et Imbecillitate Darwiniana. 69 



mathematically certain, by the nature of 

 things (which forbids any heated combi- 

 nation of dements in colder surroundings 

 to remain in the same condition, but com- 

 pels it to change), that the past was, not like 

 the present, but wholly unlike it. For the 

 earth, though not, as the old Stoics thought, 

 an animal, yet resembles an animal in pos- 

 sessing a quasi-organic existence, a begin- 

 ning, and a fated end determined by the 

 beginning, and a period of ordered passage, 

 through change after change, from one to the 

 other. This is the true evolutionary view, 

 discovered as a philosophical principle by 

 Aristotle : and to ignore it is to stumble on 

 the threshold, which is just what Darwin 

 did. Darwin belongs to the pre- Aristotelian 

 period : he attempts to explain, without un- 

 derstanding the philosophy of origination, 

 like the early Greek philosophers. He mis- 

 understood the potentiality of the geological 



