The grand conception of the uniform origin and development of all
things, earthly or sidereal, thus summed up for us in the one word
evolution, belongs by right neither to Charles Darwin nor to any other
single thinker. It is the joint product of innumerable workers, all
working up, though some of them unconsciously, towards a grand final
unified philosophy of the cosmos. In astronomy, Kant, Laplace, and the
Herschels; in geology, Hutton, Lyell, and the Geikies; in biology,
Buffon, Lamarck, the Darwins, Huxley, and Spencer; in psychology,
Spencer, Romanes, Sully, and Ribot; in sociology, Spencer, Tylor,
Lubbock, and De Mortillet--these have been the chief evolutionary
teachers and discoverers. But the use of the word evolution itself, and
the establishment of the general evolutionary theory as a system of
philosophy applicable to the entire universe, we owe to one man
alone--Herbert Spencer. Many other minds--from Galileo and Copernicus,
from Kepler and Newton, from Linnaeus and Tournefort, from D'Alembert and
Diderot, nay, even, in a sense, from Aristotle and Lucretius--had been
piling together the vast collection of raw material from which that
great and stately superstructure was to be finally edified. But the
architect who placed each block in its proper niche, who planned and
designed the whole elevation, who planted the building firmly on the
rock and poised the coping-stone on the topmost pinnacle, was the author
of the 'System of Synthetic Philosophy,' and none other.
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