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Test:ISEE Upper Level Reading
Adapted from “The Influence of the Conception of Evolution on Modern Philosophy” by H. Höffding (1909) inEvolution in Modern Thought(1917 ed.)
WhenThe Origin of Speciesappeared fifty years ago, Romantic speculation, Schelling's and Hegel's philosophy, still reigned on the continent, while in England, Positivism, the philosophy of Comte and Stuart Mill, represented the most important trend of thought. German speculation had much to say on evolution; it even pretended to be a philosophy of evolution. But then the word "evolution" was to be taken in an ideal, not in a real, sense. To speculative thought, the forms and types of nature formed a system of ideas, within which any form could lead us by continuous transitions to any other. It was a classificatory system which was regarded as a divine world of thought or images, within which metamorphoses could go on—a condition comparable with that in the mind of the poet when one image follows another with imperceptible changes.
Goethe's ideas of evolution, as expressed in hisMetamorphosen der Pflanzen und der Thiere, belong to this category; it is, therefore, incorrect to call him a forerunner of Darwin. Schelling and Hegel held the same idea; Hegel expressly rejected the conception of a real evolution in time as coarse and materialistic. "Nature," he says, "is to be considered as asystem of stages, the one necessarily arising from the other, and being the nearest truth of that from which it proceeds; but not in such a way that the one isnaturallygenerated by the other; on the contrary [their connection lies] in the inner idea which is the ground of nature. Themetamorphosiscan be ascribed only to the notion as such, because it alone is evolution.... It has been a clumsy idea in the older as well as in the newer philosophy of nature, to regard the transformation and the transition from one natural form and sphere to a higher as an outward and actual production."
| 1. | Which of the following best describes the author’s presentation of Hegel’s thought about evolution? |
None of the other answers
It is a murky matter without much real reasoning at all.
It is a natural process, at least of sorts.
It is not comprised of progressive stages, each being the natural cause of the next.
It is purely a matter for our casual reflection.
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