ty with an unbiased mind.

In accentuating the struggle for life Darwin stands as a
characteristically English thinker: he continues a train of ideas
which Hobbes and Malthus had already begun. Moreover in his critical
views as to the conception of species he had English forerunners; in
the middle ages Occam and Duns Scotus, in the eighteenth century
Berkeley and Hume. In his moral philosophy, as we shall see later, he
is an adherent of the school which is represented by Hutcheson, Home
and Adam Smith. Because he is no philosopher in the stricter sense of
the term, it is of great interest to see that his attitude of mind is
that of the great thinkers of his nation.

In considering Darwin's influence on philosophy we will begin with an
examination of the attitude of philosophy to the conception of
evolution at the time when _The Origin of Species_ appeared. We will
then examine the effects which the theory of evolution, and especially
the idea of the struggle for life, has had, and naturally must have,
on the discussion of philosophical problems.

II

When _The Origin of Species_ appeared fifty years ago Romantic
speculation, Schelling's and Hegel's philosophy, still reigned on the
continent, while in England Positivism, the philosophy of Comte and
Stuart Mill, represented the most important trend of thought. German
speculation had much to say on evolution, it even pretended to be a
philosophy of evolution. But then the word "evolution" was to be taken
in an ideal, not in a real, sense. To speculative thought the forms
and types of nature formed a system of ideas, within which any form
could lead us by continuous transitions to any other. It was a
classificatory system which was regarded as a divine world of thought
or images, within which metamorphoses could go on--a condition
comparable with that in the mind of the poet when one image follows
another with imperceptible changes. Goethe's ideas of evolution, as
expressed in his _Metamorphosen der Pflanzen und der Thiere_, belong
to this category; it is, therefore, incorrect to call him a forerunner
of Darwin. Schelling and Hegel held the same idea; Hegel expressly
rejected the conception of a real evolution in time as coarse and
materialistic. "Nature," he says, "is to be considered as a _system of
stages_, the one necessarily arising from the other, and being the
nearest truth of that from which it proceeds; but not in such a way
that the one is _naturally_ gener