truths since
established by observation. Aristotle especially, both by speculation
and observation, arrived at some results which, had Greek freedom
of thought continued, might have brought the world long since to its
present plane of biological knowledge; for he reached something like the
modern idea of a succession of higher organizations from lower, and made
the fruitful suggestion of "a perfecting principle" in Nature.

With the coming in of Christian theology this tendency toward a yet
truer theory of evolution was mainly stopped, but the old crude view
remained, and as a typical example of it we may note the opinion of St.
Basil the Great in the fourth century. Discussing the work of creation,
he declares that, at the command of God, "the waters were gifted with
productive power"; "from slime and muddy places frogs, flies, and gnats
came into being"; and he finally declares that the same voice which gave
this energy and quality of productiveness to earth and water shall be
similarly efficacious until the end of the world. St. Gregory of Nyssa
held a similar view.

This idea of these great fathers of the Eastern Church took even
stronger hold on the great father of the Western Church. For St.
Augustine, so fettered usually by the letter of the sacred text, broke
from his own famous doctrine as to the acceptance of Scripture and
spurned the generally received belief of a creative process like that by
which a toymaker brings into existence a box of playthings. In his great
treatise on Genesis he says: "To suppose that God formed man from the
dust with bodily hands is very childish.... God neither formed man with
bodily hands nor did he breathe upon him with throat and lips."

St. Augustine then suggests the adoption of the old emanation or
evolution theory, shows that "certain very small animals may not have
been created on the fifth and sixth days, but may have originated later
from putrefying matter," argues that, even if this be so, God is still
their creator, dwells upon such a potential creation as involved in the
actual creation, and speaks of animals "whose numbers the after-time
unfolded."

In his great treatise on the Trinity--the work to which he devoted the
best thirty years of his life--we find the full growth of this opinion.
He develops at length the view that in the creation of living beings
there was something like a growth--that God is the ultimate author,
but works through secondary causes; and