Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 50.djvu/846

824 In the second place—and this is the more important point—as regards evolution at large, Mr. Spencer is not in the remotest degree beholden for the origin of his ideas to Darwin. So far as those ideas are not quite original with him—and no human idea is ever wholly original—they are derived from the direct line of Kant, Laplace, and the English geologists. For many years previous to Mr. Spencer's philosophic activity the progress of human thought had been gradually leading up to the point where a cosmic evolutionism such as Mr. Spencer's became almost of necessity the next forward step. But to say this is not to detract in any way from Mr. Spencer's greatness; rather the other way; for it needed a man of cosmic intellect and of cosmic learning to make the advance which had thus become inevitable. The moment had arrived, and waited for the thinker; Mr. Spencer was the thinker who came close upon the moment. The situation is this: Kant and Laplace had suggested that suns and stars might have grown and assumed their existing distribution and movements by the action of purely natural laws without the need for direct creative or systematizing effort from without. The geologists had suggested that the crust of the earth might have assumed its existing stratification and sculpture through the agency of causes at present in action. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck had suggested that plants and animals might have been developed and specialized from a common original by the direct action of the environment, aided in part by their own volition, where such existed. But all these thinkers, great and able in their day, had addressed themselves—as Charles Darwin later addressed himself—to one set of phenomena alone; had regarded the process which they pointed out, in isolation only. It remained for a man of commanding intellect and vast grasp of generalizing faculty to build up and unify these scattered evolutionary guesses into a single consistent concept of evolution. Herbert Spencer was that man. He gave us both the concept and the name by which we habitually know it. The words "theory of evolution" occur already, seven years before Darwin, in the Leader essay.

This point, again, Mr. Clodd has excellently elaborated. "Contact with many sorts and conditions of men," he says, "brings home the need of ceaselessly dinning into their ears the fact that Darwin's theory deals only with the evolution of plants and animals from a common ancestry. It is not concerned with the origin of life itself, nor with those conditions preceding life which are covered by the general term, inorganic evolution. Therefore it forms but a very small part of the general theory of the origin of the earth and other bodies, 'as the sand by the sea-shore innumerable,' that fill the infinite spaces." It is evolution