EIGHTEENTH CENTURY EVOLUTIONISTS 217 



them, to have lost the power of production, rather 

 than to have attained all the objects of their desire. 



This critique, together with an article upon 

 ''Cause and Effect," won for Doctor Brown the 

 professorship of moral philosophy in the Univer- 

 sity of Edinburgh. We see, therefore, in Great 

 Britain, as in France, that the adherents of the 

 evolution idea found the spirit of the universities 

 strongly hostile. As we pass from man to man in 

 these outlines of the evolution idea, selecting cer- 

 tain paragraphs and ignoring all the contempo- 

 rary literature, we must not lose sight of the fact 

 that the major weight of scientific as well as the- 

 ologic opinion was, throughout all this period, 

 upon the side of Special Creation. For one argu- 

 ment like Erasmus Darwin's upon the side of 

 gradual development, there were hundreds upon 

 the side of the sudden creation of species. 



Nevertheless we may attribute to Erasmus 

 Darwin, under the influence of David Hume, a 

 full conception of the idea of Evolution as op- 

 posed to Special Creation in the divine order of 

 the universe :^ 



The late Mr. David Hume . . . concludes that 

 the world itself might have been generated, rather 

 than created; that is, it might have been gradually 

 produced from very small beginnings, increasing by 



^Zoonomia, xxxix, IV, 8. 



