ANCIENT AND MEDIAEVAL BELIEFS $ 



The ancient teachings of India, Babylon and Egypt bound 

 up the origin of Hfe with various reUgious legends and tradi- 

 tions. From this point of view spontaneous generation was 

 merely a particular manifestation of the creative will of gods 

 or demons. But at the very source of our European culture 

 in ancient Greece, on the replacement of theogony, a mystical 

 interpretation of nature, cosmogony arises as the beginning 

 of scientific investigation. 



Although all the Greek philosophers from the Miletians to 

 Epicurus and the Stoics acknowledged spontaneous genera- 

 tion as an incontrovertible fact, their philosophical treatment 

 of this fact ^vent far beyond the framework of the previous 

 mystical presentations.^ They contained the beginnings of 

 all the concepts which were developed later in connection 

 with the question of the origin of life. 



Even the earliest Greek philosopher, Thales, who lived 

 from about 624 to 547 e.g., approached the problem of the 

 essential nature and origin of life from an elementary- 

 materialist position. Thales and the other philosophers of the 

 Miletian school (Anaximander and Anaximenes) recognised, 

 as a fundamental principle, the objective existence of matter 

 as something which is ahvays living and always changing 

 from the beginning of time. Life is inherent in matter as 

 such. Thus, although the Miletians believed in the spon- 

 taneous generation of living things from mud, slime and 

 such materials, they treated this phenomenon as the self- 

 creation of individual organisms, and not as one requiring 

 the intervention of any special mystical force. This point 

 of view was developed later by Empedocles^ (c. 485-425 b.c), 

 who held that plants and animals are formed from substances 

 ^vhich, although not organised, are already living, either by 

 birth fiom things like themselves or from things unlike them- 

 selves, i.e., by spontaneous generation. A particularly clear 

 enunciation of the idea of the self-creation of living things 

 is to be found in the works of Democritus^ (460-370 e.g.). 

 In this doctrine ancient Greek materialism reached the height 

 of its development although it had also already acquired a 

 somewhat mechanistic character. According to the view of 

 Democritus matter forms the basis of the universe and 

 consists of a multitude of very small particles (atoms) which 



