34 EVOLUTION 



Latin language did indeed hit out for himself a very good 

 rough working sketch of a sort of nebulous and shapeless 

 evolutionism. It was bold, it was consistent, for its time it 

 was wonderful. But Lucretius's philosophy, like all the 

 philosophies of the older world, was a mere speculative idea, 

 a fancy picture of the development of things, not dependent 

 upon observation of facts at all, but wholly evolved, like the 

 German thinker's camel, out of its author's own pregnant 

 inner consciousness. The Roman poet would no doubt 

 have built an excellent superstructure if he had only 

 possessed a little straw to make his bricks of. As it was, 

 however, scientific brick-making being still in its infancy, 

 he could only construct in a day a shadowy Aladdin's palace 

 of pure fanciful Epicurean phantasms, an imaginary world 

 of imaginary atoms, fortuitously concurring out of void 

 chaos into an orderly universe, as though by miracle. It is 

 not thus that systems arise which regenerate the thought 

 of humanity ; he who would build for all time must make 

 sure first of a solid foundation, and then use sound bricks 

 in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation. 



It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea 

 really began to take form and shape in the separate con- 

 ceptions of Kant, Laplace, Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. 

 These were the true founders of our modern evolutionism. 

 Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who 

 led the chosen people into the land which more than one 

 venturous Moses had already dimly descried afar off from 

 the Pisgah top of the eighteenth century. 



Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy 

 comes first in logical order. Stars and suns, and planets 

 and satellites, necessarily precede in development plants 

 and animals. You can have no cabbages without a world 

 to grow them in. The science of the stars was therefore 

 reduced to comparative system and order, while the sciences 



