8 THE EVOLUTION THEORY 



at an early stage of human culture — but as an inalienable part of our 

 own religion. But investigation shows us that the doctrine of 

 evolution is true, and it is only a weak religion which is incapable 

 of adapting itself to the truth, retaining what is essential, and letting 

 go what is unessential and subject to change with the development of 

 the human mind. Even the heliocentric hypothesis was in its day 

 declared false by the Church, and Galilei was forced to retract; but 

 the earth continued to revolve round the sun, and nowadays any one 

 who doubted it would be considered mentally weak or warped. So 

 in all likelihood the time is not far distant when the champions of 

 religion will abandon their profitless struggle against the new truth, 

 and will see that the recognition of a law-governed evolution of the 

 organic world is no more prejudicial to true religion than is the 

 revolution of the earth round the sun. 



Having given this very general orientation of the Evolution 

 problem, which is to engage our attention in detail, I shall approach 

 the problem itself by the historical method, for I do not wish to bring 

 the views of present-day science quite suddenly and directly into 

 prominence. I would rather seek first to illustrate how earlier 

 generations have tried to solve the question of the origin of the 

 living world. We shall see that few attempts at solution were made 

 until quite recently, that is, until the end of the eighteenth and the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century. Only then there appeared a 

 few gifted naturalists with evolutionist ideas, but these ideas did not 

 penetrate far ; and it was not till after the middle of the nineteenth 

 century that they found a new champion, who was to make them 

 common property and a permanent possession of science. It was 

 the teaching of Charles Darwin that brought about this thorough 

 awakening, and laid the foundations of our present interpretations, 

 and his work will therefore engross our attention for a number of 

 lectures. Only after we have made ourselves acquainted with his 

 teaching shall we try to test its foundations, and to see how far this 

 splendid structure stands on a secure basis of fact, and how deeply its 

 power of interpretation penetrates towards the roots of phenomena. 

 We shall examine the forces by which organisms are dominated, and 

 the phenomena produced, and thereby test Darwin's principles of 

 interpretation, in part rejecting them, in part accepting them, though 

 in a much extended form, and thus try to give the whole theoretic 

 structure a more secure foundation. I hope to be able to show 

 that we have made some real progress since Darwin's day, that 



