136 The Bible of Nature 



of living creatures, and the history of societary 

 forms, all cases have this in common, that a process 

 of Becoming leads to a new phase of Being. The 

 study of evolution is a study of Werden and Ver- 

 geheri and Weiter-Werden. The general idea of 

 evolution is, that the present is the child of the 

 past and the parent of the future. 



The evolution-idea is probably as old as clear 

 thinking, which we may date from the (unknown) 

 time when man discovered the year — with its 

 marvellous object-lesson of recurrent sequences — 

 and realized that his race had a history. Whatever 

 may have been its origin, the idea — that the pres- 

 ent is the child of a simpler past and the parent of 

 a more complex future — was familiar to several 

 of the ancient Greek philosophers, as it was to 

 Hume and Kant; it fired the imagination of Lu- 

 cretius and linked him to another poet of evolution 

 — Goethe; it persisted, like a latent germ, through 

 the centuries of other than scientific preoccupa- 

 tion; it was made actual by the pioneers of mod- 

 ern aetiology — men like Buffon, Lamarck, Eras- 

 mus Darwin, Treviranus, and Etienne Geoffroy 

 St. Hilaire — and it became current intellectual 

 coin when Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, 

 Herbert Spencer, Haeckel, and Huxley, with 

 united but varied achievements, won the convic- 

 tion of the majority of thoughtful men. Since 

 this achievement the fact of organic-evolution has 



