THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



A much inferior dualism was elucidated by Em- 

 pedocles, a contemporary of Anaxagoras, and it would 

 not be necessary to dwell on his ideas if he had not 

 drawn a picture of creation which many modern evo- 

 lutionists extravagantly maintain to be the ancestor 

 of our present theory/" From the rather extensive 

 fragments of his didactic poem, On Nature^ and from 

 comments of later writers we know that Empedocles 

 believed that all material substance is formed out of 

 the mixture of four prime elements, earth, water, air, 

 and fire. To them, he adds two active principles, love 

 which causes them to unite, and hate to separate. He 

 thus forsakes the clear-cut and fundamental distinc- 

 tion of the material and the spiritual, which Anax- 

 agoras had grasped, and introduces the ambiguous 

 terms, love and hate. Sometimes, he treats them as 

 if they were the ethical principles of good and evil, 

 and sometimes they are like the physical forces of at- 

 traction and repulsion. Originally, the elements were 

 mingled together to form a sphere. In this state, love 

 was supreme; but hate becomes stronger and the ele- 

 ments separate into individual bodies. The power of 

 hate then wanes and again the elements return to the 



10 Haeckel : "Empedocles must be regarded as Darwin's earliest pre- 

 decessor." Hist, of Creation, I, p. 296. Fritz Schultze: "To have 

 first conceived the grand thought of a theory of tracing the origin 

 of what is suitable from what is unsuitable, is the brilliant merit of 

 Empedocles." Osborn : "Empedocles may justly be called the father 

 of the Evolution idea. . . . We find [in his teachings] the germ 

 of the theory of the survival of the fittest, or of natural selection. 

 . . . Note the remote parallel with the modern notion of the strug- 

 gle for existence as, mainly, success in feeding and in leaving pro- 

 geny." From the Greeks to Darwin, pp. 37-40- 



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