Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley Part 1

Pioneers of Evolution from Thales to Huxley.

by Edward Clodd.

PREFACE.

This book needs only brief introduction. It attempts to tell the story of the origin of the Evolution idea in Ionia, and, after long arrest, of the revival of that idea in modern times, when its profound and permanent influence on thought in all directions, and, therefore, on human relations and conduct, is apparent.

Between birth and revival there were the centuries of suspended animation, when the nepenthe of dogma drugged the reason; the Church teaching, and the laity mechanically accepting, the sufficiency of the Scriptures and of the General Councils to decide on matters which lie outside the domain of both. Hence the necessity for particularizing the causes which actively arrested advance in knowledge for sixteen hundred years.

In indicating the parts severally played in the Renascence of Evolution by a small group of ill.u.s.trious men, the writer, through the courtesy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, has been permitted to see the original doc.u.ments which show that the theory of Evolution as a whole; i. e., as dealing with the non-living, as well as with the living, contents of the Universe, was formulated by Mr. Spencer in the year preceding the publication of the Origin of Species.

ROSEMONT, TUFNELL PARK, LONDON, N., _14th December, 1896_.

_PART I._

PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION FROM THALES TO LUCRETIUS.

B. C. 600-A. D. 50.

"These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them."--HEBREWS xi. 13.

"One event is always the son of another, and we must never forget the parentage," said a Bechuana chief to Casalis the missionary. The barbarian philosopher spoke wiser than he knew, for in his words lay that doctrine of continuity and unity which is the creed of modern science. They are a suitable text to the discourse of this chapter, the design of which is to bring out what the brilliancy of present-day discoveries tends to throw into shadow, namely, the antiquity of the ideas of which those discoveries are the result. Although the Theory of Evolution, as we define it, is new, the speculations which made it possible are, at least, twenty-five centuries old. Indeed, it is not practicable, since the remote past yields no doc.u.ments, to fix their beginnings. Moreover, charged, as they are, with many crudities, they are not detachable from the barbaric conceptions of the Universe which are the philosophies of past, and the legends of present, times.

Fontenelle, a writer of the last century, shrewdly remarked that "all nations made the astounding part of their myths while they were savage, and retained them from custom and religious conservatism." For, as Walter Bagehot argues in his brilliant little book on Physics and Politics, and as all anthropological research goes to prove, the lower races are non-progressive both through fear and instinct. And the majority of the members of higher races have not escaped from the operation of the same causes. Hence the persistence of coa.r.s.e and grotesque elements in speculations wherein man has made gradual approach to the truth of things; hence, too--the like phenomena having to be interpreted--the similarity of the explanation of them. And as primitive myth embodies primitive theology, primitive morals, and primitive science, the history of beliefs shows how few there be who have escaped from the tyranny of that authority and sanct.i.ty with which the lapse of time invests old ideas.

Dissatisfaction is a necessary condition of progress; and dissatisfaction involves opposition. As Grant Allen puts it, in one of his most felicitous poems:

If systems that be are the order of G.o.d, Revolt is a part of the order.

Hence a stage in the history of certain peoples when, in questioning what is commonly accepted, intellectual freedom is born. Such a stage was markedly reached whenever, for example, an individual here and there challenged the current belief about the beginnings and nature of things, beliefs held because they were taught, not because their correspondence with fact had been examined.

A pioneer (French, _pionnier_; Italian, _pedone_; from Latin _pedes_) is, literally, a foot-soldier; one who goes before an army to clear the road of obstructions. Hence the application of the term to men who are in the van of any new movement; hence its special fitness in the present connection, as designating men whose speculations cut a pathway through jungles of myth and legend to the realities of things. The Pioneers of Evolution--the first on record to doubt the truth of the theory of special creation, whether as the work of departmental G.o.ds or of one Supreme Deity, matters not--lived in Greece about the time already mentioned; six centuries before Christ. Not in the early stages of the Evolution idea, in the Greece limited, as now, to a rugged peninsula in the southeastern corner of Europe and to the surrounding islands, but in the Greece which then included Ionia, on the opposite seaboard of Asia Minor.

From times beyond memory or record, the islands of the aegean had been the nurseries of culture and adventure. Thence the maritime inhabitants had spread themselves both east and west, feeding the spirit of inquiry, and imbibing influences from older civilizations, notably of Egypt and Chaldaea. But, mix as they might with other peoples, the Greeks never lost their own strongly marked individuality, and, in imparting what they had acquired or discovered to younger peoples, that is, younger in culture, they stamped it with an impress all their own.

At the later period with which we are dealing, refugees from the Peloponnesus, who would not submit to the Dorian yoke, had been long settled in Ionia. To what extent they had been influenced by contact with their neighbours is a question which, even were it easy to answer, need not occupy us here. Certain it is that trade and travel had widened their intellectual horizon, and although India lay too remote to touch them closely (if that incurious, dreamy East had touched them, it would have taught them nothing), there was Babylonia with her star-watchers, and Egypt with her land-surveyors. From the one, these Ionians probably gained knowledge of certain periodic movements of some of the heavenly bodies; and from the other, a few rules of mensuration, perchance a little crude science. But this is conjecture. For all the rest that she evolved, and with which she enriched the world, ancient Greece is in debt to none.

While the Oriental shrunk from quest after causes, looking, as Professor Butcher aptly remarks in his Aspects of the Greek Genius, on "each fresh gain of earth as so much robbery of heaven," the Greek eagerly sought for the law governing the facts around him. And in Ionia was born the idea foreign to the East, but which has become the starting-point of all subsequent scientific inquiry--the idea that Nature works by fixed laws.

Sir Henry Maine said that "except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves which is not Greek in its origin," and we feel how hard it is to avoid exaggeration when speaking of the heritage bequeathed by Greece as the giver of every fruitful, quickening idea which has developed human faculty on all sides, and enriched every province of life. Amid serious defects of character, as craftiness, avariciousness, and unscrupulousness, the Greeks had the redeeming grace of pursuit after knowledge which naught could baffle (Plato, Republic, vol. iv, p. 435), and that healthy outlook on things which saved them from morbid introspection. There arose among them no Simeon Stylites to mount his profitless pillar; no filth-ingrained fakir to waste life in contemplating the tip of his nose; no schoolman to idly speculate how many angels could dance upon a needle's point; or to debate such fatuous questions as the language which the saints in heaven will speak after the Last Judgment.

In his excellent and cautious survey of Early Greek Philosophy, which we mainly follow in this section, Professor Burnet says that the real advance made by the Ionians was through their "leaving off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was when as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what all things really are now."

For the early notions of the Greeks about nature, being an inheritance from their barbaric ancestors, were embodied in myths and legends bearing strong resemblance to those found among the uncivilized tribes of Polynesia and elsewhere in our day. For example, the old nature-myth of Cronus separating heaven and earth by the mutilation of Ura.n.u.s occurs among Chinese, j.a.panese, and Maoris, and among the ancient Hindus and Egyptians.

The earliest school of scientific speculation was at Miletus, the most flourishing city of Ionia. Thales, whose name heads the list of the "Seven Sages," was its founder. As with other noted philosophers of this and later periods, neither the exact date of his birth nor of his death are known, but the sixth century before Christ may be held to cover the period when he "flourished."

That "nothing comes into being out of nothing, and that nothing pa.s.ses away into nothing," was the conviction with which he and those who followed him started on their quest. All around was change; everything always becoming something else; "all in motion like streams." There must be that which is the vehicle of all the changes, and of all the motions which produce them. _What_, therefore, was this permanent and primary substance? in other words, of what is the world made? And Thales, perhaps through observing that it could become vaporous, liquid, and solid in turn; perhaps--if, as tradition records, he visited Egypt--through watching the wonder-working, life-giving Nile; perhaps as doubtless sharing the current belief in an ocean-washed earth, said that the primary substance was WATER. Anaximander, his friend and pupil, disagreeing with what seemed to him a too concrete answer, argued, in more abstract fashion, that "the material cause and first element of things was the Infinite." This material cause, which he was the first thus to name, "is neither water nor any other of what are now called the _elements_" (we quote from Theophrastus, the famous pupil of Aristotle, born at Eresus in Lesbos, 371 B. C.). Perhaps, following Professor Burnet's able guidance through the complexities of definitions, the term BOUNDLESS best expresses the "one eternal, indestructible substance out of which everything arises, and into which everything once more returns"; in other words, the exhaustless stock of matter from which the waste of existence is being continually made good.

Anaximander was the first to a.s.sert the origin of life from the non-living, i. e., "the moist element as it was evaporated by the sun,"

and to speak of man as "like another animal, namely, a fish, in the beginning." This looks well-nigh akin to prevision of the mutability of species, and of what modern biology has proved concerning the marine ancestry of the highest animals, although it is one of many ancient speculations as to the origin of life in slimy matter. And when Anaximander adds that "while other animals quickly find food for themselves, man alone requires a prolonged period of suckling," he antic.i.p.ates the modern explanation of the origin of the rudimentary family through the development of the social instincts and affections.

The lengthening of the period of infancy involves dependence on the parents, and evolves the sympathy which lies at the base of social relations. (Cf. Fiske's Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, vol. ii, pp. 344, 360.)

In dealing with speculations so remote, we have to guard against reading modern meanings into writings produced in ages whose limitations of knowledge were serious, and whose temper and standpoint are wholly alien to our own. For example, shrewd as are some of the guesses made by Anaximander, we find him describing the sun as "a ring twenty-eight times the size of the earth, like a cartwheel with the felloe hollow and full of fire, showing the fire at a certain point, as if through the nozzle of a pair of bellows." And if he made some approach to truer ideas of the earth's shape as "convex and round," the world of his day, as in the days of Homer, thought of it as flat and as floating on the all-surrounding water. The Ionian philosophers lacked not insight, but the scientific method of starting with working hypotheses, or of observation before theory, was as yet unborn.

In this brief survey of the subject there will be no advantage in detailing the various speculations which followed on the heels of those of Thales and Anaximander, since these varied only in non-essentials; or, like that of Pythagoras and his school, which Zeller regards as the outcome of the teachings of Anaximander, were purely abstract and fanciful. As is well known, the Pythagoreans, whose philosophy was ethical as well as cosmical, held that all things are made of numbers, each of which they believed had its special character and property. A belief in such symbols as ent.i.ties seems impossible to us, but its existence in early thought is conceivable when, as Aristotle says, they were "not separated from the objects of sense." Even in the present day, among the eccentric people who still believe in the modern sham agnosticism, known as theosophy, and in astrology, we find the delusion that numbers possess inherent magic or mystic virtues. So far as the ancients are concerned, "consider," as Mr. Benn remarks in his Greek Philosophers (vol. i, p. 12), "the lively emotions excited at a time when multiplication and division, squaring and cubing, the rule of three, the construction and equivalence of figures, with all their manifold applications to industry, commerce, fine arts, and tactics, were just as strange and wonderful as electrical phenomena are to us ...

and we shall cease to wonder that a mere form of thought, a lifeless abstraction, should once have been regarded as the solution of every problem; the cause of all existence; or that these speculations were more than once revived in after ages."

Xenophanes of Colophon, one of the twelve Ionian cities of Asia Minor, deserves, however, a pa.s.sing reference. He, with Parmenides and Zeno, are the chief representatives of the Eleatic school, so named from the city in southwestern Italy where a Greek colony had settled. The tendency of that school was toward metaphysical theories. He was the first known observer to detect the value of fossils as evidences of the action of water, but his chief claim to notice rests on the fact that, pa.s.sing beyond the purely physical speculations of the Ionian school, he denied the idea of a primary substance, and theorized about the nature and actions of superhuman beings. Living at a time when there was a revival of old and gross superst.i.tions to which the vulgar had recourse when fears of invasions arose, he dared to attack the old and persistent ideas about the G.o.ds, as in the following sentences from the fragments of his writings:

"Homer and Hesiod have ascribed to the G.o.ds all things that are a shame and a disgrace among men, theft and adulteries and deception of one another."

"There never was nor will be a man who has clear certainty as to what I say about the G.o.ds and about all things; for even if he does chance to say what is right, yet he himself does not know that it is so. But all are free to guess."

"Mortals think that the G.o.ds were born as they are, and have senses and a voice and body like their own. So the Ethiopians make their G.o.ds black and snub-nosed; the Thracians give theirs red hair and blue eyes."

"There is one G.o.d, the greatest among G.o.ds and men, unlike mortals both in mind and body."

Had such heresies been spoken in Athens, where the effects of a religious revival were still in force, the "secular arm" of the archons would probably have made short work of Xenophanes. But in Elea, or in whatever other colony he may have lived, "the G.o.ds were left to take care of themselves."

Greater than the philosophers yet named is Herac.l.i.tus of Ephesus, nicknamed "the dark," from the obscurity of his style. His original writings have shared the fate of most doc.u.ments of antiquity, and exist, like many of these, only in fragments preserved in the works of other authors. Many of his aphorisms are indeed dark sayings, but those that yield their meaning are full of truth and suggestiveness. As for example:

"The eyes are more exact witnesses than the ears."

"You will not find out the boundaries of soul by travelling in any direction."

"Man is kindled and put out like a light in the nighttime."

"Man's character is his fate."

But these have special value as keys to his philosophy:

"You cannot step twice into the same rivers; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you."

"Homer was wrong in saying: 'Would that strife might perish from among G.o.ds and men!' He did not see that he was praying for the destruction of the universe; for, if his prayer were heard, all things would pa.s.s away."

Flux or movement, says Herac.l.i.tus, is the all-pervading law of things, and in the opposition of forces, by which things are kept going, there is underlying harmony. Still on the quest after the primary substance whose manifestations are so various, he found it in FIRE, since "the quant.i.ty of it in a flame burning steadily appears to remain the same; the flames seems to be what we call a 'thing.' And yet the substance of it is continually changing. It is always pa.s.sing away in smoke, and its place is always being taken by fresh matter from the fuel that feeds it.

This is just what we want. If we regard the world as an 'ever-living fire'--'this order, which is the same in all things, and which no one of G.o.ds or men has made'--we can understand how fire is always becoming all things, while all things are always returning to it." And as is the world, so is man, made up, like it, both soul and body, of the fire, the water, and the earth. We are and are not the same for two consecutive moments; "the fire in us is perpetually becoming water, and the water earth, but as the opposite process goes on simultaneously we appear to remain the same."

As speculation advanced, it became more and more applied to details, theories of the beginnings of life being followed by theories of the origin of its various forms. This is a feature of the philosophy of Empedocles, who flourished in the fifth century B. C. The advance of Persia westward had led to migrations of Greeks to the south of Italy and Sicily, and it was at Agrigentum, in that island, that Empedocles was born about 490. He has an honoured place among the earliest who supplanted _guesses_ about the world by _inquiry_ into the world itself.

Many legends are told of his magic arts, one of which, it will be remembered, Matthew Arnold makes an occasion of some fine reflections in his poem Empedocles in Etna. The philosopher was said to have brought back to life a woman who apparently had been dead for thirty days. As he ascends the mountain, Pausanias of Gela, with an address to whom the poem of Empedocles opens, would fain have his curiosity slaked as to this and other marvels reported of him:

Ask not the latest news of the last miracle, Ask not what days and nights In trance Pantheia lay, But ask how thou such sights May'st see without dismay; Ask what most helps when known, thou son of Anchitus.