Of course, the great illumination as to the meaning of evolution has come with its application to many fields besides the physical. Darwin was certainly the great inaugurator of the evolutionary movement in England. Still, Darwin's problem was strictly limited. The impression is widespread that the biological evolutionary theories were first developed, and furnished the basis for the others. Yet both Hegel and Comte, not to speak of Schelling, were far more interested in the intellectual and historical, the ethical and social aspects of the question. Both Hegel and Comte were, whether rightly or wrongly, rather contemptuous of the appeal to biology and organic life. Both had the sense that they used a great figure of speech when they spoke of society as an organism, and compared the working of institutions to biological functions. This is indeed the question. It is a question over which Spencer sets himself lightly. He passes back and forth between organic evolution and the ethical, economic, and social movements which are described by the same term, as if we were in possession of a perfectly safe analogy, or rather as if we were assured of an identical principle. Much that is already archaic in Spencer's economic and social, his historical and ethical, not to say his religious, chapters is due to the influence of this fact. Of his own mind it was true that he had come to the doctrine of evolution from the physical side. He brought to his other subjects a more or less developed method of operating with the conception. He never fully realised how new subjects would alter the method and transform the conception. Spencerian evolution is an assertion of the all-sufficiency of natural law. The authority of conscience is but the experience of law-abiding and dutiful generations flowing in our veins. The public weal has hold over us, because the happiness and misery of past ages are inherited by us.