RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Evan son Evolution
Knowledge (Chicago, 1884); Poetry, Comedy, and Duty (Boston, 1888) ; Ethics for the People (1891 ) ; Gospel of Paul (1893); Ethics for Young People (1894); arid the posthumous Essays Theological and Literary (1901); Immortality and other Essays (1902); and Psychological Elements of Religious Faith (New York, 1902).
EVERLASTING GOSPEL. See Joachim of
FlORE.
EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. See Apologetics.
EVIL-MERODACH. See Babylonia, VI. 7, § 3.
I. Scope of the Term. III. Darwin's Greek Predecessors.
Anaximander and Epicurus (§1). Heraclitus and the Stoics (§ 2). Empedocles and Democritus(§3). Plato and Aristotle (§ 4).
EVOLUTION.
III. Medieval Views.
Augustine, Erigena, and Cusa (§ 1).
Giordano Bruno (§2). IV The Theory in Modern Philosophy,
Descartes, Leibnitz, Herder (§ 1).
Kant, Schelling, and Others (§ 2).
Schleiermacher and Hegel (§ 3). Lamarck and Darwin (§ 4). Haeckel, Fouille'e, Guyau (§ 5). Herbert Spencer (§ 6). Modifications of Spencer (§ 7).
Evolution (or Evolutionism) is the view that the whole world and all it contains was not established once for all, but that it is in a state of perpetual motion and development.
I. Scope of the Term : As a metaphysical theory evolution is distinguished from the doctrine of Emanation' (q.v.) by the fact that according to the latter the primal principle remains unchanged in quantity and quality in spite of every efflux and development proceeding from it; while according to the theory of development in its logical completeness nothing is excluded from the process of development or change — not even the original principle itself, if any such is assumed. Another point of difference is, that in the doctrine of emanation the development proceeds by various stages from the highest to ever lower stages, while evolution works continually toward what is higher and more perfect. Both these theories, and especially the latter, are opposed to that of creation, according to which the whole world and the matter contained in it are the products of a free and conscious act of God; and they are opposed equally to the sort of dualism, in the main Platonic, which conceives a permanent world of ideas in contrast with a mutable matter still to be formed and derives the visible phenomena from the influence of the former upon the latter. In a narrower biological sense evolution often means the development of organic beings from inorganic matter, and their further descent from one another. In the views of the evolutionistic school two different tendencies are to be distinguished. One is teleological, or more broadly organic, which deduces motion and change from internal causes or purposes inherent in the things subject to the process. This view is found not seldom in the older philosophers, and also in the modern, especially the German idealists. The other may be called the mechanical, since it ascribes the changes to external causes. This is the view chiefly held by modern evolutionists.
The terms evolution and development in this sense are of comparatively recent origin, and when they first make their appearance relate not to the entire universe but to some special partial process. The doctrine, however, which is now meant by them, appears in the early stages of Greek philosophy, and traces of it may be found in Oriental thought. The terms evolution and evolutionism, though found in a partially analogous sense as early as Nicholas of Cusa, and in Leibnitz and other
seventeenth and eighteenth century philosophers in a sense still nearer to the modern, seem to have gained their full import first in England. They are now used also by French and German writers, and designate what forms an important, if not the central, point in the modern conception of the world.
II. Darwin's Greek Predecessors: Evolution is not so much a modern discovery as some of its advocates would have us believe. It 1. Anaxi- macje j^g appearance early in Greek and philosophy, and maintained its posi- Epicurus. ^on more or less, with the most diverse modifications, and frequently confused with the idea of emanation, until the close of ancient thought. The Greeks had, it is true, no term exactly equivalent to " evolution"; but when Thales asserts that all things originated from water; when Anaximenes calls air the principle of all things, regarding the subsequent process as a thinning or thickening, they must have considered individual beings and the phenomenal world as a result of evolution, even if they did not carry the process out in detail. Anaximander is often regarded as a precursor of the modern theory of development. He deduces living beings, in a gradual development, from moisture under the influence of warmth, and suggests the view that men originated from animals of another sort, since if they had come into existence as human beings, needing fostering care for a long time, they would not have been able to maintain their existence. In Empedocles, as in Epicurus and Lucretius, who follow in his footsteps, there are rudimentary suggestions of the Darwinian theory in its broader sense; and here too, as with Darwin, the mechanical principle comes in; the process is adapted to a certain end by a sort of natural selection, without regarding nature as deliberately forming its results for these ends.
If the mechanical view is to be found in these philosophers, the teleological occurs in Heraclitus, who conceives the process as a rational development, in accordance with the Logos, and names steps of the process, as from igneous air to 2. Heracli- water> and thence to earth. The
tus and gtoics fonowed Heraclitus in the main tne stoics. lines Qf the.r phygicg The prfmal
principle is, as with him, igneous air, only that this is named God by them with much greater definiteness. The Godhead has life in itself, and develops into the universe, differentiating primarily into
Evolution