EVOLUTION 2

EVOLUTION 2

evolutionism is really a thing of far deeper growth and older
antecedents than this easy, superficial drawing-room view would lead us
to imagine. It is a very ancient and respectable theory indeed, and it
has an immense variety of minor developments. I am not going to push it
back, in the fashionable modern scientific manner, to the vague and
indefinite hints in our old friend Lucretius. The great original Roman
poet--the only original poet in the Latin language--did indeed hit out
for himself a very good rough working sketch of a sort of nebulous and
shapeless evolutionism. It was bold, it was consistent, for its time it
was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like all the philosophies of
the older world, was a mere speculative idea, a fancy picture of the
development of things, not dependent upon observation of facts at all,
but wholly evolved, like the German thinker's camel, out of its author's
own pregnant inner consciousness. The Roman poet would no doubt have
built an excellent superstructure if he had only possessed a little
straw to make his bricks of. As it was, however, scientific brick-making
being still in its infancy, he could only construct in a day a shadowy
Aladdin's palace of pure fanciful Epicurean phantasms, an imaginary
world of imaginary atoms, fortuitously concurring out of void chaos into
an orderly universe, as though by miracle. It is not thus that systems
arise which regenerate the thought of humanity; he who would build for
all time must make sure first of a solid foundation, and then use sound
bricks in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation.

It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea really began to
take form and shape in the separate conceptions of Kant, Laplace,
Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. These were the true founders of our modern
evolutionism. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who
led the chosen people into the land which more than one venturous Moses
had already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah top of the
eighteenth century.

Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in logical
order. Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily precede
in development plants and animals. You can have no cabbages without a
world to grow them in. The science of the stars was therefore reduced to
comparative system and order, while the sciences of life, and mind, and
matter were still a hopeless and inextricable muddle. It was no wonder,
then, that the evolution of the heavenly bodies should have been clearly
apprehended and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth's
crust was still imperfectly understood, and the evolution of living
beings was only tentatively and hypothetically hinted at in a timid
whisper.