JVBW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 7 



outside the Church, slowly to gain strength. On all sides, in every 

 field, men were making discoveries which caused the general theo- 

 logical view to appear more and more inadequate. 



In the first half of the seventeenth century Descartes seemed 

 about to take for a time the leadership of human thought; his 

 theories, however superseded now, gave a great impulse to inves- 

 tigation then. His genius in promoting an evolution doctrine as 

 regarded the mechanical formation of the solar system was great, 

 and his mode of thought strengthened the current of evolutionary 

 doctrine generally ; but his constant dread of persecution, both 

 from Catholics and Protestants, led him steadily to veil his 

 thoughts and even to supjDress them. He had watched the Gali- 

 leo struggle in all its stages ; he had seen his own books con- 

 demned by university after university under the direction of theo- 

 logians, and placed upon the index of prohibited books. Although 

 he gave new and striking arguments to prove the existence of God, 

 and humbled himself before the Jesuits, he was condemned by 

 Catholics and Protestants alike ; since Roger Bacon, perhaps, no 

 great thinker had been so completely abased by theological op- 

 pression. 



Near the close of the same century another great thinker, Leib- 

 nitz, though not propounding any full doctrine on evolution, gave 

 it an impulse by suggesting a view contrary to the sacrosanct 

 belief in the immutability of species that is, to the pious doc- 

 trine that every species in the animal kingdom now exists as it 

 left the hands of the Creator, the napiing process by Adam, and 

 the door of Noah's ark. 



His punishment at the hands of the Church came a few years 

 later, when, in 1712, the Jesuits defeated his attempt to found an 

 Academy of Science at Vienna ; the imperial authorities covered 

 him with honors, but the priests ruling in the confessionals and 

 pulpits would not allow him the privilege of aiding his fellow- 

 men to ascertain God's truths revealed in Nature. 



A few years after Leibnitz's death came in France a thinker 

 in natural science of much less influence, but who made a decided 

 step forward. 



Early in the eighteenth century Benoist de Maillet, a man of 

 the world, but a wide observer and close thinker upon Nature, 

 began meditating especially upon the origin of animal forms, and 

 was led into the idea of the transformation of species and so into 

 a theory of evolution, which in some important respects antici- 

 pated modern ideas. He definitely conceived the production of 

 existing species by the modification of their predecessors, and he 

 plainly accepted one of the fundamental maxims of modern ge- 

 ology that the structure of the globe must be studied in the light 

 of the present course of Nature. 



