Evolution in Modern Thought | Page 2

is more fundamental than that of the
correlation of organs, but Darwin's most characteristic contribution was
not less fundamental,--it was the idea of the correlation of organisms.
This, again, was not novel; we find it in the works of naturalists like
Christian Conrad Sprengel, Gilbert White, and Alexander von
Humboldt, but the realisation of its full import was distinctly
Darwinian.
As Regards the General Idea of Organic Evolution
While it is true, as Prof. H. F. Osborn puts it, that "'Before and after
Darwin' will always be the ante et post urbem conditam of biological
history," it is also true that the general idea of organic evolution is very
ancient. In his admirable sketch From the Greeks to Darwin,[1] Prof.
Osborn has shown that several of the ancient philosophers looked upon
Nature as a gradual development and as still in process of change. In
the suggestions of Empedocles, to take the best instance, there were
"four sparks of truth,--first, that the development of life was a gradual
process; second, that plants were evolved before animals; third, that
imperfect forms were gradually replaced (not succeeded) by perfect
forms; fourth, that the natural cause of the production of perfect forms
was the extinction of the imperfect."[2] But the fundamental idea of
one stage giving origin to another was absent. As the blue Ægean
teemed with treasures of beauty and threw many upon its shores, so did
Nature produce like a fertile artist what had to be rejected as well as
what was able to survive, but the idea of one species emerging out of
another was not yet conceived.
Aristotle's views of Nature[3] seem to have been more definitely
evolutionist than those of his predecessors, in this sense, at least, that
he recognised not only an ascending scale, but a genetic series from
polyp to man and an age-long movement towards perfection. "It is due

to the resistance of matter to form that Nature can only rise by degrees
from lower to higher types." "Nature produces those things which,
being continually moved by a certain principle contained in themselves,
arrive at a certain end."
To discern the outcrop of evolution-doctrine in the long interval
between Aristotle and Bacon seems to be very difficult, and some of
the instances that have been cited strike one as forced. Epicurus and
Lucretius, often called poets of evolution, both pictured animals as
arising directly out of the earth, very much as Milton's lion long
afterwards pawed its way out. Even when we come to Bruno who wrote
that "to the sound of the harp of the Universal Apollo (the World Spirit),
the lower organisms are called by stages to higher, and the lower stages
are connected by intermediate forms with the higher," there is great
room, as Prof. Osborn points out,[4] for difference of opinion as to how
far he was an evolutionist in our sense of the term.
The awakening of natural science in the sixteenth century brought the
possibility of a concrete evolution theory nearer, and in the early
seventeenth century we find evidences of a new spirit--in the
embryology of Harvey and the classifications of Ray. Besides sober
naturalists there were speculative dreamers in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries who had at least got beyond static formulae, but,
as Professor Osborn points out,[5] "it is a very striking fact, that the
basis of our modern methods of studying the Evolution problem was
established not by the early naturalists nor by the speculative writers,
but by the Philosophers." He refers to Bacon, Descartes, Leibnitz,
Hume, Kant, Lessing, Herder, and Schelling. "They alone were upon
the main track of modern thought. It is evident that they were groping
in the dark for a working theory of the Evolution of life, and it is
remarkable that they clearly perceived from the outset that the point to
which observation should be directed was not the past but the present
mutability of species, and further, that this mutability was simply the
variation of individuals on an extended scale."
Bacon seems to have been one of the first to think definitely about the
mutability of species, and he was far ahead of his age in his suggestion

of what we now call a Station of Experimental Evolution. Leibnitz
discusses in so many words how the species of animals may be
changed and how intermediate species may once have linked those that
now seem discontinuous. "All natural orders of beings present but a
single chain".... "All advances by degrees in Nature, and nothing by
leaps." Similar evolutionist statements are to be found in the works of
the other "philosophers," to whom Prof. Osborn refers, who were,
indeed, more scientific than the naturalists of their day. It must be
borne in mind that the general idea of organic evolution--that the
present is the