in its broad
lines. The actual data of embryology would also remain. The
correspondence between comparative embryogeny and comparative anatomy
would remain too. Therefore biology could and would continue to
establish between living forms the same relations and the same kinship
as transformism supposes to-day. It would be, it is true, an _ideal_
kinship, and no longer a _material_ affiliation. But, as the actual data
of paleontology would also remain, we should still have to admit that it
is successively, not simultaneously, that the forms between which we
find an ideal kinship have appeared. Now, the evolutionist theory, so
far as it has any importance for philosophy, requires no more. It
consists above all in establishing relations of ideal kinship, and in
maintaining that wherever there is this relation of, so to speak,
_logical_ affiliation between forms, there is also a relation of
_chronological_ succession between the species in which these forms are
materialized. Both arguments would hold in any case. And hence, an
evolution _somewhere_ would still have to be supposed, whether in a
creative Thought in which the ideas of the different species are
generated by each other exactly as transformism holds that species
themselves are generated on the earth; or in a plan of vital
organization immanent in nature, which gradually works itself out, in
which the relations of logical and chronological affiliation between
pure forms are just those which transformism presents as relations of
real affiliation between living individuals; or, finally, in some
unknown cause of life, which develops its effects _as if_ they generated
one another. 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? Apart from the
question to what extent the theory of evolution describes the facts and
to what extent it symbolizes them, there is nothing in it that is
irreconcilable with the doctrines it has claimed to replace, even with
that of special creations, to which it is usually opposed. For this
reason we think the language of transformism forces itself now upon all
philosophy, as the dogmatic affirmation of transformism forces itself
upon science.

But then, we must no longer speak of _l