EVOLUTION THE MASTER-KEY 



from all eternity or since a supposed creation, 

 "unbroken and unworn," as Clerk-Maxwell said, 

 then evolution is a myth or a half-truth. Spencer, 

 of course, could not accept this view, and reject- 

 ed it in First Principles, but, unfortunately, he has 

 given us no prophetic discussion of this matter. 

 The reader is aware that radium and radio-activity 

 have demonstrated the action of evolution in this 

 sphere also, "atomic evolution" having become, 

 within the past year or two, a familiar phrase. 



But for the first assertion of this now demon- 

 strated truth we must go back a great deal further 

 than Herbert Spencer back almost to the in- 

 ception of the atomic theory. It was Empedocles, 

 the most brilliant pupil of Democritus, the first 

 atomist, who first asserted a belief in atomic evolu- 

 tion and who correctly described its chief mode of 

 action. Much nonsense is talked about the ex- 

 traordinary coincidence that Darwin and Wallace 

 should each have expressed, almost simultaneously 

 though Darwin was really first the idea which 

 Spencer called the "survival of the fittest." But 

 not only had Spencer already enunciated the same 

 truth of societies, and Hay and Wells of organisms, 

 the latter as far back as 1813, but Empedocles had 

 actually asserted it of atoms themselves more than 

 two thousand years before. Those atomic forms 

 would survive, he declared, that were most accu- 

 rately fitted for the conditions, or " adapted to the 

 environment," as Spencer would say. Now, if we 

 turn from this almost -forgotten Greek to the latest 

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