ch. xvm The Evolution of Evolution Theories 297 



on the same day ; and last, but not least, that, through the 

 many years of strife and turmoil which followed, these two 

 English naturalists consistently maintained towards each 

 other such feelings of magnanimous recognition that it is 

 hard to say whether we should most admire the intellectual 

 or the moral qualities which, in relation to their common 

 labours, they have displayed." 



Mr. Wallace is a naturalist in the old and truest sense, 

 rich in a world-wide experience of animal life, at once 

 specialist and generaliser, a humanist thinker and a social 

 striver, and a man of science who realises the spiritual 

 aspect of the world. 



He believes in the " overwhelming importance of natural 

 selection over all other agencies in the production of new 

 species," differs from Darwin in regard to sexual selection, 

 to which he attaches little importance, and agrees with 

 Weismann in regard to the non- inheritance of acquired 

 characters. 



But the exceptional feature in Wallace's scientific philo- 

 sophy is his contention that the higher characteristics of 

 man are due to a special evolution hardly distinguishable 

 from creation. 



Wallace finds their only explanation in the hypothesis 

 of " a spiritual essence or nature, capable of progressive 

 development under favourable conditions." 



Herbert Spencer must surely have been an evolution- 

 ist by birth ; there was no hesitation even in the first strides 

 he took with the evolution-torch uplifted. A ponderer on 

 the nature of things, and the possessor of encyclopaedic 

 knowledge, he grasped what was good in Lamarck's work, 

 and as early as 1852 published a plea for the theory of 

 organic evolution which is still remarkable in its strength 

 and clearness. The work of Darwin supplied corroboration 

 and fresh material, and in the Principles of Biology (1 863-66) 

 the theory of organic evolution first found philosophic, as 

 distinguished from merely scientific expression. To Spencer 

 we owe the familiar phrase "the survival of the fittest," 

 and that at first sight puzzling generalisation, " Evolution is 

 an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of 



