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On the other hand, it is well worth while to notice that the formal opposition to the new and more expansive evolutionary views came mainly from the museum and laboratory type of naturalists in London and Paris, the official exponents of dry bones, who knew nature only through books and preserved specimens, or through her impoverished and far less plastic developments in northern lands.
Earth lost its pride when compared with the aquatic immensity. In the ocean had appeared the first manifestations of life, continuing then its evolutionary cycle over the mountains which had also come up from its depths. If the earth was the mother of man, the sea was his grandmother. The number of terrestrial animals is most insignificant compared with the maritime ones.
He argues from this that there is a possible exteriorization of power which may itself be governed by ideas and believes also that such facts as this will eventually compel us to recast our conceptions of matter and force and profoundly affect biology and all evolutionary theories.
There is no kind of inconsistency" and no words can convey the time he took to get to the end of the word "between valuing the right of the aborigines to adhere to their stage in the evolutionary process, so long as they find it congenial and requisite to do so.
The conceptions of human nature which they held have been superseded by evolutionary psychology, but modern thinkers like Lombroso have brought the new psychology into the service of a new and fruitful criminology. In pedagogy also, Locke, and Rousseau, and Herbart, and the many-sided Bentham, based their theories of education upon their conceptions of human nature.
Just so, in many plants, a step higher in the evolutionary scale as regards the method of dispersion, the capsule itself bursts open explosively, and scatters its contents to the four winds of heaven. Such plants may be said to discharge their grains on the principle of the bow and arrow.
Spencer's general theory of conduct is best gathered from his Data of Ethics, which was reprinted as Part I of his Principles of Ethics. The volume by C. M. Williams, entitled, A Review of Evolutionary Ethics, gives a convenient account of a dozen or more writers who have treated of ethics from the evolutionary standpoint.
But the higher we rise in the evolutionary scale, broadly speaking, the greater becomes the power of learning, and the fewer are the occasions when pure instinct is exhibited unmodified in adult life. This applies with great force to man, so much so that some have thought instinct less important in the life of man than in that of animals. This, however, would be a mistake.
The advance is by evolutionary progress, with no sudden, or visible, change from day to day. The life that now is creates and determines the life that is to come. A man is what he is to-day because of the life he lived yesterday, and last year, and a decade, or several decades, ago.
Nor is that form of the argument much better founded which contends that the evolutionary advantage to be expected from the 'struggle of empires' is the 'survival' not of races but of political and cultural types. Our victory over the German Empire, for instance, would mean, it is said, a victory for the idea of political liberty.
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