The blindness of those who think it absurd to suppose that … - Herbert Spencer

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The blindness of those who think it absurd to suppose that complex organic forms may have arisen by successive modifications out of simple ones becomes astonishing when we remember that complex organic forms are daily being thus produced. A tree differs from a seed immeasurably in every respect... Yet is the one changed in the course of a few years into the other: changed so gradually, that at no moment can it be said — Now the seed ceases to be, and the tree exists.

Herbert Spencer

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About Herbert Spencer

Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, classical liberal political theorist, and sociological theorist of the Victorian era. He developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He is known for coining the phrase "survival of the fittest".

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Alternative Names: Spencert • Gerbert Spencer

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John Stuart Mill Bertrand Russell Immanuel Kant Edmund Burke William Godwin

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Crime is incurable, save by that gradual process of adaptation to the social state which humanity is undergoing. Crime is the continual breaking out of the old unadapted nature — the index of a character unfitted to its conditions — and only as fast as the unfitness diminishes can crime diminish.

We have repeatedly observed that while any whole is evolving, there is always going on an evolution of the parts into which it divides itself; but we have not observed that this equally holds of the totality of things, which is made up of parts within parts from the greatest down to the smallest.

If insistence on them tends to unsettle established systems ... self-evident truths are by most people silently passed over; or else there is a tacit refusal to draw from them the most obvious inferences.

The blindness of those who think it absurd to suppose that complex organic forms may have arisen by successive modifications out of simple ones becom… - Herbert Spencer

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