Principles of western civilisation

32 WESTERN CIVILISATION CHAP.

cess as a whole, and of the laws that have controlled it throughout.

Now, the observer who has noted the direction in which the biological sciences have been affected by recent developments in the evolutionary hypothesis, and who has perceived the relationship of the conclusions which have been reached, to theories and principles of human society accepted without question in the past, will probably find that there is a conviction which has gradually come to assume shape and to attain to definitiveness in his mind. It will come to be seen in the future, he perceives, that during the last few decades through which the world has lived an entirely new direction has been given to the course of human thought. The Darwinian hypothesis, as it left the hands of Charles Darwin, remains in all its main features unshaken. It has survived, practically without serious challenge, the criticisms to which it has been subjected. And yet it has been already overlaid by a meaning which carries us almost as far beyond the import of Darwin’s contribution to knowledge as the Darwinian hypothesis itself carried us beyond the more elementary evolutionary conceptions of Goethe and Lamarck.

We have, it would appear, passed into a new era of knowledge by a development in our conception of the process of biological evolution, which will almost certainly be seen, when viewed from the horizon from which the philosopher and historian of a later period will regard our time, to dwarf into comparative insignificance other features of contemporary thought upon which attention has been concentrated to a far greater degree. No worker in any depart-