78 THE RIDDLE OF THE UNIVERSE. 



all these phenomena — indeed, for all phenomena both 

 in nature and in the mind — Lamarck takes exclusively 

 mechanical, physical, and chemical activities to be the 

 true efficient causes. His magnificent Philosophic Zoo- 

 logique contains all the elements of a purely monistic 

 system of nature on the basis of evolution. I have 

 fully treated these achievements of Lamarck in the 

 fourth chapter of my Anthropogeny, and in the fourth 

 chapter of the Natural History of Creation. 



Science had now to wait until this great effort to 

 give a scientific foundation to the theory of evolution 

 should shatter the dominant myth of a " specific 

 creation, and open out the path of natural '" develop- 

 ment. In this respect Lamarck was not more success- 

 ful in resisting the conservative authority of his great 

 opponent, Cuvier, than was his colleague and sympa- 

 thiser, Geoffroy St. Hilaire, twenty years later. The 

 famous controversies which he had with Cuvier in the 

 Parisian Academy in 1880 ended with the complete 

 triumph of the latter. I have elsewhere fully described 

 these conflicts, in which Goethe took so lively an 

 interest. The great expansion which the study of 

 biology experienced at that time, the abundance of 

 interesting discoveries in comparative anatomy and 

 physiology, the establishment of the cellular theory, 

 and the progress of ontogeny, gave zoologists and 

 botanists so overwhelming a flood of welcome material 

 to deal with that the difficult and obscure question of 

 the origin of species was easily forgotten for a time. 

 People rested content with the old dogma of creation. 

 Even when Charles Lyell refuted Cuvier's extra- 

 ordinary "catastrophic theory" in his Principles of 

 Geology > in 1830, and vindicated a natural, continuous 

 evolution for the inorganic structure of our planet, his 



