Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/608

590 chiefly interested in the study of political government and in history so far as it helps the study of politics. A philosophical student of such subjects must naturally seek for a theory of evolution. If I may cite my own experience, it was largely the absorbing and overmastering passion for the study of history that first led me to study evolution in order to obtain a correct method. When one has frequent occasion to refer to the political and social progress of the human race, one likes to know what one is talking about. Mr. Spencer needed a theory of progress. He could see that the civilized part of mankind has undergone some change from a bestial, unsocial, perpetually fighting stage of savagery into a partially peaceful and comparatively humane and social stage, and that we may reasonably hope that the change in this direction will go on. He could see, too, that along with this change there has been a building up of tribes into nations, a division of labor, a differentiation of governmental functions, a series of changes in the relations of the individual to the community. To see so much as this is to whet one's craving for enlarged resources wherewith to study human progress. Mr. Spencer had a wide general acquaintance with botany, zoology, and allied studies. The question naturally occurred to him, Where do we find the process of development most completely exemplified from beginning to end, so that we can follow and exhaustively describe its consecutive phases? Obviously in the development of the ovum. There and only there do we get the whole process under our eyes from the first segmentation of the yolk to the death of the matured individual. In other groups of phenomena we can only see a small part of what is going on; they are too vast for us, as in astronomy, or too complicated, as in sociology. Elsewhere our evidences of development are more or less piecemeal and scattered, but in embryology we do get, at any rate, a connected story. So Mr. Spencer took up Von Baer's problem and carried the solution of it much further than the great German naturalist. He showed that in the development of the ovum the change from homogeneity to heterogeneity is accompanied by a change from indefiniteness to definiteness; there are segregations of similarly differentiated units resulting in the formation of definite organs. He further showed that there is a parallel and equally important change from incoherence to coherence; along with the division of labor among the units there is an organization of labor; at first among the homogeneous units there is no subordination—to subtract one would not alter the general aspect; but at last among the heterogeneous organs there is such subordination and interdependence that to subtract anyone is liable to undo the whole process and destroy the organism. In other words, integration is as much a feature of development as differentiation; the change is