THE PHILOSOPHY OF EVOLUTION.* 



The Evolutionary Philosophy is the latest born of time. 

 Not that it has been undreamed of in the cogitations of 

 naturalists and speculators from ancient days, but that as a 

 credible and established system its currency is very recent. 

 Its acceptance may be said to date from after the publica- 

 tion of <'The Origin of Species" by Charles Darwin, in 

 1859. And though it now assumes the air of a philosophy 

 in rank with the oldest and most honored systems, yet is it 

 in no way descended from any former system of philosophy, 

 nor even in its origin does it show relationship to them. It 

 was not born of their stock nor connected in their lineage. 

 It has not the blood of their ancestors in its veins. It is 

 rather a gypsy philosophy, born of nature under the hedges. 

 It comes not of thought, but of fact ; not of spirit, but of 

 flesh, riato had no glimpse of it, and Aristotle would have 

 regarded it not as philosophy proper, but rather as a kind 

 of mechanic generalization having no claim to place beside 

 metaphysics and ethics. It is not derived from the new 

 Platonists, nor from the scholastic philosophizing of the 

 church and the INIiddle Ages. It has no derivation from 

 Kant, though Kant, outside of his " Pure Reason," stretched 

 hands towards it; nor from Spinoza Avitli his technical and 

 tedious demonstrations ; nor from Descartes with his tauto- 

 logical cogito, ergo sum ; nor from Hegel with his vast um- 

 brage of logical sequences ; nor did Hobbes or John Locke, 

 or tlie Scotch psychologists, or Hume or Sir William Ham- 

 ilton, nor even d'Holbach with his system of Nature, nor 

 Auguste Comte in his Positive Philosophy, ever get well 

 upon tlie track of the doctrine and philosophy of Evolution 

 as we know and hold it to-day. 



Rather did it make its entrance into the world from 

 quite another parentage than that of the so-called philoso- 

 phers of the old schools. For, while they were dreaming 

 and arguing, other men were examining and proving the 

 things of the material world about them ; and so it came to 

 pass that Lamarck the botanist, and Laplace the astrouomer, 



* CorvuiouT, 1880, by The Xew Ideal l^iblishiug Co. 



