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await the opportunity, if I have it given me by-and-by, of following 
in his footsteps. 
Mr. W. P. James. — I do not rise for the purpose of criticising Sir 
Edmund Beckett’s paper, which must have been an intellectual treat to 
everybody, not only on account of the ability it displays, and the polished 
irony which pervades it, but also because of the extreme ease with which the 
writer has demolished his opponent. There is one point upon which I 
should particularly like to say a few words, and that is with regard to the 
arrogance with which it is the custom for Haeckel and his school to speak 
of their views as an advance on the old philosophy. I merely wish to show, 
on the contrary, that if we consider the history of philosophy among the 
Greeks, the views of Haeckel and his followers, instead of being an ad- 
vance on those of the ancients, evince a distinct retrogression. Those scientific 
journals which take their cue from this extreme section of Free Thought 
are very fond of speaking of the Argument from Design as if it were 
something quite obsolete, old-fashioned, grandmotherly, and antediluvian. 
In opposition to this doctrine, theories of material development or Monism 
are referred to as an immense advance, as the last expression of the culture 
of the nineteenth century. Now, if we take the course of Greek philosophy 
as a guide, we can see at once that this assertion is the exact opposite of 
the truth ; and Greek philosophy is a very convenient guide for this 
reason, that it had no official connexion with religion ; or, rather, the 
Greek religion was bound up with no theory of creation; so that the 
Greek mind enjoyed the utmost freedom in dealing with all these questions. 
This being so, when we go backwards and trace the whole development 
of Greek philosophy, we see that it began with a series of wild theories 
of evolution, and ended in a sober doctrine of design. The passage from a 
scheme which recognises Purpose in Nature, which contends for design, 
to a monistic or materialistic theory of evolution, is, in fact, a distinct 
retrogression — a going back from the position taken up by Aristotle, 
Plato, and Socrates— to the infantile guesses of Empedocles, Heraclitus, 
Anaximander, and Thales. Such was the historical development of 
thought in Greece where the human intellect could move with the utmost 
conceivable freedom, and where the popular religion had no official doctrine 
about creation. Greek philosophy began, as 1 have said, with theories of 
evolution or development of the wildest and crudest kind — theories setting 
forth that there was in the universe but one original substance, which 
substance was acted on by forces, and produced all the phenomena of 
Nature. Thales held that all had been evolved from water ; Anaximander, 
that the world sprang from the infinite ; Heraclitus, that everything had 
its origin in ethereal fire ; Empedocles, that the universe was the product 
of the four elements, under the influence of two forces — love and hate, or, in 
other words, attraction and repulsion. The first person to bring in the notion 
of intelligence, or, as Aristotle put it, “ to speak like a sober man among the 
drunken,” was Anaxagoras. It is true that Pythagoras, also, had recognised that 
