rganic 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:
[Greek: panta rei]. As to the categories of political economy, it was
soon to be recognised, as by Lasalle, that they too are only
historical. The philosophy of history, moreover, gave expression
under 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 argu