440 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



knowledge are fast coining to be recognized as profoundly im- 

 moral, was without doubt the understandiiig and tlie belief of the 

 person or persons who compiled from the Chaldean and other 

 earlier statements the account of creation in the first of our 

 sacred books.* 



Thus down to a period almost within living memory it was 

 held, virtually " always, everywhere, and by all," that the uni- 

 verse, as we now see it, was created literally and directly by the 

 voice or hands of the Almighty, or by both out of nothing in 

 an instant or in six days, or in both and for the convenience of 

 the dwellers upon the earth, which was at the base and foundation 

 of the whole structure. 



But there had been implanted along through the ages germs of 

 another growth in human thinking, some of them even as early 

 as the Babylonian period. In the Assyrian inscriptions we find 

 recorded the Chaldeo-Babylonian idea of a development of the imi- 

 verse out of the primeval flood or " great deep," and of the animal 

 creation out of the earth and sea. This idea, recast, partially at 

 least, into monotheistic form, passed naturally into the sacred books 

 of the neighbors and pupils of the Chaldeans the Hebrews ; but 

 its development in Christendom afterward was checked, as we shall 

 hereafter see, by the more powerful influence of other inherited 

 statements which appealed more simply and powerfully to the 

 mind of the Church. 



Far more striking was the effect of this idea, rewrought by the 

 early Ionian philosophers, to whom it was doubtless transmitted 

 from the Chaldeans through the Phoenicians. In the minds of 

 lonians like Anaximander and Anaximenes it was most strik- 

 ingly developed ; the first of these conceived of the visible uni- 

 verse as the result of processes of evolution, and the latter pressed 

 further the same mode of reasoning, dwelling on agencies in cos- 

 mic development recognized in modern science. 



This geneal idea of evolution in Nature thus took strong hold 

 upon Greek thought and was developed in many ways, some 

 wonderfully ingenious, some curiously perverse. Plato, indeed, 

 withstood it ; but Aristotle sometimes developed it so as to re- 

 mind us of modern views. 



* For scriptural indications of the independent existence of light and darkness, compare 

 with the first verses of the first chapter of Genesis such passages as Job xxxviii, 19, 24; 

 for the general prevalence of this early view, see Lukas, Kosmogonie, pp. 31, 33, 41, 74, 

 and j9a,ssim; for the view of St. Ambrose regardmg the creation of light and of the sun, 

 see his ITexameron, lib. 4, cap. iii ; for an excellent general statement, see Huxley, Mr. 

 Gladstone and Genesis, in the Nineteenth Century, 1886, reprinted in his Essays on Contro- 

 verted Questions, London, 1892, note, pp. 126 et seq. ; for the acceptance in the miracle 

 plays of the scriptural idea of light and darkness as independent creations, see Wright, 

 Essays on Archaeological Subjects, vol. ii, p. 178. 



