INTRODUCTION 



manuscript of his treatise on a new cosmical system, 

 on the ground that if the world would not accept the 

 mechanical principles of Galileo there was no chance 

 for his far more daring attempt to exalt natural law. 

 Pascal advises us to limit our respect and admiration 

 for the ancient writers. But of all the leaders of the 

 period, Francis Bacon saw most clearly the impend- 

 ing break between modern and ancient times. He re- 

 iterates, over and over again, that the Greek philoso- 

 phers had failed, however brilliantly they may have 

 reasoned, because they had not based their work on 

 observation and experiment. To him the old gospel 

 was dead, and he would give a novum organutn which 

 would install science by inductive reasoning as the 

 guide to truth. 



This revolt, which began in the sciences of astron- 

 omy and mechanics, spread until it embraced the 

 phenomena of all the inorganic world. But so long 

 as the nature and actions of living organisms, and 

 especially of man, remained outside the laws of phys- 

 ics, the revolution was manifestly incomplete. Dur- 

 ing the nineteenth century, science reached out to in- 

 clude the biological phenomena. The movement 

 against the authority of religion, in this field, takes 

 the form of biological evolution which finds its most 

 frequent expression in Darwinism. It is true that 

 evolution is a much more general term and signifies 

 merely any continuous variation of forms of fauna 

 and flora in contradistinction to the special creation 



