As times and individuals and purposes change, that which has been true becomes insignificant, that which has seemed absurd comes to be true. Movement and evolution enter the calm architectonic world of knowledge. Schiller naturally regards the doctrines of evolution with approval, since they have made familiar the idea of the plasticity of organic beings, and have thus prepared the way for the idea of the plasticity of speculative organisms.
For Schiller, and for Schiller distinctively, motion, change, and activity are everything. Things exist in so far as they are active. Existence means action. Substance is activity. Schiller renews Aristotle's vision of ένέργεια, and shares the vision of his contemporary, Ostwald, the present champion of energism. Spirit as well as substance, then, must be preëminently active, must choose and reconstruct. The world as we know it is not the original world: it is the result of long centuries of choices, modifications, eliminations, deformations, and creations wrought by men according to their habits and their desires. The world is not "a datum imposed upon us ready-made, but the fruit of a long evolution, of a strenuous struggle"—the struggle of consciousness with consciousness, of spirit with things, of man with the world.
Such is the philosophy which comes to us from Oxford under the fair name of Humanism, dear
