Unquestionably that which men sought to be rid of was the idea of purpose in nature, in the old sense of design in the mind of God, external to the material universe, of force exerted upon nature from without, so as to cause nature to conform to the design of its ’Great Original,’ in Addison’s high phrase.  In this effort, however, the reducing of all to mere force and permutation of force, not merely explains nothing, but contradicts facts which stare us in the face.  It deprives evolution of the quality which makes it evolution.  To put in this incongruous quality at the beginning, because we find it necessary at the end, is, to say the least, naive.  To deny that we have put it in, to insist that in the marvellous sequence we have only an illustration of mechanism and of conservation of force, is perverse.  We passed through an era in which some said that they did not believe in God; everything was accounted for by evolution.  In so far as they meant that they did not believe in the God of deism and of much traditional theology, they did not stand alone in this claim.  In so far as they meant by evolution mere mechanism, they explained nothing and destroyed the notion of evolution besides.  In so far as they meant more than mere mechanism, they lapsed into the company of the scientific myth-makers to whom we alluded above.  They attributed to their abstraction, evolution, qualities which other people found in the forms of the universe viewed as the manifestation of an immanent God.  Only by so doing were they able to ascribe to evolution that which other people describe as the work of God.  At this level the controversy becomes one simply about words.

Of course, the great illumination as to the meaning of evolution has come with its application to many fields besides the physical.  Darwin was certainly the great inaugurator of the evolutionary movement in England.  Still, Darwin’s problem was strictly limited.  The impression is widespread that the biological evolutionary theories were first developed, and furnished the basis for the others.  Yet both Hegel and Comte, not to speak of Schelling, were far more interested in the intellectual and historical, the ethical and social aspects of the question.  Both Hegel and Comte were, whether rightly or wrongly, rather contemptuous of the appeal to biology and organic life.  Both had the sense that they used a great figure of speech when they spoke of society as an organism, and compared the working of institutions to biological functions.  This is indeed the question.  It is a question over which Spencer sets himself lightly.  He passes back and forth between organic evolution and the ethical, economic, and social movements which are described by the same term, as if we were in possession of a perfectly safe analogy, or rather as if we were assured of an identical principle.  Much that is already archaic in Spencer’s economic and social, his historical and ethical, not to say his religious, chapters is due to the influence of this