ideas, and the universal is but a spectral representation of the living reality. Of course an artificial and mechanical view of the relation of the universal to the particular in logic will justify this contention that the conceptual logic can deal with mechanical rigidly set relations, but not with vital processes or experiences. I am bold enough and possibly some may add rash enough to quote Hegel in this connection, and insist that "the particular is the universal." The relation between the universal and particular in our knowledge is not an external one; but it is essentially organic. Darwin who in his thinking was so conspicuously fertile in generalization, was preeminently the expert investigator of the special case. He was not content to note an exception merely as such, and then dismiss it from his mind. Every exception was a challenge to him to discover its ground; and the discovered ground in turn became at once the occasion and reason for modifying the general law. Darwin's studies in variation were an attempt to search out the rationâle of particularization. My colleague, Professor Edwin G. Conklin, in a recent article on The World's Debt to Darwin comments as follows upon this particular phase of Darwin's labors:
"The positive side of Darwin's theory, and indeed of every other theory of evolution, is the variability of organisms, and the principal question which confronted him as it confronts every evolutionist today, was this: 'What is the nature and what are the causes of variation?'"[1]
In seeking the causes of variation, Darwin was profoundly convinced that every particular instance has a universal significance, that is, it can be ultimately embodied and expressed in a general law. And every student of science today, every serious scholar in whatever field of research feels a compulsion to discover the light of the universal, in order that it may illumine the particular phenomenon under investigation. It is impossible to disclose the nature of the particular case without some insight into the relations which it sustains to certain determinants having a universal and necessary significance. In the investigation of the vital processes of nature, the causal necessity may be veiled, and the supposed universality confronted with outstanding excep-
- ↑ Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. XLVIII, p. xlvi.
