8 TEE WHENCE AND THE WHITHER OF MAN 



embryo or principium. Plato's world was a ' zoon,' a 

 liTing thing, a natural production." 



Furthermore, to the ancient writers of the Bible the 

 idea of origin by birth from some antecedent form — 

 and this is the essential idea of evolution — was per- 

 fectly natural. They speak of the " generations of the 

 heavens and the earth " as of the " generations " of the 

 patriarchs. The first book of the Bible is still called 

 Genesis, the book of births. The writer of the nine- 

 tieth Psalm says, " Before the mountains were bom, or 

 ever thou hadst brought to birth the earth and the 

 world." And what satisfactory meaning can you give to 

 the words, " Let the earth bring forth," and " the earth 

 brought forth," in immediate proximity to the words, 

 " and God made," imless while the ultimate source was 

 God's creative power, the immediate process of forma- 

 tion was one of evolution. 



The Bible is big and broad enough to include both 

 ideas, the human mind is prone to overestimate the 

 one or the other. Traces, at least, of a similar mode of 

 thought persisted by the Greek Fathers of the Church, 

 and disappeared, if ever, with the predominance of 

 Latin theology. To the oriental the idea of evolution 

 is natural. The earth is to him no inert, resistant 

 clod ; she brings forth of herself. 



But our ancestors lived on a barren soil beneath a 

 forbidding sky. They were frozen in winter and 

 parched in summer. Nature was to them no kind foster- 

 mother, but a cruel stepmother, training them by stem 

 discipline to battle with her and the world. They 

 peopled the earth with gnomes and cobolds and gi- 

 ants, and their nymphs were the Valkyre. Their God 

 was Thor, of the thunderbolt and hammer, and who 



