In grouping the departments and their respective phenomena as departments in which the law of evolution has obtained, and in drawing from them the sweeping deduction that there is no department in which this law has not obtained as the _causa causans_, Mr. Spencer does not appear to have made these necessary discriminations. He specifies the following remote fields of inquiry, in which he maintains that this law of evolution is now admitted to be the solution of the phenomena that lie in those respective fields: First, the solar system, which, as he asserts, astronomers now consider has been gradually evolved out of diffused matter.[70] Second, geological discoveries, which show that the earth has reached its present varied structure through a process of evolution. Third, society, which has progressed through a corresponding process of gradual development. "Constitutions are not made, but grow," is said to be now a recognized truth among "philosophical politicians," and a part of the more general truth that "societies are not made, but grow." Fourth, languages, which, we are told, are now believed not to have been artificially or supernaturally formed, but to have been developed. Finally, the histories of religions, philosophy, science, the fine arts, and the industrial arts, show, it is said, development "through as unobtrusive changes as those which the mind of a child passes on its way to maturity."[71] It is obvious that in some of these departments neither human agency nor the human will and choice can have had any influence in producing the phenomena, while in some of them human agency, will, and choice have had a vast influence in making the phenomena what they are. That political constitutions or social institutions are not made, but grow, is a dogma that is by no means universally true, however wise it may sound, or with whatever confidence in a paradox it may be asserted by "some political philosophers." While past events and present exigencies may have largely shaped some political constitutions, we know that others have been deliberately modified by a choice that has had more or less of a free scope, and that sometimes this has amounted to an arbitrary decision. Languages may or may not have been a direct and supernatural gift from Heaven, but we know that their structure has been powerfully influenced by human agencies, when they have come to be written expressions of thought; for they have then received expansion by the actual coinage of new words, as well as by new meanings of old words; and even when they were in the first stages of a spoken tongue, inflections that were purely arbitrary have been introduced. So it has been with systems of religion, philosophy, the fine arts, the mechanic arts, legislation, and jurisprudence. While in all these departments changes have been going on, which upon a superficial view appear to indicate a kind of spontaneous development,