Quite the opposite happens when “history” deals with the individual from the egg to the adult: here the whole series of historical facts is seen to form one whole. This case therefore we shall call not history, but evolution, an evolving of something; the word “evolution” being understood here in a much wider sense than on former occasions,[162] and including, for instance, the embryological alternative “evolutio” or “epigenesis.”
And half-way between enumeration and evolution there now stands a type of history which is more than the one and less than the other: there is a kind of intelligible connection between the consecutive historical stages and yet the concept of a whole does not come in. The geological history of a mountain or of an island is a very clear instance of this class. It is easy to see here, how what has been always becomes the 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 all its actual characteristics, if we know its history. This “historical understanding” rests on the fact that what first appeared as an inconceivable complex has been resolved into a sequence of single events, each of which may claim to have been explained by actually existing sciences. The complex has been explained as being, though not a real “whole,” yet a sum of singularities, every element of which is familiar.
But you may tell me that my discussion of evolution and of cumulation, as the higher aspects of history, is by no means complete; nay, more—that it is altogether wrong. You would certainly not be mistaken in calling my analysis incomplete. We have called one type of history evolution, the other cumulation; but how have these higher types been reached? Has historical enumeration itself, which was supposed to stand at the beginning of all analysis, 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 from our knowledge that there are billions or more of frogs’ eggs, all destined to the same “history,” which therefore is not history at all. We have created the concept of cumulation not from the historical study of a single mountain, but from our knowledge of physics and chemistry and so-called dynamical geology: by the aid of these sciences we “understood” historically, and thus our understanding came from another source than history itself.
2. Phylogenetic Possibilities
Does history always gain its importance from what it is not? Must history always lose its “historical” aspect, in order to become of importance to human knowledge? And can it always become “science” by such a transformation? We afterwards shall resume this discussion on a larger scale, but at present we shall apply what we have learned to hypothetic phylogeny. What then are the possibilities of phylogeny, to what class of history would it belong if it were complete? Of course, we shall not be able to answer this question fully; for phylogeny is not complete, and scarcely anything is known about the factors which act in it. But in spite of that, so much, it seems to me, is gained by our analysis of the possible aspects of history and of the factors possibly concerned in transformism, that we are at least able to formulate the possibilities of a phylogeny of the future in their strict logical outlines.
Darwinism and Lamarckism, regarding organic forms as contingent, must at the same time regard organic history as a cumulation; they indeed might claim to furnish an historical explanation in the realm of biology—if only their statements were unimpeachable, which as we have seen, they are not.
But any transformistic theory, which locates the very principle of phylogeny in the organism itself, and to which therefore even organic forms would be not accidental but essential, might be forced to regard the descent of organisms as a true evolution. The singularities in phylogenetic history would thus become links in one whole: history proper would become more than history. But I only say that phylogeny might be evolution, and in fact I cannot admit more than this a priori, even on the basis of an internal transformistic principle, as has been assumed. Such a principle also might lead always from one typical state of organisation to the next: but ad infinitum.[163] Then phylogeny, though containing what might in some sense be called “progress,” would not be “evolution”; it might even be called cumulation in such a case, in spite of the internal transforming principle, though, of course, cumulation from within would always mean something very different from cumulation from without.[164]
But we must leave this problem an open question, as long as our actual knowledge about transformism remains as poor as it is. We need only add, for the sake of logical interest, that phylogeny, as a true evolution, would necessarily be characterised by the possibility of being repeated.