SOURCE: "Spirit and Nature: Alexander's Early Writings," in Unity and Variety in the Philosophy of Samuel Alexander, Purdue University Press, 1984, pp. 12-32.

In the following essay, Weinstein discusses the development of Alexander's philosophical system from Hegelian idealism in the 1880s to Darwinism and Naturalism in the 1890s.

May it not be that the inability of philosophy to understand the great body of facts familiar to us as variety, modification, multiplicity, accident, is not due to the weakness of nature, but suggests a problem for philosophy itself. (1886)

The real answer to Hume is given by Darwinism. (1892)

Samuel Alexander's first approach to the problem of unity and variety was from the perspective of absolute or objective idealism. In his middle twenties, as Atkinson Lee reports, when late Victorian culture was reaching its florescence, Alexander "became immersed in the Neo-Hegelian philosophy."¹ Lee observes that it was to Alexander that "Mark Pattison...