by adopting such measures of self-defence-never of aggressionas to them may seem necessary. Not always, perhaps, the wisest and the best may such measures be; but the republics lay no claim to infallibility. Their greatest desire is to be left undisturbed, to work out their own destiny, free from all interference, whether from the side of Great Britain or of Germany or of any other nation.

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Ever and anon one reads of some difficult South African problem.' Utterly wearied one may well be of difficult South African problems. But to whom is the creation of such problems due? Can it be honestly and truthfully said that in a single instance it has been due to any initiative action on the part of either of the republics? Even the political institutions themselves of the republics have suffered from the effects of foreign interference, in a degree proportionate to such interference. Few free countries have had constitutions more liberal in most respects than the republics. The Transvaal has had, as a measure of self-defence, to restrict its franchise. Had England followed a policy different from that which she did follow; had she not given in to the intriguers who, at the start, misled her; had she made it apparent that, come what might, she would respect the rights, the liberty, and the independence of the republics, no such measure of self-defence would have been necessary. At this moment there exists a Convention to which the Transvaal has assented, which only to a very slight extent limits the freedom of action of that country, but which at all events may give a pretext for British subjects of the less honourable sort, should they be placed in a position to become burghers of the South African Republic, for qualifying their republican allegiance by a profession of belief in the continued existence of a British allegiance. The republics can tolerate no dual allegiance; even in the Free State it has become necessary to take measures to make this clear.

It is with reluctance that I have written the foregoing account of England's advance North of Orange River. But since no one more able and more capable of doing justice to the subject has come. forward to do so, that which is to me no pleasure has appeared to me in the light of a duty. Too long have we allowed judgment to go against us by default. The matters on which I have written too are matters affecting our national existence and not merely questions of party or faction politics. If the recital of the facts of our republican history sounds like an indictment of British policy, I regret it, but the blame lies with those who have been responsible for those facts. The republics and republicans have always desired to be on a friendly

This statement is not unfounded. Several writers in the newspapers of this sort, and others, have tried to make out that a British suzerainty over the Transvaal still exists!

VOL. XLI-No. 241

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footing with England if possible. And it may be the act of a friend for one who entertains the belief-it may be, the superstition-that for every act of violence or wrong there follows a Nemesis, to write what I have written. And I trust that I have not written anything that will not bear the test of strict examination; consciously at least I have not.

MELIUS DE VILLIERS.

MR. HERBERT SPENCER AND

LORD SALISBURY ON EVOLUTION

PART I

MR. HERBERT SPENCER contributed to this Review in November 1895 an article entitled Lord Salisbury on Evolution.' The occasion of it arose out of the brief and passing, but pungent, comments on the Darwinian theory, which formed part of Lord Salisbury's Presidential Address to the British Association at Oxford in 1894. In so far as that article is merely a reply to Lord Salisbury, it is not my intention here to come between the distinguished disputants. But, like everything from Mr. Spencer's pen, it is full of highly significant matter on the whole subject to which it relates. It takes a much larger view of the problems of Biology than is generally taken, and it deals with them by a method which is excellent, so far as he goes, and which we can all take up and follow farther than the point at which he stops. Nor is his paper less instructive because he does stop in the application of his method just where it ought to be most continuously and rigorously applied. The method of Mr. Spencer is to insist on a clear definition of the words and phrases used in our biological data and speculations. No method could be more admirable than this. It is one for which I have myself a great predilection, and have continually used in all difficult subjects of inquiry. Such, pre-eminently, are the problems presented by the nature and history of organic life. I propose, therefore, in this Paper to accept Mr. Spencer's method, and to examine what light can come from it on this most intricate of all subjects.

The leading idea of Mr. Spencer's article is to assert and insist upon a wide distinction between the 'natural selection' theory of Darwin and the general theory of what Mr. Spencer calls 'organic evolution.' He insists and reiterates that even if Darwin's special theory of natural selection were disproved and abandoned, the more general doctrine of organic evolution would remain unshaken. I entirely agree in this discrimination between two quite separate conceptions. But I must demand a farther advance on the same linesan advance which Mr. Spencer has not made, and which does not appear 387

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to have occurred to him as required. Not only is Darwin's special theory of natural selection quite separable from the more general theory of organic evolution, but also Mr. Spencer's special version and understanding of organic evolution is quite separable from the general doctrine of development, with which, nevertheless, it is habitually confounded. It is quite as true that even if Mr. Spencer's theory of organic evolution were disproved and abandoned, the general doctrine of development would remain unshaken, as it is true that organic evolution would survive the demolition of the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection.

The great importance of these discriminations lies in this-that both the narrow theory of Darwin, and also the wider idea of organic evolution, have derived an adventitious strength and popularity from elements of conception which are not their own-elements of conception, that is to say, which are not peculiar to them, but common to them and to a much larger conception-a much wider doctrinewhich has a much more indisputable place and rank in the facts of nature, and in the universal recognition of the human mind.

Let us, therefore, unravel this entanglement of separable ideas much more completely than Mr. Spencer has done in the article before us. And for this purpose let us begin at the bottom-with the one fundamental conception which underlies all the theories and speculations that litter the ground before us. That conception is simply represented by the old familiar word, and the old familiar ideadevelopment. It is the conception of the whole world, in us and around us, being a world full of changes, which to-day leave nothing exactly as it was yesterday, and which will not allow to-morrow to be exactly as to-day. It is the conception of some things always coming to be, and of other things always ceasing to be-in endless sequences of cause and of effect. It has this great advantage-that it is not a mere doctrine nor a theory, nor an hypothesis, but a visible and undoubted fact. Nobody can deny or dispute it. Nowhere has it been more profoundly expressed and described, in its deepest meanings and significance, than in the words of that great metaphysician-whoever he may be who wrote the Epistle to the Hebrews, when he describes the Universe as a system in which the things which we see were not made of things that do appear.' That is to say, that all its phenomena are due to causes which lie behind them, and which belong to the Invisible. Nor can we even conceive of its being otherwise. The causes of things-whatever these may be-are the sources out of which all things come, or are developed. What these causes are has been the Great Quest, and the great incentive to inquiry, since human thought began. But there never has been any doubt, or any failure, on the part of man to grasp the universal fact that there is a natural sequence among all things, leading from what has been to what is, and to what is to be. Whether he could apprehend

or not the processes out of which these changes arise, he has always recognised the existence of such processes as a fact.

One might almost suppose from much of the talk we have had during the last thirty years about development, that nobody had ever known or dwelt upon this universal fact until Lamarck and Darwin had discovered it. But all their theories, and, indeed, all possible theories which may supplant or supplement them, are nothing but guesses at the details of the processes through which causation works its way from innumerable small beginnings to innumerable great and complicated results. Every one of these guesses may be wrong in whole, or in essential parts, but the universal facts of development in Nature remain as certain and as obvious as before.

It is a bad thing, at least for a time, when the undoubtedness of a great general conception such as this-of the continuity of causation and of the gradual accumulation of its effects-gets hooked on (as it were) in the minds of theorists to their own little fragmentary fancies as to particular modes of operation. But it is a worse thing still when this spurious and accidental affiliation becomes so established in the popular mind that men are afraid not to accept the fancies lest they should be thought to impugn admitted and authoritative truths. Yet this is exactly what has happened with the Darwinian theory. The very word development was captured by the Darwinian school as if it belonged to them alone, and the old familiar idea was identified with theories with which it had no necessary connection whatever. Development is nowhere more conspicuous than in the history of human inventions; the gun, the watch, the steam-engine, have all passed through many stages of development, every step in which is historically known. So it is with human social and political institutions, when they are at all advanced. But this kind and conception of development has nothing whatever to do with the purely physical conceptions involved in the Darwinian theory. The idea, for example, of one suggestion arising out of another in the constructive mind of man, is a kind of development absolutely different from the idea of one specific kind of organic structure being born of quite another form of structure without the directing agency of any mind at all. Our full persuasion of the perfect continuity of causation does not compel us to accept, even for a moment, the idea of any particular cause which may be obviously incompetent, far less such as may be conspicuously fantastic. Norand this is often forgotten-does the most perfect continuity of causes involve, as a necessary consequence, any similar continuity in their visible effects. These effects may be sudden and violent, although the previous working has been slow and even infinitesimally gradual. In short, the general idea of development is a conception which remains untouched whether we believe, or do not believe, in hypotheses which profess to explain its steps.