Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy
Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative; Vol. 1 of 3: Library Edition (1891), Containing Seven Essays not before Republished, and Various other Additions.
Spencer, Herbert
Philosophy; Political science; Science
Now it seems to us that the various kinds of integration here
exemplified, which are commonly set down as so many independent
phenomena, ought to be generalized, and included in the formula
describing the process of development. The fact that in an adult crab,
many pairs of ganglia originally separate have become fused into a
single mass, is a fact only second in significance to the
differentiation of its alimentary canal into stomach and intestine. That
in the higher _Annulosa_, a single heart replaces the string of
rudimentary hearts constituting the dorsal blood-vessel in the lower
_Annulosa_, (reaching in one species to the number of one hundred and
sixty), is a truth as much needing to be comprised in the history of
evolution, as is the formation of a respiratory surface by a branched
expansion of the skin. A right conception of the genesis of a vertebral
column, includes not only the differentiations from which result the
_chorda dorsalis_ and the vertebral segments imbedded in it; but quite
as much it includes the coalescence of numerous vertebral processes with
their respective vertebral bodies. The changes in virtue of which
several things become one, demand recognition equally with those in
virtue of which one thing becomes several. Evidently, then, the current
statement which ascribes the developmental progress to differentiations
alone, is incomplete. Adequately to express the facts, we must say
that the transition from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous is carried
on by differentiations and accompanying integrations.
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