THE EARLY EVOLUTIONISTS
The idea of Evolution, or Transformation as it is now sometimes called,
was not first conceived by Charles Darwin, nor by Alfred Russel Wallace,
who observed the operation of Circumstantial Selection simultaneously
with Charles. The celebrated Buffoon was a better Evolutionist than
either of them; and two thousand years before Buffon was born, the Greek
philosopher Empedocles opined that all forms of life are transformations
of four elements, Fire, Air, Earth, and Water, effected by the two
innate forces of attraction and repulsion, or love and hate. As lately
as 1860 I myself was taught as a child that everything was made out of
these four elements. Both the Empedocleans and the Evolutionists were
opposed to those who believed in the separate creation of all forms
of life as described in the book of Genesis. This 'conflict between
religion and science', as the phrase went then, did not perplex my
infant mind in the least: I knew perfectly well, without knowing that I
knew it, that the validity of a story is not the same as the occurrence
of a fact.
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