Page:The Herbert Spencer lecture.djvu/28

 of every development is irrevocably determined when the primordial type is constituted. The Child is father of the Man. But the child has all the essential organic features out of which the man is developed.

The orthodox Spencerian would possibly reply—there is no such thing as stability in rerum natura. Everything is in Evolution, from the solar system to the last theory about taxation, and the latest novelty in dress or in games. Absolutely, no doubt, we have no example of rigid immobility. The sun, the everlasting mountains, human nature—all are changing, however subtle and invisible to us be the process. But relatively, an immense body of our observations, and nearly half our scientific knowledge, deal with phenomena of apparent stability, order, permanent type. It would be riding to death the old apophthegm of Heracleitus—πάντα ρεἳ—to think of things only in flux, to ignore the vast field of Persistence of Type as dominating change. To those who reject the relativity of knowledge, it may be open to disregard mere relative permanence in a universe of absolute movement. This is not open to those who regard all our knowledge as relative, not absolute, to whom it is wholly based on experience.

For all practical purposes of reasoning, our experience reports a vast substratum of stability; and its laws and its conditions are as essential to all reasoning as the laws of change. It is one of the inherent vices of the objective synthesis, that it has to banish Statics from its scheme, and to concentrate its study on Dynamics alone. It is the intellectual and moral disease of our time to despise everything that is not in constant flux. The Philosophy of Evolution is limited ex hypothesi and ex vi termini to dynamical movements. But it is not true that Science consists