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Let us raise the war-whoop and go out for scalps; we are here only to devour one another; the summum bonum is the Chicago packer's dollar-chest! Enough, quite enough of that, without having transformism next to break down the sacred law of work. I will not hold it responsible for our moral ruin; it has not a sturdy enough shoulder to effect such a breach; but still it has done its worst.
And besides, we can go further. "The idea of transformism is already contained in germ in the natural classification of organised beings.
Professor Scott, of Princeton, has recently given to the public in his Westbrook Lectures an exceedingly impartial, convincing, and lucid statement of the evidence for the theory of evolution or transformism.
The spirited struggle that Darwin had occasioned by the reformation of the theory of descent in 1859, and that lasted for a decade with varying fortunes in every branch of biology, was drawing to a close in 1870-1872, and soon ended in the complete victory of transformism.
Continuity of change, preservation of the past in the present, real duration the living being seems, then, to share these attributes with consciousness. Can we go further and say that life, like conscious activity, is invention, is unceasing creation? It does not enter into our plan to set down here the proofs of transformism.
The intimate relations that exist between all parts of organic science, especially the direct causal nexus between the two sections of evolution ontogeny and phylogeny were explained in that work for the first time by transformism, and were interpreted philosophically in the light of the theory of descent. However imperfect this attempt was, it provided a starting-point for further investigation.
The hypothesis of organic evolution was much in the same position as the Copernican hypothesis in the sixteenth century. Then in 1859 Darwin intervened, like Galileo. The appearance of the ORIGIN OF SPECIES changed the situation by disproving definitely the dogma of fixity of species and assigning real causes for "transformism."
The affirmative seems all the more inevitable inasmuch as the language of transformism is the only language known to the biology of today.
Evolution would then simply have been transposed, made to pass from the visible to the invisible. Almost all that transformism tells us to-day would be preserved, open to interpretation in another way. Will it not, therefore, be better to stick to the letter of transformism as almost all scientists profess it?
We have the old argument from embryonic transformism brought forward without any hint that later investigation tends to show differentiation further and further back, prior to segmentation and, according to some, in the very protoplasm itself.
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