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"There is no subject great or small" he wrote in "A Century of Science," "that has not come to be affected by this doctrine." Fiske is one of those defenders of the evolutionistic philosophy who irritate by reason of their cocksureness.
In its provisions is summed up the final product of that most interesting series of evolutionistic transformations in Territorial government that took place throughout the North and West.
Speaking in the Darwinian dialect we should say that the authors of these school-texts constitute a case of "arrested development." The preceding chapter concludes our investigation of that stage of evolutionistic thought which owes its origin and name to Charles Darwin. The question suggests itself, do scientists to-day believe as Darwin did? A great many do.
However, the specifically Darwinian phase of evolutionistic thought, as laid down in Spencer's interminable volumes, for instance, is given up by reputable biologists the world over. There is pretty much of a Babel among them, when it comes to a definition of evolution.
But the evolutionists maintain with great fervor that this period is far too short for the production of such complicated types of organism as now live on the earth; they demand from two hundred to a thousand million years! And so these two groups of scientists, the evolutionistic biologist and the physicists are hopelessly at odds.
Here again we find confident assertion of an evolutionistic process mainly among those who lack the qualifications of original research.
Aside from the fact that "forces resident in matter," the basic idea of the evolutionistic theory, here begins to become somewhat faint as a background even for a "theistic" conception of development, it is evident that we have already reached a point far down the scale of organic evolution in which the admission must be made that no possible working of forces within matter can account for the change.
Obviously this was a system which, by enlarging man's mental horizon and sympathies, could create new values for aesthetic use. Like the crude evolutionistic hypotheses in Rousseau's day, it gave one a more soundly based sympathy for one's fellows since evolution was not yet "red in tooth and claw." If nature was to be trusted, why not man's nature?
These solutions, such as the theories of de Vries and Mendel, are frankly no more than guesses based on certain observation in plant life and insect life and their originators by no means assert that they have found a law by which the universe can be accounted for. But if there is no universal law, there is only chance. Such is the condition of evolutionistic thought to-day.
Wallace, "that of extracting carbon from the air and that of indefinite reproduction. Here," note this admission, "we have indications of a new power at work." In other words, forces resident in matter no longer suffice. The evolutionistic principle breaks down.
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