Page:The Story of Philosophy.pdf/426

 chemical equipment with the name of "philosophical instruments"; but such a term came naturally to men who agreed with Comte and Spencer in defining philosophy as a generalization of the results of all the sciences. So it was that the positivist movement found more adherents in England than in the land of its birth; adherents perhaps not so fervent as the generous Littré, but endowed with that English tenacity which kept John Stuart Mill (1806-73) and Frederick Harrison (1831-1923) faithful all their lives to Comte's philosophy, while their English caution kept them aloof from his ceremonious religion.

Meanwhile the Industrial Revolution, born of a little science, was stimulating science in return. Newton and Herschel had brought the stars to England, Boyle and Davy had opened the treasures of chemistry, Faraday was making the discoveries that would electrify the world, Rumford and Joule were demonstrating the transformability and equivalence of force and the conservation of energy. The sciences were reaching a stage of complexity which would make a bewildered world welcome a synthesis. But above all these intellectual influences that stirred England in the youth of Herbert Spencer was the growth of biology, and the doctrine of evolution. Science had been exemplarily international in the development of this doctrine: Kant had spoken of the possibility of apes becoming men; Goethe had written of " [sic]the metamorphosis of plants; Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck had propounded the theory that species had evolved from simpler forms by the inheritance of the effects of use and disuse; and in 1830 St. Hilaire shocked Europe, and gladdened old Goethe, by almost triumphing against Cuvier in that famous debate on evolution which seemed like another Ernani, another revolt against classic ideas of changeless rules and orders in a changeless world.

In the eighteen-fifties evolution was in the air. Spencer expressed the idea, long before Darwin, in an essay on "The Development Hypothesis" (1852), and in his Principles of