DARWIN'S INFLUENCE UPON PHILOSOPHY 93 



dispose of them by laughing at the famous gentleman who accounted 

 for the fact that opium put people to sleep on the ground it had a 

 dormitive faculty. But the doctrine, held in our own day, that 

 knowledge of the plant that yields the poppy consists in referring the 

 peculiarities of an individual to a type, to a universal form, a doctrine 

 so firmly established that any other method of knowing was conceived 

 to be unphilosophical and unscientific, was a survival of precisely the 

 same logic. This identity of conception in the scholastic and anti- 

 Darwinian theory may well suggest greater sympathy for what has 

 become unfamiliar and greater humility regarding the further un- 

 familiarities that history has in store. 



Darwin was not, of course, the first to question the classic philoso- 

 phy of nature and of knowledge. The beginnings of the revolution are 

 in the physical science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 

 When Galileo said : " It is my opinion that the earth is very noble and 

 admirable by reason of so many and so different alterations and gen- 

 erations which are incessantly made therein," he expressed the changed 

 temper that was coming over the world; the transfer of interest from 

 the permanent to the changing. "When Descartes said : " The nature 

 of physical things is much more easily conceived when they are beheld 

 coming gradually into existence, than when they are only considered as 

 produced at once in a finished and perfect state," the modern world 

 became self-conscious of the logic that was henceforth to control it, 

 the logic of which Darwin's " Origin of Species " is the latest scientific 

 achievement. Without the methods of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo 

 and their successors in astronomy, physics and chemistry, Darwin 

 would have been helpless in the organic sciences. But prior to Darwin 

 the impact of the new scientific method upon life, mind and politics, 

 had been arrested for the most part, because between these ideal or 

 moral interests and the inorganic world there intervened the kingdom 

 of plants and animals. The gates of the garden of life were barred to 

 the new ideas while only through this garden was there access to mind 

 and politics. The influence of Darwin upon philosophy resides in his 

 having freed the new logic for application to mind and morals by con- 

 quering the phenomena of life. When he said of species what Galileo 

 had said of the earth, e pur se muove, he emancipated once for all 

 genetic and experimental ideas as an organon of asking questions and 

 looking for explanations in philosophy. 



Ill 



The exact bearings upon philosophy of the new logical outlook 

 are, of course, as yet, uncertain and inchoate. We live in the twilight 

 of intellectual transition. One must add the rashness of the prophet to 

 the stubbornness of the partisan to venture a systematic exposition of 



