608 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



publication of the ' Origin of Species ' that the phenomena 

 of variation i.e n 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 ation of the dynamic and kinetic 

 evolutionism leaves exactly where element in universal nature. 

 it stood before the advent of the Spencer and Hartmann, Haeckel 

 Darwinian conception. In nothing and Clifford, had the field to them- 

 is this fact more conspicuously seen selves for the establishment of their 

 than in the immediate obsolescence essentially evolutionary systems. 

 (so to speak) of all the statical Great thinkers of the elder genera- 

 pre-Darwinian philosophies which tion, like Bain and Lyell, felt bound 

 ignored development, as soon as to remodel their earlier conceptions 

 ever the new progressive evolu- by the light of the new Darwinian 

 tionary theories had fairly burst hypotheses. Those who failed by 

 upon an astonished world. Dog- congenital constitution to do so, 

 matic Comte was left forthwith to like Carlyle and Carpenter, were, 

 his little band of devoted adherents ; philosophically speaking, left hope- 

 shadowy Hegel was relegated with ! lessly behind and utterly extin- 

 a bow to the cool shades of the guished. Those who only half 

 common-rooms of Oxford ; Buckle succeeded in thus reading them- 

 was exploded like an inflated wind- selves into the new ideas, like 

 bag ; even Mill himself, magnum Lewes and Max Miiller, lost ground 

 et venerabile nomen, with all his immediately before the eager on- 

 mighty steam - hammer force of slaught of their younger corn- 

 logical directness, was felt instinct- petitors " (loc. cit., p. 197). 

 ively to be lacking in full appreci- 



