xxi EVOLUTION OF EVOLUTION THEORIES 413 



sublime humility he says : " I found no basis prepared, 

 no models to copy. Mine is the first step, and therefore 

 a small one, though worked out with much thought and 

 hard labour." Aristotle saAv in Nature a process of pro- 

 gressive chance, the expression of an inherent perfecting 

 principle. 



" In nature, the passage from inanimate things to animals is so 

 gradual that it is impossible to draw a hard-and-fast line between 

 them. After inanimate things come plants, which differ from one 

 another in the degree of life which they possess. Compared with 

 inert bodies, plants seem endowed with life ; compared with animals, 

 they seem inanimate. From plants to animals the passage is by 

 no means sudden or abrupt ; one finds living things in the sea 

 about which there is doubt whether they be animals or plants." 

 " Animals are at war with one another when they live in the same 

 place and use the same food. If the food be not sufficiently abun- 

 dant they fight for it even with those of the same kind." 



3. Lucretius. Among the Romans Lucretius gave 

 noble expression to the philosophy of Epicurus. We 

 cannot here discuss his materialistic theory of the con- 

 course of atoms into stable and well-adapted forms, but 

 must be content with quoting a few sentences in which 

 he states his belief that the earth is the mother of all 

 life, and that animals work out their destiny in a struggle 

 for existence. He was a cosmic, but hardly an organic 

 evolutionist, for, according to his poetic fancy, organisms 

 arose from the earth's fertile bosom and not by the 

 gradual transformation of simpler predecessors. 



" In the beginning the earth gave forth all kinds of herbage and 

 verdant sheen about the hills and over all the plains ; the flowery 

 meadows glittered with the bright green hue, and nexc in order to 

 the different trees was given a strong and emulous desire of grow- 

 ing up into the air with full unbridled powers. . . . With good 

 reason the earth has gotten the name of mother, since all things 

 have been produced out of the earth. . . . 



" We see that many conditions must meet together in things in 

 order that they may beget and continue their kinds ; first a supply 

 of food, then a way in which the birth-producing seeds throughout 

 the frame may stream from the relaxed limbs. . . . And many 

 races of living things must then have died out and been unable to beget 

 and continue their breed. For in the case of all things which you see 

 breathing the breath of life, either craft or courage or else speed 



