Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/798

Rh 762 EVOLUTION capability of natural development (which already involves a teleological idea) Kant distinguishes the power of moral self-development or self-liberation from the dominion of nature, the gradual realization of which constitutes human history or progress. This moral development is regarded as a gradual approach to that rational, social, and political state in which will be realized the greatest possible quantity of liberty. Thus Kant, though he appropriated and gave new form to the idea of human progress, conceived of this as wholly distinct from a natural (mechanical) process. In this particular, as in his view of organic actions, Kant distinctly opposed the idea of evolution as one universal process swaying alike the physical and the moral world. Schilling. In the earlier writings of Schelling, containing the philosophy of identity, existence is represented as a becoming, or process of evolution. Nature and mind (which are the two sides, or polar directions, of the one absolute) are each viewed as an activity advancing by an uninterrupted succession of stages. The side of this process which Schelling worked out most completely is the negative side, that is, nature. Nature is essentially a process of organic self-evolution. It can only be understood by subordinating the mechanical conception to the vital, by conceiving the world as one organism animated by a spiritual principle or intelligence (Weltseele). From this point of view the pro cesses of nature from the inorganic up to the most com plex of the organic become stages in the self-realization of nature. All organic forms are at bottom but one organiza tion, and the inorganic world shows the same formative activity in various degrees or potences. Schelling conceives of the gradual self-evolution of nature in a succession of higher and higher forms as brought about by a limitation of her infinite productivity, showing itself in a series of points of arrest. The detailed exhibition of the organizing activity of nature in the several processes of the organic and inorganic world rests on a number of fanciful and unscientific ideas. Schelling s theory is a bold attempt to revitalize nature in the light of growing physical and physiological science, and by so doing to comprehend the unity of the world under the idea of one principle of organic development. His highly figurative language might leave us in doubt how far he conceived the higher stages of this evolution of nature as following the lower in time. In the introduction to his work Von der Weltseele, however, he argues in favour of the possibility of a transmutation of species in periods incommensurable with ours. The evolu tion of mind (the positive pole) proceeds by way of three stages, theoretic, practical, and sesthetical activity. Schelling s later theosophic speculations do not specially concern us here. Followers of Schelling. Of the followers of Schelling a word or two must be said. Heinrich Steffens, in his Anthropologte, seeks to trace out the origin and history of man in connexion with a general theory of the development of the earth, and this again as related to the formation of the solar system. All these processes are regarded as a series of manifestations of a vital principle in higher and higher forms. Oken, again, who carries Schelling s ideas into the region of biological science, seeks to reconstruct the ^ gradual evolution of the material world out of original matter, which is the first immediate appearance of God, or the absolute. This process is an upward one, through the formation of the solar system and of our earth with its inorganic bodies, up to the production of man. The process is essentially a polar linear action, or differentiation from a common centre. By means of this process the bodies of the solar system separate themselves, and tho order of cosmic evolution is repeated in that of terrestrial evolution. The organic world (like the world as a whole) arises out of a primitive chaos, namely, the infusorial slime. A somewhat similar working out of Schelling s idea is to be found in Oersted s work entitled The Soul in Nature (Eng. trans.). Of later works based on Schelling s doctrine of evolution mention may be made of the volume entitled Natur und Idee, by G. F. Cams. According to this writer, existence is nothing but a be coming, and matter is simply the momentary product of the process of becoming, while force is this process constantly revealing itself in these products. Hegel. Like Schelling, Hegel conceives the problem of existence as one of becoming. He differs from him with respect to the ultimate motive of that process of gradual evolution which reveals itself alike in nature and in mind. With Hegel the absolute is itself a dialectic process which contains within itself a principle of progress from difference to difference and from unity to unity. &quot; This process (Mr Wallace remarks) knows nothing of the distinctions between past and future, because it implies an eternal present.&quot; This conception of an immanent spontaneous evolution is applied alike both to nature and to mind and history. Nature to Hegel is the idea in the form of hetereity ; and finding itself here it has to remove this exteriority in a progressive evolution towards an existence for itself in life and mind. Nature (says Zeller) is to Hegel a system of gradations, of which one arises necessarily out of the other, and is the proximate truth of that out of which it results. There are three stadia, or moments, in this process of nature (1) the mechanical moment, or matter devoid of individuality ; (2) the physical moment, or matter which has particularized itself in bodies the solar system ; and (3) the organic moment, or organic beings, beginning with the geological organism or the mineral kingdom, plants, and animals. Yet this process of development is not to be conceived as if one stage is naturally produced out of the other, and not even as if the one followed the other in time. Only spirit -has a history ; in nature all forms are contemporaneous. 1 Hegel s interpretation of mind and history as a process of evolution has more scientific interest than his conception of nature. His theory of the development of free-will (the objective spirit), which takes its start from Kant s conception of history, with its three stages of legal right, morality as determined by motive and instinctive goodness (Sitllichkeit), might almost as well be expressed in terms of a thoroughly naturalistic doctrine of human development. So, too, some of his conceptions respecting the development of art and religion (the absolute spirit) lend themselves to a similar interpretation. Yet while, in its application to history, Hegel s theory of evolution has points of resem blance with those doctrines which seek to explain the world-process as one unbroken progress occurring in time, it constitutes on the whole a theory apart and siti generis. It does not conceive of the organic as succeeding on the inorganic, or of conscious life as conditioned in time by lower forms. In this respect it resembles Leibnitz s idea of the world as a development ; the idea of evolution is in each case a metaphysical as distinguished from a scientific one. 2 Hegel gives a place in his metaphysical system to the mechanical and the teleological views ; yet in his treatment of the world as an evolution the idea of end or purpose is the predominant one. Of the followers of Hegel who have worked out his 1 Hegel somewhere says that the question of the eternal duration of the world is unanswerable : time as well as space can be pre dicated of finitudes only. 8 Mr Wallace (Logic of Ilegd, Proleg. pp. 48, 49) speaks of Hegel s system of evolution as having been in a sense the transfor mation into a philosophic shape of the biological doctrine of evolution as suggested by Treviranus and Lamarck. Yet this relation is by no means obvious.