The Science and Philosophy of the Organism

or that a bird passed through it on the wing. But it would hardly be found very suggestive to write the history of space-volumes. In fact, it is to bodies in space that all history actually rela

sense, but so does our hypothetical phylogeny and a great part of the history of mankind. And lastly, there is a rather complicated kind of sequence of which the "history" has actually been written. History can refer to bodies which are in no direct relation with one another, but which are each the effect of another body that belongs to a consecutive series of body-units showing periodicity. This sounds rather complicated; but it is only the strict expression of what is perfectly familiar to you all. Our sentence indeed is simply part of the definition of a history of art or of literature for instance-or, say, of a phylogenetic history of the n

ned what this "more" signifies. It is not very difficult to do so: in fact, there are three different t

relation to bodies. Take a cloud and describe its history from the beginning to the end: there would never be much more than pure description. Or take one pair of dogs and describe them and their offspring for four generations or more: I doubt if you will get beyond

to form one whole. This case therefore we shall call not history, but evolution, an evolving of something; the word "evolution" being understoo

he foundation of what will be in the next phase of the historical process. There is a sort of cumulation of consecutive phases, the later ones being impossible without the earlier. So we shall speak of the type of "historical cumulation" as standing between evolution and bare temporal sequence. By means of historical cumulations history may fairly claim to "explain" things. We "understand" a mountain or an island in

is, or has "history" itself in its strictest sense, as relating to the single as such, risen unaided into something more than "history"? By no means: history has grown beyond its bounds by the aid of something from without. It is unhistorical elements that have brought us from mere history to more than history. We have created the concept of evolution, not from our knowledge of the single line of events attendant on a single egg of a frog, but