United States or Mauritius ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


If it makes the universe the body of God, it also makes God the soul of the universe. The question at issue, then, between the Darwinism of Erasmus Darwin and the neo-Darwinism of his grandson, is not a personal one, nor anything like a personal one.

Here, as also in regard toDarwinism,” which was advanced about the same time, the typical advocate ofcautionwas Rudolf Virchow. His doubts and reservations found utterance very soon after the theory itself had been promulgated. In hisCellular Pathologie,” and in an essay onThe Old Vitalism and the New,” he puts in a word for a vis vitalis.

We are aware that this apparent impossibility is evaded by the believers in spontaneous generation, who hold that such germ cells may be produced anywhere and at all times. But this is not Darwinism.

One of the strangest facts in the history of the scientific thought of the nineteenth century is that, though the profound scientific revolution caused by Darwinism and Spencerian evolution has reinvigorated with new youth all the physical, biological and even psychological sciences, when it reached the domain of the social sciences, it only superficially rippled the tranquil and orthodox surface of the lake of that social science par excellence, political economy.

I was never so affected by any book in my life as I was by the misery of Balzac's poet, Lucien de Rubempré." Naturally this creed of an exaggerated individualism appealed peculiarly to the best set in London. It was eminently aristocratic and might almost be defended as scientific, for to a certain extent it found corroboration in Darwinism.

The fin de siecle therefore, finds Darwinism not with the proud mien of a conqueror, but on the defensive against new antagonists." And again: "It seems, in fact, as if Darwinism were about to enter a crisis, the outcome of which can scarcely be any longer a matter of doubt."

If the independence of the spiritual is thus shown to be a vain assumption, the alleged difference between the animal and the human Psyche is much more so. Not from the days of Darwinism alone, but from the very beginning, naturalism has opposed this claim to distinctiveness.

In the Captain's library the only notice of evolution was a book called "Darwinism Dethroned." As for the elaborations of the Darwinian hypothesis by Spencer, Fiske, DeVries, Weismann, Haeckel, Kidd, Bergson, and every subsequent philosophic or biologic writer, all these men might never have written a line so far as Captain Renfrew's library was informed. Now, why such extraordinary occlusions?

You, on your side, always gave the credit to him, and underestimated your own position as the co-discoverer. I need only refer to your calling your great exposition of the joint theory "Darwinism," as the typical example of your generous emphasising of the claims of your illustrious fellow-worker.

But the planetary orbits turned out to be not quite circular after all, and, grand as was the service Copernicus rendered to science, Kepler and Newton had to come after him. What if the orbit of Darwinism should be a little too circular? What if species should offer residual phænomena, here and there, not explicable by natural selection?