Page:Philosophical Review Volume 26.djvu/255

No. 2.] refinement of sentiment, and all our industry and social life would be merely to conserve the plasm in "le milieu marin." These theories are attractive, but they involve difficult questions of finality. In the organism not only are the parts reciprocally ends and means to each other, but the system is the deeper end of them all. The soldiers are not for the general, nor the general for the soldiers, but both that there may be an army. In every organism there are some things much more important than others. The end of evolution is the development of larger, surer, and more unified life for the individual and the social groups. For this end, the chemical composition and temperature of the serum are conditions. It seems as if the 'same' of evolving things itself changed in evolution; there is great difference between the embryo and the man, for example. In fact, evolutions can be divided into two great classes, those which repeat some predetermined pattern, and those which invent. Thus the growth of each human individual is determined in outline by the character of the species. Here the 'same' which is conserved is not an individual whole, but the possibility of arriving at a normal adult. It is a direction, a virtuality. In the case of evolutions which invent, whose courses are unpredictable, the question is more complicated. The growth of every individual is in part unpredictable. The growing individual realizes the 'idea' of the species and at the same time creates the 'idea' of the individual as such. The evolution of societies is also original, and we are unable to predict the fate of a people in the same way that we can that of an individual. There is no general predetermined plan for the development of life in general, of mind, or of humanity. Had we been able to know the undifferentiated protoplasm whence have come all forms of life, we could not have predicted the great reptiles of the secondary period, the insects, the mammals, or man. The 'same' of such a process cannot be foreseen. May not this whole terrestrial evolution be a repetition of a process occurring elsewhere in the world? On Nietzsche's theory of the eternal recurrence such would be the case. There is, however, no evidence for this view. Evolution conserves, disengages, and concentrates the essences of things, so that that which evolves becomes more itself. A civilized man is more truly a man than a savage. The essential nature, the 'same,' in an inventive process of evolution, may be compared to a major premise which yields a number of different conclusions according to the minor it is combined with. The 'same' is modified by circumstances. The primordial essential virtualities conserve themselves in evolution by combining with diverse secondary characters. However, this is not the whole truth. In a sense the essence also evolves. Everything carries the germs of contradiction in it, and is forced to transform itself. Although when the child becomes the man it carries on the personality, the elements of it are no longer the same. What remains of the child becomes more and more attenuated, more and more abstract. Every idea contains elements the development of which contradict the original idea, as in the case of Christianity, evolution, imitation in Tarde's philosophy, etc. What conserves the primitive essence becomes the more abstract, the more the