It was in the last century that the evolutionary idea really began to
take form and shape in the separate conceptions of Kant, Laplace,
Lamarck, and Erasmus Darwin. These were the true founders of our modern
evolutionism. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer were the Joshuas who
led the chosen people into the land which more than one venturous Moses
had already dimly descried afar off from the Pisgah top of the
eighteenth century.
Kant and Laplace came first in time, as astronomy comes first in logical
order. Stars and suns, and planets and satellites, necessarily precede
in development plants and animals. You can have no cabbages without a
world to grow them in. The science of the stars was therefore reduced to
comparative system and order, while the sciences of life, and mind, and
matter were still a hopeless and inextricable muddle. It was no wonder,
then, that the evolution of the heavenly bodies should have been clearly
apprehended and definitely formulated while the evolution of the earth's
crust was still imperfectly understood, and the evolution of living
beings was only tentatively and hypothetically hinted at in a timid
whisper.
In the beginning, say the astronomical evolutionists, not only this
world, but all the other worlds in the universe, existed potentially, as
the poet justly remarks, in 'a haze of fluid light,' a vast nebula of
enormous extent and almost inconceivable material thinness. The world
arose out of a sort of primitive world-gruel.
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