40 AMONG THE GREEKS. 



I 



of the Fittest, or of Natural Selection. And the 

 absolute proof that Empedocles' crude hypothesis ^ 

 embodied this world famous thought, is found in 

 passages in Aristotle's Physics, in which he refers 

 to Empedocles as having first shown the possibility 

 of the origin of the fittest forms of life through 

 chance rather than through Design. With Empe- 

 docles himself, however, it was no more than the 

 potential germ of suggestion, which, in the brilliant 

 mind of Aristotle, was stated precisely in its modern 

 form, as we shall see later in our study of Aristotle. 



Lange attributes to Democritus a similar inter- 

 pretation of Empedocles' teaching, namely, the 

 " attainment of adaptations through the infinitely 

 repeated play of production and annihilation, in 

 which finally that alone survives which bears the 

 guarantee of persistence through its relatively 

 fortuitous constitution." But Zeller takes a more 

 conservative and sounder view of the real meaning 

 of this old philosopher of Agrigentum. He says 

 this could not have been advanced by Empedocles 

 as an explanation of Design in Nature, because 

 this idea had not yet been formulated in the 

 Greek mind. 



Empedocles was an evolutionist only in so far 

 as he taught the gradual substitution of the less by 

 the more perfect forms of life. He had a dim 

 adumbration of the truth. There is no glimmer- 

 ing of slow development through the successive 

 modification of lower into higher forms. His 



