human
Why Lyell's arguments produced the opposite effect to that intended, I cannot say. Probably it was that the discussion presented, more clearly than had been done previously, the natural genesis of organic forms. The question whether it was or was not true was more distinctly raised. My inclination to accept it as true in spite of Lyell's adverse criticisms, was, doubtless, chiefly due to its harmony with that general idea of the order of Nature towards which I had, throughout life, been growing. Super-naturalism, in whatever form, had never commended itself. From boyhood there was in me a need to see, in a more or less distinct way, how phenomena, no matter of what kind, are to be naturally explained. Hence, when my attention was drawn to the question whether organic forms have been specially created, or whether they have arisen by progressive modifications, physically caused and inherited, I adopted the last supposition; inadequate as was the evidence, and great as were the difficulties in the way. Its congruity with the course of procedure throughout things at large gave it an irresistible attraction; and my belief in it never afterwards wavered, much as I was in after years ridiculed for entertaining it
gpt
Nonconformist in 1842 on
human
The Proper Sphere of Government,
gpt
But in his _Social Statics_ (1850) there
human
Thus he says,
gpt
The development of society as well as the development of man and the development of life generally, may be described as a tendency to individuate--_to become a thing_. And rightly interpreted, the manifold forms of progress going on around us are uniformly significant of this tendency.
human
At the close of his _Social Statics_ Spencer had indicated that progress from low to high types of society or organism implied an advance
gpt
human
Yet this phrase of von Baer, expressing the law of individual development, awakened my attention to the fact that the law which holds of the ascending stages of each individual organism is also the law which holds of the ascending grades of organisms of all kinds. And it had the further advantage that it presented in brief form, a more graphic image of the transformation, and thus facilitated further thought. Important consequences eventually ensued.
gpt
If anyone says that had von Baer never written I should not be doing that which I now am, I have nothing to say to the contrary--I should reply it is highly probable.