THE DOGMA OF EVOLUTION 



to establish the laws of rational mechanics. Instead 

 of developing Plato's reliance on mathematical law : 

 "It is rather the poetic visions and hypotheses of the 

 Timaeus which influenced the later Greek philosophy 

 and absorbed the entire Christian thought. The neo- 

 Aristotelian scholasticism was occupied with the cos- 

 mic system of the TifJiaeus rather than with classi- 

 fying phenomena in mathematical laws."^" 



While we may class Aristotle with his teacher, 

 Plato, as a philosopher whose chief purposes are to 

 seek for the final cause of phenomena and to establish 

 the laws of justice and righteousness, we also find 

 him as sharply contrasted to Plato because of his pre- 

 dilection for knowledge of the objective world. His 

 indefatigable industry in collecting and classifymg 

 data of the animal world; his foresight in seeing that 

 for exact knowledge we must begin with the phenom- 

 ena presented by each group of animals, and when 

 this is done, proceed afterwards to state the causes 

 of those phenomena; his recognition that he had no 

 body of facts from which to generalize ; and his de- 

 termination to leave to his successors as great a col- 

 lection of the data of observation as he could obtain, 

 make him worthy to be called the first master of 

 science. But we must not overlook the fact that al- 

 though he announces for the first time the inductive 

 scientific method, he was forced, both by his training 

 and by his lack of data, to derive his laws deduc- 



i^Lasswitz, Geschichtc. der Atomistik, vol, I, p. 61. 



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