is apprehended. Let us take a few examples which, owing to their magnitude and familiarity, will be at once intelligible. Our first shall be taken from the histories of art and of speculative philosophy. In each of these domains of human activity and achievement we find those phenomena of development to which it is now customary to apply the name of evolution. Thus we hear of the evolution of philosophy from the {100} crude guesses of Thales to the elaborate system of Aristotle. We hear of the evolution of the Greek drama from the exhibitions of Thespis with his cart to the tragedies of Æschylus and of Sophocles; and similarly we hear of the evolution of the English drama from such exhibitions as miracle plays or _Gammer Gurton’s Needle_ to tragedies such as _Hamlet_ and comedies such as _As You Like It_. And to all such examples of development the word _evolution_ is applied with perfect accuracy; for there is in each an obvious and orderly sequence of the unintended. Aristotle’s philosophy was in part derived from that of his predecessors. He employed existing materials so as to produce a result which was not intended, indeed was not even imagined, by those who originally got them together and fashioned them, and which would never have been reached by Aristotle himself, if his predecessors had not thus unintentionally assisted him. None the less, however, does the Aristotelian philosophy, as its author gave it to the world, embody the deliberate intention of his profound and unrivalled genius; and it is only because it embodies this intended element that it constitutes an advance on the philosophies that went before it. Similarly, though Sophocles and Shakespeare, in constructing their dramas, each profited by the achievements of the dramatists who had gone before them, and though the art of each would doubtless have been more crude and imperfect had he come into the world a generation or two before he did, yet the part played {101} by evolution in the production of _Hamlet_ and _Antigone_ is totally distinct from, and is altogether dwarfed by, the part played by the genius and the intentions of their great authors.