Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley. Edward Clodd

“Nature, which governs the whole, will soon change all things which thou seest, and out of their substance will make other things, and again other things from the substance of them, in order that the world may be ever new.”

Marcus Aurelius, vii, 25.

BC 600-A. D. 50.

“These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them.”—Hebrews xi. 13.

“One event is always the son of another, and we must never forget the parentage,” said a Bechuana chief to Casalis the missionary. The barbarian philosopher spoke wiser than he knew, for in his words lay that doctrine of continuity and unity which is the creed of modern science. They are a suitable text to the discourse of this chapter, the design of which is to bring out what the brilliancy of present-day discoveries tends to throw into shadow, namely, the antiquity of the ideas of which those discoveries are the result. Although the Theory of Evolution, as we define it, is new, the speculations which made it possible are, at least, twenty-five centuries old. Indeed, it is not practicable, since the remote past yields no documents, to fix their beginnings. Moreover, charged, as they are, with many crudities, they are not detachable from the barbaric conceptions of the Universe which are the philosophies of past, and the legends of present, times.

Fontenelle, a writer of the last century, shrewdly remarked that “all nations made the astounding part of their myths while they were savage, and retained them from custom and religious conservatism.” For, as Walter Bagehot argues in his brilliant little book on Physics and Politics, and as all anthropological research goes to prove, the lower races are non-progressive both through fear and instinct. And the majority of the members of higher races have not escaped from the operation of the same causes. Hence the persistence of coarse and grotesque elements in speculations wherein man has made gradual approach to the truth of things; hence, too—the like phenomena having to be interpreted—the similarity of the explanation of them. And as primitive myth embodies primitive theology, primitive morals, and primitive science, the history of beliefs shows how few there be who have escaped from the tyranny of that authority and sanctity with which the lapse of time invests old ideas.

Dissatisfaction is a necessary condition of progress; and dissatisfaction involves opposition. As Grant Allen puts it, in one of his most felicitous poems:

If systems that be are the order of God,

Revolt is a part of the order.

Hence a stage in the history of certain peoples when, in questioning what is commonly accepted, intellectual freedom is born. Such a stage was markedly reached whenever, for example, an individual here and there challenged the current belief about the beginnings and nature of things, beliefs held because they were taught, not because their correspondence with fact had been examined.

A pioneer (French, pionnier; Italian, pedone; from Latin pedes) is, literally, a foot-soldier; one who goes before an army to clear the road of obstructions. Hence the application of the term to men who are in the van of any new movement; hence its special fitness in the present connection, as designating men whose speculations cut a pathway through jungles of myth and legend to the realities of things. The Pioneers of Evolution—the first on record to doubt the truth of the theory of special creation, whether as the work of departmental gods or of one Supreme Deity, matters not—lived in Greece about the time already mentioned; six centuries before Christ. Not in the early stages of the Evolution idea, in the Greece limited, as now, to a rugged peninsula in the southeastern corner of Europe and to the surrounding islands, but in the Greece which then included Ionia, on the opposite seaboard of Asia Minor.

From times beyond memory or record, the islands of the Ægean had been the nurseries of culture and adventure. Thence the maritime inhabitants had spread themselves both east and west, feeding the spirit of inquiry, and imbibing influences from older civilizations, notably of Egypt and Chaldæa. But, mix as they might with other peoples, the Greeks never lost their own strongly marked individuality, and, in imparting what they had acquired or discovered to younger peoples, that is, younger in culture, they stamped it with an impress all their own.

At the later period with which we are dealing, refugees

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Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley. Edward Clodd

Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley

Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley

Table of Contents

PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION.

PART I.

PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION FROM THALES TO LUCRETIUS.