136 The Bible of Nature 



of living creatures, and the history of societary 

 forms, all cases have this in common, that a process 

 of Becoming leads to a new phase of Being. The 

 study of evolution is a study of Werden and Ver- 

 gehen and Weiter-Werden. The general idea of 

 evolution is, that the present is the child of the 

 past and the parent of the future. 



The evolution-idea is probably as old as clear 

 thinking, which we may date from the (unknown) 

 time when man discovered the year with its 

 marvellous object-lesson of recurrent sequences 

 and realized that his race had a history. Whatever 

 may have been its origin, the idea that the pres- 

 ent is the child of a simpler past and the parent of 

 a more complex future was familiar to several 

 of the ancient Greek philosophers, as it was to 

 Hume and Kant; it fired the imagination of Lu- 

 cretius and linked him to another poet of evolution 

 Goethe; it persisted, like a latent germ, through 

 the centuries of other than scientific preoccupa- 

 tion; it was made actual by the pioneers of mod- 

 ern aetiology men like Buffon, Lamarck, Eras- 

 mus Darwin, Treviranus, and Etienne Geoffroy 

 St. Hilaire and it became current intellectual 

 coin when Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace, 

 Herbert Spencer, Haeckel, and Huxley, with 

 united but varied achievements, won the convic- 

 tion of the majority of thoughtful men. Since 

 this achievement the fact of organic-evolution has 



