EARLY VIEWS 45 



II 



As a speculative conjecture the idea of a development 

 of the world out of primordial matter is as ancient as is 

 human philosophy.^ Christianity has enriched human 

 thought with the doctrine of the creation of matter 

 by the will of God, and teaches the doctrine of divine 

 immanence and of sovereign control by God of the 

 course of nature. But the evolutionary form of thought 

 was not prejudiced by the pubHcation of these truths. 

 On the contrary, the narrative of creation in Genesis, 

 and the progressive nature of God's self-manifestation 

 as recorded in the Scriptures, were commented on by 

 certain patristic writers in terms that were favourable 

 to evolutionary conceptions of history, whether nat- 

 ural or spiritual. Mediaeval realists, starting with 

 the doctrine of an original creation of matter ex nihilo, 

 described its differentiation by an individualizing prin- 

 ciple into specific forms in terms suggestive of evolu- 

 tion. This appears especially in Duns Scotus, who 

 used the figure of a growing tree to illustrate his con- 

 ception. Descartes was governed by the evolutionary 

 conception of the universe, and Hume considered that 

 generation and growth were preferable to the notion of 



1 For the history of evolutionary theories both monistic and 

 organic, see R. H. Lock, Recent Progress, chh. ii, iii; H. F. Osborn, 

 From the Greeks to Darwin; Ewd. Clodd, Pioneers of Evolution from 

 Tholes to Huxley; A. R. Wallace, Darwinism, ch. i; A. Weismann, 

 Evolution Theory, chh. i, ii; Chas. Darwin, Origin of Species (6th 

 ed.), pp. xiii-xxvi; Thos. Huxley, Darwiniana, pp. 204-239; Jas. 

 Sully, in Encyc. Brit., 9th ed., s. v. "Evolution." 



