gether these disjecta membra into a vital and invigorating view of the world. Or, rather, he mentions it among the things "which Evolution is not" on p. 7. It is "the innate tendency towards progression." President Jordan objects to it because there is degeneration in Evolution (here=the 'theory' in its 'narrower sense') as well as progress, because adaptation is not necessarily progression. True: we have no business to speak of innate tendencies; progress is not universal; it does not even necessarily follow from the Spencerian formula of Evolution.[1] In short, we cannot see any reason why there should be any progress at all, why there should not be as much degeneration as development.
But does that alter the facts? No: the fact remains that the actual course of Evolution has been predominantly progressive, whether we attribute this to an innate tendency or refrain from theorizing about its cause. And it is this fact which has been of such immense significance for the theories of Evolution, and has overshadowed them so entirely that it has for the most part quite escaped notice that they do nothing to explain it. Yet neither the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection nor the Spencerian theory of increasing heterogeneity, account for the fact in the least—they both presuppose it as a datum. The struggle for existence and natural selection might prevail in a world in which there was no progress whatever; there might be widespread tendencies towards heterogeneity which never led to any greater heterogeneity in the whole; there might be an increase of gradations in every possible direction, which could not be formulated under any single law.
And further, it is this unexplained fact of actual progression which has fused together the various views of Evolution which President Jordan presents to us. Under its influence, the history of organic life has been regarded as the realization of a tendency towards greater heterogeneity; the tendency to heterogeneity has been interpreted as the law of a single all-embracing world-process; and the fact of this process has given rise to the belief that all change was ultimately process, and that Evolution was the science of a universal world-process, a science of which the method was necessarily historical and explained things by their history.
But every one of these steps, though psychologically very easy, is a speculative inference, and without these inferences Evolution is
- ↑ That is, unless 'progress' is defined in terms of that formula as=that to which Evolution tends, whatever that may be. In that case, of course, all succession would have to be progression.
