THE ORIGIN OF MAN 195 



thought had he seen the gills in the human 

 embryo ! Still more precisely, and with an 

 apparent prescience of the modern doctrine of cor- 

 puscles, Anaxagoras declared : " Together were all 

 things infinite in number and smallness ; nothing 

 was distinguishable. Before they were sorted, 

 while all was together, there was no quality notice- 

 able." The Arabic and Jewish philosophers of 

 the Middle Ages — Avempace, Abubacer, Maimon- 

 ides — also believed in the evolution of the organic 

 from the inorganic. 



And we find that the bravest minds of more 

 modern times discerned and preached the divinity 

 of matter. The brave Bruno, who was burned at 

 the stake for asserting the horrible heresy that the 

 earth went round the sun, declared that matter 

 was not " that mere empty capacity which philoso- 

 phers have pictured her to be, but the universal 

 mother who brings forth all things as the fruit of 

 her own womb." And Newton, penetrating more 

 deeply into the mystery of matter, saw the possi- 

 bilities of the atom, and wrote in his Principia : — 



" Many circumstances lead me to suspect that 

 all the phenomena (of Nature) may depend upon 

 certain forces, in virtue of which the particles of 

 bodies, by causes not yet known, are mutually 

 repelled against one another, and cohere into 

 regular figures, and recede from each other, which 



