Also he believed that Evolution was
a heresy which involved the destruction of Christianity, of which, as
a member of the Irish Church (the pseudo-Protestant one), he conceived
himself a pillar. But this was only his ignorance; for man may deny his
descent from an ape and be eligible as a churchwarden without being any
the less a convinced Evolutionist.
DISCOVERY ANTICIPATED BY DIVINATION
What is more, the religious folk can claim to be among the pioneers of
Evolutionism. Weismann, Neo-Darwinist though he was, devoted a long
passage in his History of Evolution to the Nature Philosophy of Lorenz
Oken, published in 1809. Oken defined natural science as 'the science
of the everlasting transmutations of the Holy Ghost in the world.' His
religion had started him on the right track, and not only led him to
think out a whole scheme of Evolution in abstract terms, but guided his
aim in a significantly good scientific shot which brought him within the
scope of Weismann. He not only defined the original substance from which
all forms of life have developed as protoplasm, or, as he called it,
primitive slime (_Urschleim_), but actually declared that this slime
took the form of vesicles out of which the universe was built.
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