82 EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL PROGRESS 



There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several 

 powers having been originally breathed by the Creator into a 

 few forms or into one; and that, while this planet has gone 

 cycling on according to fixed law of gravity, from so simple 

 a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful 

 have been and are being evolved. 10 



Men like Wallace, Huxley, Asa Gray and 

 Spencer greatly helped to popularize the Dar- 

 winian theory in the English-speaking world. 

 Haeckel, as we have seen, carried it to such ex- 

 tremes that already in 1868 Darwin wrote to 

 him: "Your boldness makes me sometimes trem- 

 ble." And good reason Darwin had for his ap- 

 prehensions. The atheistic theory of the uni- 

 verse, according to which the entire order, beauty 

 and glory of the existing world has arisen out 

 of primal chaos through the accidental survival 

 of the fittest, should be called Haeckelianism and 

 not Darwinism. It was never Darwin's purpose 

 to use his speculations as an attack upon religion, 

 though they might readily lend themselves to this 

 purpose. 



So too the theory with which the name of Dar- 

 win is now most commonly associated in the popu- 

 lar mind, which makes of man in body and soul 

 merely a more highly developed brute, was not 

 originated by Darwin. As Wasmann points out, 

 it was first mentioned in Huxley's "Evidence as 

 to Man's Place in Nature." The same doctrine 



"Charles Darwin, "The Origin of Species," II, pp. 305, 306, 

 same ed. 



