CHARLES DARWIN. ^^'^ 



which Galileo revealed were hostile to religion, might have brought 

 on him a similar fate, had he not, after imprisonment and under 

 threat of torture, in his seventieth year, publicly recanted before 

 the Inquisition, abjuring " the error and the heresy of the 

 movement of the earth," though convinced that it did move. 

 Kepler then disproved the Aristotelian doctrine of the movement 

 of the heavenly bodies in perfect circles, and gave to the world 

 the three astronomical laws which bear his name, for which he 

 too was persecuted and imprisoned. And yet he was so much 

 impressed with the sublimity of the laws which he discovered, that 

 he exclaimed: " I do think the thoughts of God." 



Now all this is changed. Our earth is universally acknowledged 

 to be but one of several planets revolving in ellipses around one of 

 many suns. iN'ewton, by showing that every particle of matter 

 attracts every other particle directly as the mass and inversely as 

 the square of the distance, proved the general accuracy of the 

 propositions of Copernicus and corrected errors in his application of 

 them, and also assigned a physical cause to Kepler's empirical laws. 



And yet not entirely changed. The battle between reason and 

 prejudice still continues, but it is fought on another field ; it is 

 fought over the grandest scientific conception of modern times, — 

 the conception of progressive development. 



It is not many years since the belief was almost universal that 

 the whole visible universe was created in its present state out of 

 nothing in a brief period of time ; that every species of animal and 

 plant was independently created in its existing form ; and that 

 everything extraneous to our globe was created expressly for its 

 benefit, and everything on our globe expressly for the benefit of 

 man. These ideas must have been formed at a very early age, 

 when the earth was believed to be the centre of the universe, 

 immovable, and inhabited only " on the top," and when the planets 

 were thought to be guided in their seemingly erratic course by 

 angels. They accord with a literal interpretation of the biblical 

 account of the creation ; and they appear to pay a flattering tribute 

 to the dignity of man. They are deeply-rooted and prejudiced 

 ideas with which science finds it hard to contend. The persistence 

 of the belief in the immutability of species is also due in part to 

 the fact that it is apparently borne out by our experience. To 

 those who have not made a special study of any department of 

 botany, zoology, or palaeontology, every species seems to be distinct, 

 one never appearing to pass imperceptibly into another ; nor can we 

 detect progressive change in any living thing in its natural or wild 

 state, although we have modified to a considerable extent, and still 



