stant, it is yet evolution by cycles,—a never-ending series of departures from, and returns to, a fixed point. I doubt not the time is coming when it will be seen that whatever all this is, it is not evolution. A thoroughgoing evolution must by the nature of the case abolish all fixed limits, beginnings, origins, forces, laws, goals. If there be evolution, then all these also evolve, and are what they are as points of origin and of destination relative to some special portion of evolution. They are to be defined in terms of the process, the process that now and always is, not the process in terms of them. But the transfer from the world of set external facts and of fixed ideal values to the world of free, mobile, self-developing, and self-organizing reality would be unthinkable and impossible were it not for the work of Spencer, which, shot all through as it is with contradictions, thereby all the more effectually served the purpose of a medium of transition from the fixed to the moving. A fixed world, a world of movement between fixed limits, a moving world, such is the order.
| John Dewey |
| The University of Chicago.. |
