As Hegel put it: to limit reason by reasoning is like trying to swim without entering the water. And all this logic-chopping about "inconceivability"—how far away that seems to us now, how like those sophomoric days when to be alive was to debate! And for that matter, an unguided machine is not much more conceivable than a First Cause, particularly if, by this latter phrase, we mean the sum total of all causes and forces in the world. Spencer, living in a world of machines, took mechanism for granted; just as Darwin, living in an age of ruthless individual competition, saw only the struggle for existence.
What shall we say of that tremendous definition of evolution? Does it explain anything? "To say, 'first there was the simple, and then the complex was evolved out of it,' and so on, is not to explain nature."[1] Spencer, says Bergson, repieces, he does not explain;[2] he misses, as he at last perceives, the vital element in the world. The critics, evidently, have been irritated by the definition; its Latinized English is especially arresting in a man who denounced the study of Latin, and defined a good style as that which requires the least effort of understanding. Something must be conceded to Spencer, however; no doubt he chose to sacrifice immediate clarity to the need of concentrating in a brief statement the flow of all existence. But in truth he is a little too fond of his definition; he rolls it over his tongue like a choice morsel, and takes it apart and puts it together again interminably. The weak point of the definition lies in the supposed "instability of the homogeneous." Is a whole composed of like parts more unstable, more subject to change, than a whole composed of unlike parts? The heterogeneous, as more complex, would presumably be more unstable than the homogeneously simple. In ethnology and politics it is taken for granted that heterogeneity makes for instability, and that the fusion of immigrant stocks into one national type would strengthen a society.
