He too was the first to point out, what even in our own day is
incompletely appreciated, that nature, including the development of
man, is not full of incoherent episodes like a bad tragedy, that
inconsistency and anomaly are as impossible in the moral as they
are in the physical world, and that where the superficial observer
thinks he sees a revolution the philosophical critic discerns
merely the gradual and rational evolution of the inevitable results
of certain antecedents.
And while admitting the necessity of a psychological basis for the
philosophy of history, he added to it the important truth that man,
to be apprehended in his proper position in the universe as well as
in his natural powers, must be studied from below in the
hierarchical progression of higher function from the lower forms of
life. The important maxim, that to obtain a clear conception of
anything we must 'study it in its growth from the very beginning,'
is formally set down in the opening of the POLITICS, where, indeed,
we shall find the other characteristic features of the modern
Evolutionary theory, such as the 'Differentiation of Function' and
the 'Survival of the Fittest' explicitly set forth.
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