etely at the mercy of
chance. Some years before the appearance of "The Origin of Species",
Auguste Comte had pointed out the importance, as regards the unification
of positive knowledge, of the conviction that the social world, the last
refuge of spiritualism, is itself subject to determininism. It cannot be
doubted that the movement of thought which Darwin's discoveries promoted
contributed to the spread of this conviction, by breaking down the
traditional barrier which cut man off from Nature.

But Nature, according to modern naturalists, is no immutable thing: it
is rather perpetual movement, continual progression. Their discoveries
batter a breach directly into the Aristotelian notion of species; they
refuse to see in the animal world a collection of immutable types,
distinct from all eternity, and corresponding, as Cuvier said, to so
many particular thoughts of the Creator. Darwin especially congratulated
himself upon having been able to deal this doctrine the coup de grace:
immutability is, he says, his chief enemy; and he is concerned to
show--therein following up Lyell's work--that everything in the organic
world, as in the inorganic, is explained by insensible but incessant
transformations. "Nature makes no leaps"--"Nature knows no gaps": these
two dicta form, as it were, the two landmarks between which Darwin's
idea of transformation is worked out. That is to say, the development of
Darwinism is calculated to further the application of the philosophy of
Becoming to the study of human institutions.

The progress of the natural sciences thus brings unexpected
reinforcements to the revolution which the progress of historical
discipline had begun. The first attempt to constitute an actual science
of social phenomena--that, namely, of the economists--had resulted in
laws which were called natural, and which were believed to be
eternal and universal, valid for all times and all places. But this
perpetuality, brother, as Knies said, of the immutability of the old
zoology, did not long hold out against the ever swelling tide of the
historical movement. Knowledge of the transformations that had taken
place in language, of the early phases of the family, of religion, of
property, had all favoured the revival of the Heraclitean view: panta
rei. As to the categories of political economy, it was soon to be
recognised, as by Lassalle, that they too are only historical. The
philosophy of history, moreover, gave expression u