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The Case for Emergent Evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Extract

The word “emergent” was suggested by George Henry Lewes for specialized use in contradistinction to “resultant.” Little came of the suggestion, so far as I know, for some forty years.

All that Lewes had to say on the matter is comprised within half a dozen, or at most eleven, pages, at the close of a long-winded, but at that time not negligible, discussion of Force and Cause, and is preceded by a section on Hume's Theory of Causation. This leads up to the statement: ‘There are two classes of effects markedly distinguishable as resultants and enter gents.’ Even here there was nothing new save in the adoption and adaptation of the word ‘emergent’ in place, let us say, of John Stuart Mill's ‘heteropathic effects.’

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1929

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References

page 23 note 1 Problems of Life and Mind, 2nd Series, 1875, p. 412.

page 23 note 2 Pp. 416–422.

page 25 note 1 For example in The Physical Basis of Mind (1877), as republished in 1893, p. 95. The whole argument here is in support of what Mr. Broad calls “emergent vitalism"—of which, by the way, it may be said: If vitalism, as commonly understood, then not emergent; if emergent, then no longer in accordance with the cardinal tenets of vitalism.

page 26 note 1 P. 46.

page 26 note 2 Opp. p. 162.

page 28 note 1 Essays, v, p. 198.Google Scholar

page 29 note 1 L’ Évolution Créatrice, 6th edition, p. 217.

page 29 note 2 Essays, ix, p. 6.Google Scholar

page 29 note 3 Analysis of Matter, p. 77, cf. p. 17.

page 30 note 1 Essays, v, pp. 114–15.Google Scholar

page 30 note 2 P. 88.

page 30 note 3 Russell, , Analysis of Matter, p. 171.Google Scholar

page 30 note 4 P. 295, cf. p. 84.

page 30 note 5 P. 88.

page 30 note 6 P. 174.

page 32 note 1 Essays, v, pp. 70 and 204.Google Scholar

page 33 note 1 Chap. xi and elsewhere.

page 35 note 1 Essays, vi, p. 214.Google Scholar

page 37 note 1 Science and the Modern World, p. 111.

page 38 note 1 Essays, ix, p. 126.