The Philosophy of Becoming 467 
science of social phenomena—that, namely, of the economists—had 
resulted in laws which were called natural, and which were believed 
to be eternal and universal, valid for all times and all places. But 
this perpetuality, brother, as Knies said, of the immutability of the 
old zoology, did not long hold out against the ever swelling tide of 
the historical movement. Knowledge of the transformations that 
had taken place in language, of the early phases of the family, of 
religion, of property, had all favoured the revival of the Heraclitean 
view : mdvta pei. As to the categories of political economy, it was 
soon to be recognised, as by Lassalle, that they too are only historical. 
The philosophy of history, moreover, gave expression under various 
forms to the same tendency. Hegel declares that “all that is real 
is rational,” but at the same time he shows that all that is real is 
ephemeral, and that for history there is nothing fixed beneath the 
sun. It is this sense of universal evolution that Darwin came with 
fresh authority to enlarge. It was in the name of biological facts 
themselves that he taught us to see only slow metamorphoses in the 
history of institutions, and to be always on the outlook for survivals 
side by side with rudimentary forms. Anyone who reads Primitive 
Culture, by Tylor,—a writer closely connected with Darwin—vwill 
be able to estimate the services which these cardinal ideas were 
to render to the social sciences when the age of comparative re- 
search had succeeded to that of & priori construction. 
Let us note, moreover, that the philosophy of Becoming in passing 
through the Darwinian biology became, as it were, filtered: it got 
rid of those traces of finalism, which, under different forms, it had 
preserved through all the systems of German Romanticism. Even 
in Herbert Spencer, it has been plausibly argued, one can detect 
something of that sort of mystic confidence in forces spontaneously 
directing life, which forms the very essence of those systems. But 
Darwin’s observations were precisely calculated to render such an 
hypothesis futile. At first people may have failed to see this; and we 
call to mind the ponderous sarcasms of Flourens when he objected 
to the theory of Natural Selection that it attributed to nature a 
power of free choice. “Nature endowed with will! That was the 
final error of last century; but the nineteenth no longer deals in 
personifications’” In fact Darwin himself put his readers on their 
guard against the metaphors he was obliged to use. The processes 
by which he explains the survival of the fittest are far from affording 
any indication of the design of some transcendent breeder. Nor, if 
we look closely, do they even imply immanent effort in the animal ; 
1 P, Flourens, Examen du Livre de M. Darwin sur VOrigine des Espéces, p. 53, 
Paris, 1864. See also Huxley, “Criticisms on the Origin of Species,” Collected Essays, 
Vol. 1, p. 102, London, 1902, 
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