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powers to be itself the product of development, carrying us 
back to certain fundamental powers from which these secondary 
capacities proceed. 
This genetic interpretation was well known to the Greeks, 
pre-eminently to Aristotle, who, following Plato, makes the 
whole to precede the parts, the type determining by its pre- 
sence and agency their formation and working. This view 
remained current through later antiquity, the early Christian 
times, and the middle ages, with here and there an exception. 
It was not, however, till modern philosophy taught us to 
comprehend being by means of causation that the genetic 
method of defining and explaining phenomena was introduced. 
This explained how analysis into elements, conceived as living 
powers, gives at once the historical progress and the philo- 
sophical explanation of events. But the first in time is not 
necessarily the simplest and the ultimate, and development 
by tracing the historical order is still obliged to ask what is 
developed, and how and to what — that is, it must go back to 
causes and their results. 
Nor may we overlook the fact that the genetic method may 
be applied in every one of the significations which develop- 
ment both as term and conception has assumed in modern 
philosophy. These are many. On the one side, the universe 
is made to come from a single ground-force ; on the other, 
several are assumed as necessary. One holds to matter as the 
beginning, another to spirit; one proceeds from unity to 
multiplicity, another from the simple to the complex ; one 
makes it a formation from within outwards, another a super- 
position from without. The one class of tendencies begins 
with Nicolas of Cusa and culminates with Hegel, who develops 
all forms of being by the movement of the concept ; the other 
begins, as it were, with Descartes and ends with Darwin, 
which last theory has in some circles almost appropriated the 
conception of the word development in his own special inter- 
pretation. The term without qualification should be avoided 
as involving confusion and vagueness of thought. Or if we 
give to it a definite meaning, we must interpret it in the 
sense of some special theory. 
The Darwinian theory knows nothing of inward dispositions 
or tendencies. Its strength lies in the definiteness with which 
it states its elements or forces, and its entire rejection of all 
inner agencies, but its weakness lies in the obligation which it 
assumes to explain phenomena in causal as well as in historical 
relations. To do this successfully it must give the laws of the 
workings of its cause, and as it only knows mechanical laws it 
often is unable to do this. The next difficulty is to account 
