F1582    Book contribution:     Barrett, P. H. 1974. Early writings of Charles Darwin. In Gruber, H. E., Darwin on man. A psychological study of scientific creativity; together with Darwin's early and unpublished notebooks. Transcribed and annotated by Paul H. Barrett, commentary by Howard E. Gruber. Foreword by Jean Piaget. London: Wildwood House. [Notebooks M, N, Old and useless notes, Essay on theology and natural selection, Questions for Mr. Wynn, Extracts from B-C-D-E transmutation notebooks, A Biographical Sketch of Charles Darwin's Father, Plinian Society Minutes Book]   Text

Harriet Martineau's, and Charles knew her too; they were all in the Carlyle circle. It is striking to discover the identical grouping of ideas repeated in a letter from Darwin to Lyell in 1861. He is complaining that Asa Gray and Sir John Herschel, and perhaps Lyell too, cling to the idea of providential intervention in the natural order. In language and example not very different from the M notebook, he reminds Lyell that the Chilenos whom Darwin met during the Beagle voyage thought that God had

A162    Book:     Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.   Text   Image   PDF

continuation and deepening of positivism, though the Italian thinker arrived at his point of view independently of French-English positivism. The idea of continuous evolution is here maintained in opposition to Comte's and Mill's philosophy of discontinuity. From Wundt and Fouill e Ardig differs in conceiving psychical evolution not as an immediate revelation of the innermost nature of existence, but only as a single, though the most accessible example, of evolution. III. To the French

A162    Book:     Seward, A. C. ed. 1909. Darwin and modern science. Essays in commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The origin of species. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.   Text   Image   PDF

to be constituted, it is to Darwin that its thanks are due; he had long been clearing paths for it which lay well away from the old familiar road trodden by so many theories of evolution. This anti-finalist doctrine, when fully worked out, was, moreover, calculated to aid in the needful dissociation of two notions: that of evolution and that of progress. In application to society these had long been confounded; and, as a consequence, the general idea seemed to be that only one type of evolution