POST-ARISTOTELIANS. 57 



These passages seem to contain absolute evi- 

 dence that Aristotle had substantially the modern 

 conception of the Evolution of life, from a primor- 

 dial, soft mass of living matter to the most perfect 

 forms, and that even in these he believed Evolu- 

 tion was incomplete for they were progressing to 

 higher forms. His argument of the analogy be- 

 tween the operation of natural law, rather than of 

 chance, in the lifeless and in the living world, is a 

 perfectly logical one, and his consequent rejection 

 of the hypothesis of the Survival of the Fittest, a 

 sound induction from his own limited knowledge 

 of Nature. It seems perfectly clear that he placed 

 ^ jS) under secondary natural laws. If he had ac- 

 ' ^ xcepted Empedocles' hypothesis, he would have 

 ^^^jl/^ been the literal prophet of Darwinism. 



The Post- Aristotelians. 



Thus, in this great natural philosopher, we reach 

 the highest level attained by the Greeks, and we 

 now pass to a rapid decline in Greek productive- 

 ness until its final extinction. We notice a marked 

 chasm between his theistic, or dualistic, teaching 

 and the sceptical, or rather agnostic, and, to a cer- 

 tain extent, monis';ic, teaching of Epicurus. This 

 gap widened. The materialistic and agnostic ten- 

 dency of Empedocles, Democritus, and Epicurus 

 was revived by Lucretius, and culminated in him 

 for the time. The theistic tendency of Aristotle 



