18 The Fundamentals lowing are blind guides leading on to an end which it is not pleasant to contemplate, and from which we can be delivered only by the coming of the Son of Man. CONCLUSION The title of this paper is perhaps a misnomer. For, doubt- less, the passing of the present phase of evolution is not final. Theories of evolution have chased each other off the field in rapid succession for thousands of years. Evolution is not a new thing in philosophy, and such is the frailty of human na- ture that it is not likely to disappear suddenly from among men. The craze of the last half century is little more than the recrudesence of a philosophy which has divided the opin- ion of men from the earliest ages. In both the Egyptian and the East Indian mythology, the world and all things in it were evolved from an egg; and so in the Polynesian myths. But the Polynesians had to have a bird to lay the egg, and the Egyptians and the Brahmans had to have some sort of a deity to create theirs. The Greek philosophers struggled with the problem without coming to any more satisfactory con- clusion. Aniximander, like Professor Huxley, traced every- thing back to an “infinity” which gradually worked itself into a sort of pristine “mud” (something like Huxley’s exploded “bathybius” ), out of which everything else evolved; while Thales of Miletus tried to think of water as the mother of everything, and Aneximenes practically deified the air. Dio- genes imagined a “mind stuff” (something like Weissmann’s “biophores,” Darwin’s “gemmules possessed with affinity for each other,” and Spencer’s “vitalized molecules”) which acted as i f it had intelligence; while Heraclitus thought that fire was the only element pure enough to produce the soul of man. These speculations culminated in the great poem of Lucretius entitled, De Rerum Natura, written shortly before the beginning of the Christian era. His atomic theory was something like that which prevails at the present time among
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