118 FROM THE GREEKS TO DARWIN 



mal spirit, and at the same time that the entire 

 animal race forms a single whole. He makes the same 

 discovery among the plants, and finally he sees the 

 animal and plant forms in their unity, and discovers 

 that among all their differences they have sensitive- 

 ness and feeling in common ; from which he concludes 

 that animals and plants are one and the same thing. 



Transition to the Literal Interpretation 

 OF Genesis 



In the middle of the twelfth century was be- 

 gun the translation of the works of the Arabs 

 into Latin. In 1209 the Church Provincial Coun- 

 cil of Paris forbade the study of these Arabic 

 writers and included Aristotle's Natural Phi- 

 losophy in the interdict, although Albertus Mag- 

 nus and Thomas Aquinas endeavored to uphold 

 the orthodoxy of Aristotle against the preju- 

 dices which the heretical glosses of Arabic writ- 

 ers had raised against him. The Church de- 

 nounced as heresy all diversity of opinion and all 

 attempts to revive the evolution idea on the basis 

 of new observation, and great naturalists, even 

 down to the time of Buffon at the close of the 

 eighteenth century, were forced to recant or to 

 revise their publications under very strict censor- 

 ship by the faculties of theology. 



