deviation from the existing type 

 or average — forced themselves upon naturalists and 

 statisticians as requiring to be specially observed, de- 

 scribed, and accounted for. Since that time a new 

 branch of science has sprung up, unknown before even 

 by name — the study of variation in nature. This, as we 

 have seen in a former chapter, is one of the great and 

 important aspects of nature brought prominently before 

 the thinking naturalist by Darwin's and Wallace's dis- 

 coveries, and strongly urged forward by the independent 

 arguments of Mr Herbert Spencer. It involves the 

 great problems of Inheritance and Adaptation. What 

 are the facts, and what the causes of variation, of the 

 moving and propelling principle in natural selection and 

 evolution ? The latter is a physiological problem — the 

 former is one of statistics. 



thought or human action which 

 evolutionism leaves exactly where 

 it stood before the advent of the 

 Darwinian conception. In nothing 

 is this fact more conspicuously seen 

 than in the immediate obsolescence 

 (so to speak) of all the statical 

 pre-Darwinian philosophies which 

 ignored development, as soon as 

 ever the new progressive evolu- 

 tionary theories had fairly burst 

 upon an astonished world. Dog- 

 matic Comte was left forthwith to 

 his little band of devoted adherents ; 

 shadowy Hegel was relegated with 

 a bow to the cool shades of the 

 common-rooms of Oxford ; Buckle 

 was exploded like an inflated wind- 

 bag ; even Mill himself, — magnum 

 et venerabile nomen, — with all his 

 mighty steam - hammer force of 

 logical directness, was felt instinct- 

 ively to be lacking in full appreci- 



ation of the dynamic and kinetic 

 element in universal nature. 

 Spencer and Hartmann, Haeckel 

 and Clifford, had the field to them- 

 selves for the establishment of their 

 essentially evolutionary systems. 

 Great thinkers of the elder genera- 

 tion, like Bain and Lyell, felt bound 

 to remodel their earlier conceptions 

 by the light of the new Darwinian 

 hypotheses. Those who failed by 

 congenital constitution to do so, 

 like Carlyle and Carpenter, were, 

 philosophically speaking, left hope- 

 lessly behind and utterly extin- 

 guished. Those who only half 

 succeeded in thus reading them- 

 selves into the new ideas, like 

 Lewes and Max Muller, lost gi-ound 

 immediately before the eager on- 

 slaught of their younger com- 

 petitors " {loc. cit., p. 197). 



