Buddhist nor Christian, but which is susceptible of several
interpretations, all the more so because Nietzsche, who was a poet, never
fails, whilst always artistically very fine, to fall into plenty of
contradictions.



CHAPTER VIII

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY: ENGLAND


The Doctrines of Evolution and of Transformism:
Lamarck (French), Darwin, Spencer.


TRANSFORMISM AND EVOLUTION.--The great philosophic invention of the
English of the nineteenth century has been the idea, based on a wide
knowledge of natural history, that there never was creation. The animal
species had been considered by all the philosophers (except Epicurus and
the Epicureans) as being created once and for all and remaining
invariable. Nothing of the kind. Matter, eternally fruitful, has
transformed itself first into plants, then into lower animals, then into
higher animals, then into man; our ancestor is the fish; tracing back yet
more remotely, our ancestor is the plant. Transformation (hence the name
_transformism_), discrimination and separation of species, the
strongest individuals of each kind alone surviving and creating descendants
in their image which constitute a species; evolution (hence the name
_evolutionism_) of living nature thus operating from the lowest types
to the highest and therefore the most complicated; there is nothing but