Evolutionist Philosophers 5 



Aristotle's views of Nature 1 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 con- 

 tained 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 2 , 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 seven- 

 teenth centuries who had at least got beyond static formulae, but, as 

 Professor Osborn points out 3 , " 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 



1 See G. J. Romanes, "Aristotle as a Naturalist," Contemporary Review, Vol. LIX. 

 p. 275, 1891 ; G. Pouchet, La Biologic Aristotelique, Paris, 1885 ; E. Zeller, A History 

 of Greek Philosophy, London, 1881, and " Ueber die griecbischen Vorganger Darwin's," 

 Abhandl. Berlin Akad. 1878, pp. 111124. 



2 op. cit. p. 81. 3 op. cit. p. 87. 



