nder various forms to
the same tendency. Hegel declares that "all that is real is rational,"
but at the same time he shows that all that is real is ephemeral, and
that for history there is nothing fixed beneath the sun. It is this
sense of universal evolution that Darwin came with fresh authority
to enlarge. It was in the name of biological facts themselves that he
taught us to see only slow metamorphoses in the history of institutions,
and to be always on the outlook for survivals side by side with
rudimentary forms. Anyone who reads "Primitive Culture", by Tylor,--a
writer closely connected with Darwin--will be able to estimate the
services which these cardinal ideas were to render to the social
sciences when the age of comparative research had succeeded to that of a
priori construction.

Let us note, moreover, that the philosophy of Becoming in passing
through the Darwinian biology became, as it were, filtered: it got
rid of those traces of finalism, which, under different forms, it had
preserved through all the systems of German Romanticism. Even in Herbert
Spencer, it has been plausibly argued, one can detect something of that
sort of mystic confidence in forces spontaneously directing life, which
forms the very essence of those systems. But Darwin's observations
were precisely calculated to render such an hypothesis futile. At first
people may have failed to see this; and we call to mind the ponderous
sarcasms of Flourens when he objected to the theory of Natural Selection
that it attributed to nature a power of free choice. "Nature endowed
with will! That was the final error of last century; but the nineteenth
no longer deals in personifications." (P. Flourens, "Examen du Livre
de M. Darwin sur l'Origine des Especes", page 53, Paris, 1864. See also
Huxley, "Criticisms on the 'Origin of Species'", "Collected Essays",
Vol. II, page 102, London, 1902.) In fact Darwin himself put his
readers on their guard against the metaphors he was obliged to use. The
processes by which he explains the survival of the fittest are far from
affording any indication of the design of some transcendent breeder.
Nor, if we look closely, do they even imply immanent effort in the
animal; the sorting out can be brought about mechanically, simply by
the action of the environment. In this connection Huxley could with
good reason maintain that Darwin's originality consisted in showing
how harmonies which hitherto had been taken to imply the a