Initiation Into Philosophy The Nineteenth Century: England byFaguet, Émile
The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism:
Lamarck (French), Darwin, Spencer.
TRANSFORMISM AND EVOLUTION.--The great philosophic invention of the
English of the nineteenth century has been the idea, based on a wide
knowledge of natural history, that there never was creation. The animal
species had been considered by all the philosophers (except Epicurus and
the Epicureans) as being created once and for all and remaining
invariable. Nothing of the kind. Matter, eternally fruitful, has
transformed itself first into plants, then into lower animals, then into
higher animals, then into man; our ancestor is the fish; tracing back yet
more remotely, our ancestor is the plant. Transformation (hence the name
transformism), discrimination and separation of species, the
strongest individuals of each kind alone surviving and creating descendants
in their image which constitute a species; evolution (hence the name
evolutionism) of living nature thus operating from the lowest types
to the highest and therefore the most complicated; there is nothing but
that in the world.
LAMARCK; DARWIN; SPENCER.--The Frenchman Lamarck in the eighteenth
century had already conceived this idea; Darwin, purely a naturalist, set
it forth clearly, Spencer again stated it and drew from it consequences of
general philosophy. Thus, to Spencer, the evolutionist theory contains no
immorality. On the contrary, the progressive transformation of the human
species is an ascent towards morality; from egoism is born altruism because
the species, seeking its best law and its best condition of happiness,
perceives a greater happiness in altruism; seeking its best law and its
best condition of happiness, perceives that a greater happiness lies in
order, regular life, social life, etc.; so that humanity raises itself to a
higher and yet higher morality by the mere fact of adapting itself better
to the conditions of the life of humanity. Morality develops
physiologically as the germ becomes the stem and the bud becomes the
flower.
As for religion it is the domain of the unknowable. That is not to assert
that it is nothing. On the contrary it is something formidable and
immense. It is the feeling that something, apart from all that we know,
surpasses us and that we shall never know it. Now this feeling at the same
time maintains us in a humility highly favourable to the health of the soul
and also in a serene confidence in the mysterious being who presides over
universal evolution and who, no doubt, is the all-powerful and eternal soul
of it.
