This passage obliges us to infer that Lord Salisbury supposes the theory of evolution to be concerned only with things that "breed." If the molecules of matter were "organic beings," he says, "the comfortable word 'evolution'" might be thought to suggest a solution; but since they are not organic beings, evolution has no place. Apparently, then. Lord Salisbury thinks evolution is concerned only with animals and plants. It is difficult to believe that, well acquainted as he is with the science of the day, he really means that which his words imply. We seem almost bound to assume an inadvertence of expression or a lapse of thought. Still as his statement and his apparent belief have been put before a million or two of readers, it seems needful to do something toward dissipating the misapprehension caused, by briefly indicating what is meant by evolution as rightly understood.
The Cosmos as a whole and in all its parts has reached its present state either supernaturally or naturally; and if naturally then not living things only but all other things have come naturally to be what they are. A doctrine which alleges evolution for the animate world and assumes creation of the inanimate world is absurd. Evolution, if alleged at all, must be alleged as coextensive with all existence—save that which is undergoing the reverse process of dissolution.
One who sees that our interpretations must leave us for ever Ignorant concerning the data of the process—the space and the time, the matter and the motion, as well as the ultimate energy manifested through them—may yet rationally seek a proximate interpretation. If things of all kinds, inorganic, organic, and superorganic, have become what they are, not supernaturally but naturally, the implication is that their present state is the outcome of preceding states; and that the genesis of changes throughout the past has been of like nature with the genesis of changes at present. What, then, is the most dominant trait common to successions of changes?
A thing ever being modified and re-modified diverges more and more from its original condition: accumulated changes produce transformation. What is the general nature of that progressive transformation which constitutes evolution? The first
