Page:The Herbert Spencer lecture.djvu/34

 Organic and the Inorganic worlds, of the Human and the Non-human worlds, of the Physical and the Moral worlds, of the Cosmical and the Social worlds, of the law of Progress and the law of Order. On all sides we are confronted with a series of Antinomies, Dualisms, and irreducible ultimate conceptions. The World and Humanity are not reducible to any common measure. If objectively, and in rerum natura, the World is everywhere in eternal flux; relatively and humanly, the world of inorganic Nature is in a state of comparative permanence and stability as compared with the organic world. So the Non-human world is relatively in a state of fixity as compared with the Human world and its infinitely complex and subtle laws of progress. The Evolution of Man is infinitely more subtle, more continuous, more important to us than the Evolution of the Physical world. Wonderful as may be the Evolution of the Horse from Eohippus and Hipparion in ten or twenty millions of years, the evolution of Man in ten or twenty centuries is infinitely more marvellous, and is certainly more complex—and perhaps is more useful for us to know. No formula which explains the Evolution of the Horse, and of Man, in terms of the Evolution of the Milky Way and the Nebula of Orion, can be a very fertile organum of thought. It does not advance us much to be furnished with a set of formulas which profess equally to explain the rotation of the earth and the French Revolution, the pressure of the atmosphere and the growth of the moral sense, the Precession of the Equinoxes and the social improvement of women, the indivisibility of molecules and the rise and growth of the Catholic Church. And this law is the perpetual 'transformation from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite, coherent hetero-