d already begun. Moreover in his critical views as
to the conception of species he had English forerunners; in the middle
ages Occam and Duns Scotus, in the eighteenth century Berkeley and Hume.
In his moral philosophy, as we shall see later, he is an adherent of the
school which is represented by Hutcheson, Hume and Adam Smith. Because
he is no philosopher in the stricter sense of the term, it is of great
interest to see that his attitude of mind is that of the great thinkers
of his nation.

In considering Darwin's influence on philosophy we will begin with an
examination of the attitude of philosophy to the conception of evolution
at the time when "The Origin of Species" appeared. We will then examine
the effects which the theory of evolution, and especially the idea
of the struggle for life, has had, and naturally must have, on the
discussion of philosophical problems.

II.

When "The Origin of Species" appeared fifty years ago Romantic
speculation, Schelling's and Hegel's philosophy, still reigned on the
continent, while in England Positivism, the philosophy of Comte and
Stuart Mill, represented the most important trend of thought. German
speculation had much to say on evolution, it even pretended to be a
philosophy of evolution. But then the word "evolution" was to be taken
in an ideal, not in a real, sense. To speculative thought the forms and
types of nature formed a system of ideas, within which any form could
lead us by continuous transitions to any other. It was a classificatory
system which was regarded as a divine world of thought or images, within
which metamorphoses could go on--a condition comparable with that in
the mind of the poet when one image follows another with imperceptible
changes. Goethe's ideas of evolution, as expressed in his "Metamorphosen
der Pflanzen und der Thiere", belong to this category; it is, therefore,
incorrect to call him a forerunner of Darwin. Schelling and Hegel
held the same idea; Hegel expressly rejected the conception of a real
evolution in time as coarse and materialistic. "Nature," he says, "is
to be considered as a SYSTEM OF STAGES, the one necessarily arising from
the other, and being the nearest truth of that from which it proceeds;
but not in such a way that the one is NATURALLY generated by the other;
on the contrary (their connection lies) in the inner idea which is the
ground of nature. The METAMORPHOSIS can be ascribed only to the notion
as such, because it alo