CHAPTER I 
INTRODUCTION 
WHAT ORGANIC EVOLUTION IS—-DEFINITIONS 
[The following selections are representative both of the older and 
of the newer attitudes of thinkers on the subject of organic evolution. 
The earlier writers were greatly impressed with the sublimity of the 
idea and found it in full accord with their religious faith. The later 
writers are less awed by the vastness of the process and hence adopt 
a more completely materialistic attitude. It is not necessary, how- 
ever, to discard one’s religious beliefs in order to adopt a scientific 
attitude toward the problems of organic evolution.t These points of 
view are well expressed in the following quotations.—Eb.] 
“The world has been evolved, not created; it has arisen little by 
little from a small beginning, and has increased through the activity: 
of the elemental forces embodied in itself, and so has rather grown than 
suddenly come into being at an almighty word. What a sublime idea 
of the infinite might of the great Architect! the Cause of all causes, 
the Father of all fathers, the Ens entium! For if we could compare 
the Infinite it would surely require a greater Infinite to cause the 
causes of effects than to produce the effects themselves. 
“All that happens in the world depends on the forces that prevail 
in it, and results according to law; but where these forces and their 
substratum, Matter, come from, we know not, and here we have room 
for faith.”—Erasmus Darwin,’ as interpreted by Weismann. 
‘‘When I first came to the notion, . . . . of asuccession of extinc- 
tion of species, and creation of new ones, going on perpetually now, and 
through an indefinite period of the past, and to continue for ages to 
come, all in accommodation to the changes which must continue in the 
inanimate and habitable earth, the idea struck me as the grandest 
which I had ever conceived, so far as regards the attributes of the 
Presiding Mind.’’-—From a letter of Sir Charles Lyell to Sir John 
Herschel, 1836. 
1 See Joseph Le Conte, Relation of Evolution to Materialism, chap. iii. 
2 From R. S. Lull, Organic Evolution (The Macmillan Company. Reprinted 
by permission). 
