CHAPTER I 



INTRODUCTION 



WHAT ORGANIC EVOLUTION IS — DEFINITIONS 



The following selections are representative both of the older and 

 of the newer attitudes of thinkers on the subject of organic evolution. 

 The earlier writers were greatly impressed with the sublimity of the 

 idea and found it in full accord with their religious faith. The later 

 writers are less awed by the vastness of the process and hence adopt 

 a more completely materialistic attitude. It is not necessary, how- 

 ever, to discard one's religious beliefs in order to adopt a scientific 

 attitude toward the problems of organic evolution.' These points of 

 view are well expressed in the following quotations. 



"The world has been evolved, not created; it has arisen little by 

 little from a small beginning, and has increased through the activity 

 of the elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather grown than 

 suddenly come into being at an almighty word. What a sublime idea 

 of the infinite might of the great Architect! the Cause of all causes, 

 the Father of all fathers, the Ens entiumi For if we could compare 

 the Infinite it would surely require a greater Infinite to cause the 

 causes of effects than to produce the effects themselves. . 



"All that happens in the world depends on the forces that prevail 

 in it, and results according to law; but where these forces and their 

 substratum, Matter, come from, we know not, and here we have room 

 for faith. " — Erasmus Darwin,^ as interpreted by Weismann. 



"When I first came to the notion, .... of a succession of extinc- 

 tion of species, and creation of new ones, going on perpetually now, and 

 through an indefinite period of the past, and to continue for ages to 

 come, all in accommodation to the changes which must continue in the 

 inanimate and habitable earth, the idea struck me as the grandest 

 which I had ever conceived, so far as regards the attributes of the 

 Presiding Mind. "—From a letter of Sir Charles Lyell to Sir John 

 Herschel, 1836. 



' See Joseph Le Conte, Relation oj Evolution to Materialism, chap. iii. 



' From R. S. Lull, Organic Evolution (The Macmillan Company. Reprinted 

 by permission). 



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