II EVOLUTION AND ETHICS 69 



which refuses any efficacy to prayer and sacrifice ; 

 which bids men look to nothing but their own 

 efforts for salvation ; which, in its original purity, 

 knew nothing of vows of obedience, abhorred in- 

 tolerance, and never sought the aid of the secular 

 arm ; yet spread over a considerable moiety of the 

 Old World with marvellous rapidity, and is still, 

 with whatever base admixture of foreign super- 

 stitions, the dominant creed of a large fraction of 

 mankind. 



Let us now set our faces westwards, towards 

 Asia Minor and Greece and Italy, to view the rise 

 and progress of another philosophy, apparently 

 independent, but no less pervaded by the concep- 

 tion of evolution.^^ 



The sages of Miletus were pronounced evolu- 

 tionists ; and, however dark may be some of the 

 sayings of Heracleitus of Ephesus, who was prob- 

 ably a contemporary of Gautama, no better ex- 

 pressions of the essence of the modern doctrine 

 of evolution can be found than are presented by 

 some of his pithy aphorisms and striking meta- 

 phors.^2 Indeed, many of my present auditors 

 must have observed that, more than once, I have 

 borrowed from him in the brief exposition of the 

 theory of evolution with which this discourse 

 commenced. 



But when the focus of Greek intellectual activity 

 shifted to Athens, the leading minds concentrated 



