in one work theology, cosmogony, history, biography, civil law,
ethics, poetry; through other phases in which, as in the Iliad, the
religious, martial, historical, the epic, dramatic, and lyric elements
are similarly commingled; down to its present heterogeneous development,
in which its divisions and subdivisions are so numerous and varied as to
defy complete classification. Or we might trace out the evolution of
Science; beginning with the era in which it was not yet differentiated
from Art, and was, in union with Art, the handmaid of Religion; passing
through the era in which the sciences were so few and rudimentary, as to
be simultaneously cultivated by the same philosophers; and ending with
the era in which the genera and species are so numerous that few can
enumerate them, and no one can adequately grasp even one genus. Or we
might do the like with Architecture, with the Drama, with Dress.

But doubtless the reader is already weary of illustrations; and our
promise has been amply fulfilled. We believe we have shown beyond
question, that that which the German physiologists have found to be the
law of organic development, is the law of all development. The advance
from the simple to the complex, through a process of successive
differentiations, is seen alike in the earliest changes of the Universe
to which we can reason our way back; and in the earliest changes which
we can inductively establish; it is seen in the geologic and climatic
evolution of the Earth, and of every single organism on its surface; it
is seen in the evolution of Humanity, whether contemplated in the
civilised individual, or in the aggregation of races; it is seen in the
evolution of Society in respect alike of its political, its religious,
and its economical organisation; and it is seen in the evolution of all
those endless concrete and abstract products of human activity which
constitute the environment of our daily life. From the remotest past
which Science can fathom, up to the novelties of yesterday, that in
which Progress essentially consists, is the transformation of the
homogeneous into the heterogeneous.

* * * * *

And now, from this uniformity of procedure, may we not infer some
fundamental necessity whence it results? May we not rationally seek for
some all-pervading principle which determines this all-pervading process
of things? Does not the universality of the _law_ imply a universal
_cause_?

T