The degradation of the democratic dogma; with an introduction by Brooks Adams by Adams Henry 1838-1918

Author:Adams, Henry, 1838-1918
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adams, John Quincy, 1767-1848, History -- Philosophy, Science
Publisher: New York Macmillan
Published: 1919-10-18T04:00:00+00:00

defections so serious that no discipline remains. A full account of the situation would need an amount of knowl edge that is now granted to no one; but the most trifling popular science is enough for popular teachers like our selves.

Every one knows that Darwin owed much of his science as well as of his success to Sir Charles Lyell, who sup plied him with the doctrine of uniformity and the evidence to support it. Darwin's own assumptions or theories were quite sufficiently difficult of proof, without adding the doctrine of uniformity; but Sir Charles' ability and authority carried the point in spite of Kelvin's protest that uniformity could not be admitted as possible under the second law of thermodynamics. Lyell's conservative system of evolution, resting on several broad assumptions of fact, became not merely a physiological, but even more a philosophical dogma, and in a literary point of view the Victorian epoch rested largely, — perhaps chiefly, — on the faith that society had but to follow where science led; to-

"Move upward, working out tlio Ix'aat, And lot the ape and tiger die" ;

in order to attain perfection. An infinite series of imperceptible steps, continuous under uniform conditions since the earliest traces of organic life, and always tending

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