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aring for the one above. Thus all nature, and especially the realm of life, implies a ladder of "evolution." What is "potentially" inherent in the lowest form of life has in the highest, as in man, become actual or "realised" through a continuous sequence of phases, successively more and more evolved. This view in its earlier forms was very far from implying that each higher step was literally "descended" from the one below it, through the physical and mental transformation of some of its representatives. As the world, in Aristotle's view for instance, had existed from all eternity, so also had the stages and forms of life, each giving rise again to its like. Indeed, the essential idea was that each higher step is simply a development, a fuller unfolding of the lower stage, and finally that man was the complete realisation of what was potentially inherent in the lowest of all. This doctrine of evolution was in modern times the fundamental idea of Leibnitz and Kant, of Goethe, Schelling and Hegel. It brought unity and connectedness into the system of nature, united everything by steps, denied the existence of gaping chasms, and proclaimed the solidarity of all the forms of life. But to all this the idea of actual descent was unnecessary. An actual material variation and transition from one stage to another seemed to it a wooden and gross expression of the evolution idea, an "all too childish and nebulous hypothesis" (Hegel). All the important results of comparative morphology and physiology, which the modern supporters of the doctrine of descent so confidently utilise as arguments in its favour, would have been welcomed by those who held the original and general evolution idea, as a corroboration of their own standpoint. And as a matter of fact they all afford conclusive proofs of _evolution_; but not one of them, including even the fundamental biogenetic law and the inoculated chimpanzee, is decisive in regard to _descent_. This contention is sufficiently important to claim our attention for a little. Let us take the last example. Transfusion of blood between two species is possible, not necessarily because they are descended from one another or from a common root, but solely because of their systematic (ideal) relationship, that is to say because they are sufficiently near to one another and like one another in their physiological qualities and functions. If, assuming descent, this homology were disturbed, and the sy
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