Darwin was more empirical than Comte and Mill; experience disclosed to him a deeper continuity than they could find; closer than before the nature and fate of the single individual were shown to be interwoven in the great web binding the life of the species with nature as a whole. And the continuity which so many idealistic philosophers could find only in the world of thought, he showed to be present in the world of reality.
III.
Darwin's energetic renewal of the old idea of evolution had its chief importance in strengthening the conviction of this real continuity in the world, of continuity in the series of form and events. It was a great support for all those who were prepared to base their conception of life on scientific grounds. Together with the recently discovered law of the conservation of energy, it helped to produce the great realistic movement which characterises the last third of the nineteenth century. After the decline of the Romantic movement people wished to have firmer ground under their feet and reality now asserted itself in a more emphatic manner than in the period of Romanticism. It was easy for Hegel to proclaim that "the real" was "the rational," and that "the rational" was "the real": reality itself existed for him only in the interpretation of ideal reason, and if there was anything which could not be merged in the higher unity of thought, then it was only an example of the "impotence of nature to hold to the idea." But now concepts are to be founded on nature and not on any system of categories too confidently deduced a priori. The new devotion to nature had its recompense in itself, because the new points of view made us see that nature could indeed "hold to ideas," though perhaps not to those which we had cogitated beforehand.
A most important question for philosophers to answer was whether the new views were compatible with an idealistic conception of life and existence.
Some proclaimed that we have now no need of any philosophy beyond the principles of the conservation of matter and energy and the principle of natural evolution: existence should and could be definitely and completely explained by the laws of material nature. But abler thinkers saw that the thing was not so simple. They were prepared to give the new views their just place and to examine what alterations the old views must undergo in order to be brought into harmony with the new data.
The realistic character of Darwin's theory was shown not only in the idea of natural continuity, but also, and not least, in the idea of the cause whereby organic life advances step by step. This idea--the idea of the struggle for life--implied that nothing could persist, if it had no power to maintain itself under the given conditions. Inner value alone does not decide. Idealism was here put to its hardest trial. In continuous evolution it could perhaps still find an analogy to the inner evolution of ideas in the mind; but in the demand for power in order to struggle with outward conditions Realism seemed to announce itself in its most brutal form. Every form of Idealism had to ask itself seriously how it was going to "struggle for life" with this new Realism.
We will now give a short account of the position which leading thinkers in different countries have taken up in regard to this question.
I. Herbert Spencer was the philosopher whose mind was best prepared by his own previous thinking to admit the theory of Darwin to a place in his conception of the world. His criticism of the arguments which had been put forward against the hypothesis of Lamarck, showed that Spencer, as a young man, was an adherent to the evolution idea. In his "Social Statics" (1850)he applied this idea to human life and moral civilisation. In 1852 he wrote an essay on "The Development Hypothesis", in which he definitely stated his belief that the differentiation of species, like the differentiation within a single organism, was the result of development.
In the first edition of his "Psychology" (1855) he took a step which put him in opposition to the older English school (from Locke to Mill): he acknowledged "innate ideas" so far as to admit the tendency of acquired habits to be inherited in the course of generations, so that the nature and functions of the individual are only to be understood through its connection with the life of the species. In 1857, in his essay on "Progress", he propounded the law of differentiation as a general law of evolution, verified by examples from all regions of experience, the evolution of species being only one of these examples. On the effect which the appearance of "The Origin of Species" had on his mind he writes in his "Autobiography": "Up to that time...I held that the sole cause of organic evolution is the inheritance of functionally-produced modifications. The "Origin of Species" made it clear to me that I was wrong, and that the larger part of the facts cannot be due to any such cause...To have the theory of organic evolution justified was of course to get further support for that theory of evolution at large with which...all my conceptions were bound up." (Spencer, "Autobiography", Vol. II. page 50, London, 1904.)Instead of the metaphorical expression "natural selection," Spencer introduced the term "survival of the fittest," which found favour with Darwin as well as with Wallace.