Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/804

Rh 768 EVOLUTION material world is an organism, namely, a primitive &quot;cosm- organic&quot; condition of our earth. This primitive matter has gradually differentiated itself into the regions of the organic and the inorganic, and the former again into the animal and vegetable kingdoms. Consciousness was breathed into the cosmorganic matter by the Creator and so pressed out, as though from the bellows of an organ, into all living creatures. This process of evolution is directed towards an end, namely, the greatest possible degree of mutual adaptation of parts, or the most stable condition ; and conscious action is but the subjective side of this tendency. 1 Lotze. The mechanical view of the world, as wrought out by modern science, is fully recognized and yet surmounted in the cosmological doctrine put fortli by Hermann Lotze in his Mikrokosmus. Lotze defends the mechanical method as applicable to all departments of phenomena, and insists on this way of viewing organic processes. At the same time he holds that the mechanical interpretation of nature is limited at every point. The inadequacy of this view may be seen in the attempt to apply it to the question of the genesis of the world and its order. On the one hand, Lotze accepts the teachings of modern specu lation respecting the evolution of the solar system, the genesis of the organic out of the inorganic, the continuity of man with the lower animal world; and his exposition and defence of this idea of evolution as the result of mechanical laws is extremely able and interesting. Again, Lotze seeks to bridge over the gulf between material and spiritual evolution by bringing human development into close relation to the processes of nature as a whole. Yet, while thus doing justice to the mechanical conception of the gradual genesis of the world, Lotze strenuously affirms the limitations of this kind of explanation. In the first place, he maintains that the mechanical processes them selves cannot be understood except by help of ideas respect ing the real internal nature of the elements cencerned. This nature he describes as life, and thus he endows all parts of matter with feeling (though he distinctly rejects Czolbe s idea of a world-soul which includes these feelings). In this internal activity Lotze finds a teleological element, viz,, a striving towards self-preservation and development. This idea he seeks to blend with that of mechanical rela tions among the elements, so as to make the whole upward process of physical evolution the product of purposeful impulses. Thus the first genesis of organisms is repre sented as a combination of elements (accidentally meet ing), through which there is effected a summation of the separate ends of the elements, to a purposeful equilibrium of a composite whole. 2 This may be called the first stage of his teleology. In addition to this, Lotze looks at the world-process as a gradual unfolding of a creative spiritual principle, which he sometimes figuratively describes as the world-soul, more commonly, however, as the infinite sub stance. This assumption, he says, is necessitated by the very process of cosmic evolution, the absolute beginning and end of which we are wholly unable to conjecture? However far back the evolutionist may go he always has to assume some definite arrangement of parts, some general laws of action of which he can give no account. The con ception of the atomists, that in the beginning of things 1 In a new edition of his work Fechner avows himself a convert to Mr Darwin s theory of organic descent. 2 Lotze does not express himself very clearly with respect to the ques tion of the first genesis of mind. In the Mikrokosmus (ii. p 33) he appears to find the &quot; sparks &quot; of mental life in the atoms which he here conceives of after the manner of Leibnitz s monads. In another place, however (Medicinisc.he Psychologic, pp. 164, 165), Lolze tells is that mind is the direct product of the original creative activity which is stimulated to create by the stimulus involved in the formation oi the physical germ. there was an indefinite number of possibilities, is unthink able, and the modern doctrine of evolution, by conceiving of the existing world as a survival of certain forms from among many others actually produced, but lacking in the conditions of stability, plainly makes no such absurd sup position. Hence, there must always be a certain order to be accounted for, and science is wholly inadequate to effect this explanation. This conducts to a teleological view of the world-process, as directed by mind towards some end which we cannot distinctly recognize. Lotze s criticisms of previous attempts to formulate the end of the world-process are not the least valuable part of his discussion of the pro blems of evolution. He shows that neither the notion of a progressive effort towards the highest unfolding of mental life, nor that of an impulse towards the greatest variety of manifestations of one and the same fundamental form, adequately represents the order of organic forms. Here Lotze shows again a due recognition of the mechanical aspect of the world-process, and argues that the evolution of the organic world is no immediate consequence of the self-evolving ideas, but only the form in which the com mands of these ideas are capable of being realized on our earth,- that is to say, with our terrestrial conditions. A somewhat similar view of cosmic and organic evolution, -as at once a mechanical and a teleological process, is to be found in Ulrici s Gott und die Nat^lr. Mechanical Doctrines of Evolution. Over against these attempts to carry up a mechanical conception of evolution into a teleological must be set a number of works which content themselves, in the spirit of positive science, with expounding a doctrine of evolution on a strictly mechanical basis. Of these we may first mention C. Radenhausen (Isis), who, in his interesting work Der Mensch und die Welt, expounds the idea of a gradual evolution of the solar system, the earth, and organic life. In the growth of the individual man the past evolution of the world is repre sented. A temperate statement of the doctrine of modern evolution is to be found in Dr Ch. Wiener s volume Die Grundzuge der Weltordnung. The problems of the origin of organic life and of the genesis of the nervous system are both said to be as yet insoluble. With this may be compared another interesting presentation of the doc trine of evolution, namely, H. J. Klein s Entivickehings- geschichte des Kosmos. The mechanical causes of evolution are clearly set forth in a work of the Herbartian C. S. Cornelius, Ueber die Entstehung der Welt. Cornelius argues against Czolbe s hypothesis of the past eternity of organic life. Organisms first arose under some quite special physical conditions. A very curious feature in this volume is the criticism of Air Darwin s doctrine of descent, which is said to involve mystical ideas, &c. Lange. Among later works touching on the problems of evolution the History of Materialism of Lange deserves mention here. Lange accepts the modern hypothesis of evolution, and justifies the mechanical conception of its various stages. It is true that in his criticism of Mr Darwin s theory he assumes some internal formative principle (as held to by Nageli and Kolliker) as supple mentary to the factor of utility emphasized by Mr Darwin. Yet he does not appear to regard this process as other than a mode of mechanical action. Lange s greatest difficulty in view of a consistent materialistic doctrine of evolution is to explain the genesis of conscious life. The difficulty of the atomistic theory, even when we add a rudimentary sensibility to the elements, is to determine &quot; where and how the transition is effected from the mani- foldness of the collisions of the atoms to the unity of sensation.&quot; Lange supplements his mechanical view of the world by the Kantian conception of the adaptation of the world by reason of its generalities or uniformities to