The history of creation, or, The development of the earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes : a popular exposition of the doctrine of evolution in general, and of that of Darwin, Goethe and Lamarck in particular / from the German of Ernst Haeckel ; the translation revised by E. Ray Lankester.

Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The history of creation, or, The development of the earth and its inhabitants by the action of natural causes : a popular exposition of the doctrine of evolution in general, and of that of Darwin, Goethe and Lamarck in particular / from the German of Ernst Haeckel ; the translation revised by E. Ray Lankester. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    63/938 (page 37)
    raw material, and the glorious world of phenomena -arisicg from it—insensible to the inexhaustible charms of Nature, and without a knowledge of her laws—they stigmatize all natural science, and the culture arising from it, as sinful materialism, while really it is this which they themselves exhibit in a most shocking form. Satisfactory proofs of this are furnished, not only by the whole history of the Catholic Popes, with their long series of crimes, but also by the history of the morals of orthodoxy in every form of religion. In order, then, to avoid in future the usual confusion of this] utterly objectionable Moral Materialism with our Scientific Materialism, we think it necessary to call the latter either Monism or Realism. The principle of this Monism is the same as what Kant terms the principle of mechanism, and of which he expressly asserts, thsit without it there can he no natural science at all. This principle is quite inseparable from our Non-miraculous History of Crea- tion, and characterizes it as opposed to the teleological belief in the miracles of a Supernatural History of Creation. Let us now first of all glance at the most important of all ithe supernatural histories of creation, I mean that of Moses, as it has been handed down to us in the Bible, the ancient document of the history and laws of the Jewish .people. The Mosaic history of creation, since in the first chapter of Genesis it forms the introduction to the Old Testament, has enjoyed, down to the present day, general recognition in the whole Jewish and Christian world of <jivilization. Its extraordinary success is explained not only by its close connection with Jewish and Christian doctrines, but also by the simple and natural chain of ideas