THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



his notion from this fact, and from the fact that the 

 seeds of all things have a moist nature, and that water 

 is the origin of the nature of moist things."^ Because 

 of the attempt of these philosophers to find a unity 

 between matter and life, we can classify them as 

 monists. Their doctrine is a form of hylozoism since 

 they also endowed matter with life. They are there- 

 fore highly extolled by the modern school of monistic 

 thinkers. Haeckel, for example, goes to the absurd 

 length of calling Anaximander the prophet of Kant 

 and Laplace who originated the nebular hypothesis, 

 because he is said to have taught that an infinite num- 

 ber of worlds have been generated and have perished 

 again. And he is, on the same authority, the prophet 

 of Lamarck and Darwin because he states, according 

 to Plutarch, that at the beginning man was generated 

 from all sorts of animals; and from another commen- 

 tator, that the first animals were generated in moist- 

 ure, and were covered with a prickly skin. 



In their attempt to find a single cause for all phe- 

 nomena, these philosophers had carried over into their 

 conception of nature something of the mythical, or 

 animistic, beliefs of their contemporaries. They, there- 

 fore, endowed inert matter with a form of life or sen- 

 sation and were the founders of the doctrine of hylo- 

 zoistic monism. It is but natural to expect that a 

 monistic view of phenomena would be early recog- 



2 Aristotle, Meta., i, 3, 983 b. 20. English trans, by W. D. Ross, 

 Oxford. 



