tivism, though the Italian
thinker arrived at his point of view independently of French-English
positivism. The idea of continuous evolution is here maintained in
opposition to Comte's and Mill's philosophy of discontinuity. From Wundt
and Fouillee Ardigo differs in conceiving psychical evolution not as an
immediate revelation of the innermost nature of existence, but only as a
single, though the most accessible example, of evolution.

III. To the French philosophers Boutroux and Bergson, evolution proper
is continuous and qualitative, while outer experience and physical
science give us fragments only, sporadic processes and mechanical
combinations. To Bergson, in his recent work "L'Evolution Creatrice",
evolution consists in an elan de vie which to our fragmentary
observation and analytic reflexion appears as broken into a manifold of
elements and processes. The concept of matter in its scientific form
is the result of this breaking asunder, essential for all scientific
reflexion. In these conceptions the strongest opposition between
inner and outer conditions of evolution is expressed: in the domain of
internal conditions spontaneous development of qualitative forms--in the
domain of external conditions discontinuity and mechanical combination.

We see, then, that the theory of evolution has influenced philosophy
in a variety of forms. It has made idealistic thinkers revise their
relation to the real world; it has led positivistic thinkers to find a
closer connection between the facts on which they based their views; it
has made us all open our eyes for new possibilities to arise through
the prima facie inexplicable "spontaneous" variations which are the
condition of all evolution. This last point is one of peculiar interest.
Deeper than speculative philosophy and mechanical science saw in the
days of their triumph, we catch sight of new streams, whose sources and
laws we have still to discover. Most sharply does this appear in the
theory of mutation, which is only a stronger accentuation of a main
point in Darwinism. It is interesting to see that an analogous
problem comes into the foreground in physics through the discovery
of radioactive phenomena, and in psychology through the assumption
of psychical new formations (as held by Boutroux, William James and
Bergson). From this side, Darwin's ideas, as well as the analogous
ideas in other domains, incite us to renewed examination of our first
principles, their ration