Evolutionist Philosophers 5 
Aristotle’s views of Nature! seem to have been more definitely 
evolutionist than those of his predecessors, in this sense, at least, that 
he recognised not only. an ascending scale, but a genetic series 
from polyp to man and an age-long movement towards perfection. 
“It is due to the resistance of matter to form that Nature can only 
rise by degrees from lower to higher types.” “Nature produces those 
things which, being continually moved by a certain principle con- 
tained in themselves, arrive at a certain end.” 
To discern the outcrop of evolution-doctrine in the long interval 
between Aristotle and Bacon seems to be very difficult, and some 
of the instances that have been cited strike one as forced. Epicurus 
and Lucretius, often called poets of evolution, both pictured animals 
as arising directly out of the earth, very much as Milton’s lion long 
afterwards pawed its way out. Even when we come to Bruno who 
wrote that “to the sound of the harp of the Universal Apollo (the 
World Spirit), the lower organisms are called by stages to higher, and 
the lower stages are connected by intermediate forms with the higher,” 
there is great room, as Prof. Osborn points out’, for difference of 
opinion as to how far he was an evolutionist in our sense of the 
term. 
The awakening of natural science in the sixteenth century brought 
the possibility of a concrete evolution theory nearer, and in the 
early seventeenth century we find evidences of a new spirit—in the 
embryology of Harvey and the classifications of Ray. Besides sober 
naturalists there were speculative dreamers in the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries who had at least got beyond static formulae, but, as 
Professor Osborn points out’, “it is a very striking fact, that the basis 
of our modern methods of studying the Evolution problem was 
established not by the early naturalists nor by the speculative writers, 
but by the Philosophers.” He refers to Bacon, Descartes, Leibnitz, 
Hume, Kant, Lessing, Herder, and Schelling. “They alone were 
upon the main track of modern thought. It is evident that they 
were groping in the dark for a working theory of the Evolution 
of life, and it is remarkable that they clearly perceived from the 
outset that the point to which observation should be directed was not 
the past but the present mutability of species, and further, that this 
mutability was simply the variation of individuals on an extended 
scale.” 
Bacon seems to have been one of the first to think definitely about 
1 See G. J. Romanes, ‘Aristotle as a Naturalist,” Contemporary Review, Vol. Lx. 
p. 275, 1891; G. Pouchet, La Biologie Aristotélique, Paris, 1885; Bi. Zeller, 4 History 
of Greek Philosophy, London, 1881, and ‘‘ Ueber die griechischen Vorginger Darwin’s,” 
Abhandl. Berlin Akad. 1878, pp. 111—124. 
2 op. cit. p. 81. % op. cit. p. 87. 
