Page:The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism (1911).djvu/35

 concerning the origin of society, of language, of religion, show this. And, as the most recent historian of scientific thought has pointed out, the work of Laplace shows this too. Both his Mécanique céleste, “dealing with the sfeneral laws of motion and of lifeless masses,” and his Théorie de la Probabilité, “dealing with the arithmetical properties of large numbers of units, leave out of consideration that hidden and mysterious phenomenon [fact] to which alone is attached. . . all that commands interest in the created world — the existence of individuality.” And yet it was in the latter of these works that Laplace, brushing aside freewill as a palpable illusion, proclaimed the implicit omniscience of the mechanical theory in a passage that I took for the text of my former lectures. In like manner the belief in fixed and immutable species prevented Laplace’s great contemporary, Cuvier, from appreciating the genetic view of nature, where the supreme importance of the individual first appears as — to quote an expression of Hegel’s — ‘involving the species and genus in itself,’ where variation and heredity become the central problems of biology and where the classifications of system-makers cease to be of value save as a preliminary clue. I have mentioned Hegel, and — whatever may be thought of other sides of his philosophy — its value in this connexion can hardly be over-