Capitolo 33
to imagine. It is indeed a very ancient and respectable theory and it
it has an immense variety of smaller developments. I won't push him/it
back, in the modern scientific way and to the fashion, to the vague one and
indefinite suggestions in our old friend Lucretius. The great original Roman
poet--the only original poet in the Latin language--strikes out indeed
for him a raw squirt that he/she works very good of a kind of nebulous and
shapeless theory of evolution. It was daring, it was constant, for his/her time it
it was marvelous. But the philosophy of Lucretius as all the philosophies of
the oldest world, was a speculative and mere idea an elaborate portrait of the,
development of things, not dependent on observation of facts at all,
but it evolved completely, as the camel of the German thinker, out of his/her author
own pregnant inside conscience. The Roman poet without doubt would have
he/she built an excellent superstructure if he had only possessed a small
straw to make his/her bricks of. As it was, however, scientific brick-creation
being still in his/her infancy, he could only build in one day a shady
The building of Aladdin of phantasms of fantastic and pure Epicure, an imaginary
world of imaginary atoms, coinciding out accidentally of empty chaos in
an orderly universe, as if from miracle. It is not so that systems
rises what they regenerate the thought of humanity; he who would build for
every duration has to make sure himself/herself/themselves of a solid foundation before, and then sound of use
you pave in place of the airy nothings of metaphysical speculation.
It was really in the last century that the evolutionary idea it started
takes form and plasmas in the conceptions separate of Kant, Laplace,
Lamarck and Erasmus Darwin. These were the true founders of ours modern
theory of evolution. Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer is the Joshuases that
conducted the chosen people in the earth that more than a venturous Moses
you/he/she had flowed far weakly already street from the top of Pisgah of the
eighteenth century.
Kant and Laplace entered duration before, as astronomy enters logic before