EVOLUTION AND SOCIETY 



still, in some unknown way, leaves us freedom of 

 choice. For how else can we account for Huxley's 

 bitter condemnation of us for not accepting his doc- 

 trines? How else can we account for Haeckel's rage 

 against the popes and the Christian inquisition which 

 burnt the "great Dominican friar, Giordano Bruno" 

 who was himself a monist, or account for his con- 

 tempt of the early Christian and mediaeval eras be- 

 cause they neglected science although they were 

 changing the civilization of the world and prepar- 

 ing, after the debacle of the Roman Empire, for the 

 Renaissance; a contempt so great that he dismisses 

 this whole period of history with only a curt notice 

 of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas'? If man is 

 but an aggregation of material atoms subject to me- 

 chanical forces he is surely but a part of an inexor- 

 able machine; his actions and his thoughts are but the 

 consequence of former actions of molecules, such a 

 power as free-will or the ability to choose what we 

 shall do has no place in this scheme. One might as 

 well expect a stone to rise up suddenly from the earth 

 as to suppose that those atoms, called St. Simon 

 Stylites, could get down from their pillar and begin 

 the study of evolution, or that the pope and the in- 

 quisition could consecrate Bruno instead of burning 

 him. If the pope who condemned Bruno and the fire 

 which burned him; if the "distinction which has been 

 made between animate and inanim.ate bodies does 7iot 

 exist" as Haeckel states, then why is the pope dif- 



C 339 3 



