xxvi THE DARWIN CENTENARY. [April 23, 



fundamental attitude, a point of view, which has proved so signifi- 

 cant, so vital, so revolutionary, that its acceptance compels a world- 

 wide change in the spirit and method in which we approach the 

 sciences which treat of man. It is this point of view that I shall 

 discuss in what follows. 



The central and significant truth which Darwin and his followers 

 have forced upon our attention is that man is literally and unequivo- 

 cally to be given a place in nature, if we are to make him the subject 

 of scientific investigation. It may be said: Has man not always 

 been given a place in nature? To this I answer: Yes and no. It 

 has, of course, been impossible to deny the palpable fact that man 

 does exist on this planet, that he is to be assigned a definite time 

 and place of being. But he who is acquainted with the history of 

 human thought during the centuries past cannot but be aware that 

 the place assigned to man in nature has often, indeed, has generally, 

 been an equivocal one. The earliest Greek philosophy was, it is 

 true, naturalistic ; and it is also true that, in the centuries past, some 

 form of naturalism has again and again come to the front. Never- 

 theless, we must remember that, on the one hand, these philosophies, 

 while of speculative interest, remained relatively unfruitful in the 

 explanation of concrete facts ; and that, on the other, they were con- 

 fronted with and influenced by a powerful tradition of a very dif- 

 ferent sort, a tradition which has always regarded man as a thing 

 in some sense in nature, but not of it. I think it is not too much 

 to say that, on the whole, pre-Darwinian science treated man as an 

 equivocal thing. The sciences which occupy themselves with man 

 grew up under the influence of preconceptions which have only 

 within a generation been disappearing in the solvent of the new 

 thought. 



It is with some hesitation that one undertakes to describe in a 

 few sentences the characteristic spirit of a given group of sciences 

 at a definite time. There are always dififerences of opinion to be 

 remarked. The old and the new, cautious conservatism and radical 

 independence exist side by side. Nevertheless, to bring out clearly 

 the extraordinary change, largely due to the influence of Darwin, 

 which has come over the mental and moral sciences, I shall attempt 

 a characterization, going back, first, to a time to which those of us 



