ABSTRACT
T H E N A T U R E OF L I F E problems of the natural philosophy of evolution had been formulated ages before he wrote. The astonishing Greeks, who seem to have opened and poked their head out of almost every window of the mansion provided for man's habitation on earth, cast their eye over this landscape also. The great atomic theorists, Empedocles, Democritus and their later followers such as Lucretius, envisaged a world in which evolutionary changes had taken place as a result of the chance collisions and comings together of atoms. In opposition, Anaxagoras saw such changes as resulting from intelligent design.Darwin, in the 'Historical Sketch' which he added to the later editions of his Origin of Species, argued that the most famous of all the ancient biologists, Aristotle, adopted the atomistic or Lucretian view, which was the nearer to Darwin's own. However, as Basil Willey has recently pointed out,* this was an error on Darwin's part. Aristotle repeated the atomistic arguments only to repudiate them. His conception of nature was one which we no longer entertain in any serious form; it was the 'teleological' view. This supposes that existing things come into being in relation to a formulated design, but the design is placed, as it were, after them rather than before. It is not thought of as a will which attempts to create them, but as an end which they strive to attain. This point of view led Aristotle to classify living organisms into a hierarchial system, but one which he thought of as a static arrangement rather than as representing a progression through which the living world had moved with the passage of time. Plants were 'lower' than animals; sponges, jelly fish and so on 'lower' than worms; these again were surpassed in perfection by the other types of animals, until one reached the 'highest' groups and so to man himself. But to Aristotle this arrangement was a classificatory system in terms of degrees of perfection and not in terms of historical succession.Throughout most of European history, from the time of the Greeks until the end of the eighteenth century, men's ideas about the world of living things were a compound of Aristotle's repudiation of atomism, his recognition of a hierarchical system of living things, and, usually, a literal acceptance of the Book of Genesis as a statement that the living things we know had been
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