Publisher's Synopsis
An excerpt from the beginning of Chapter I. -- ITS MEANING.We must not confuse the Darwinian theory with Evolution. It is a part of that larger whole. Evolution is the name for the idea of the unity and continuity of phenomena. The evolutionist regards all the phenomena of the universe as natural, and does not believe in the intervention of the supernatural. To him there never is, never has been, and to never will be, any break in the series of events. The evolutionist pure and simple does not recognise any hiatus between man and other animals, between the animal and the plant, between the living and the non-living.In this wide sense I cannot, strange as this may seem, call Charles Darwin an evolutionist. For in the "Origin of Species " he uses one phrase, not so far as I know contradicted or modified in more recently published utterances, that may fairly be quoted as evidence of his belief in the supernatural origin of life. It is the well-known sentence: "There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers. having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one."Darwin's great work was done in relation to living things. His two remarkable theories of Natural Selection and Sexual Selection have bearing only on plants and animals. Darwin's hypotheses had to do with the evolution of these two highest forms of matter known to us. They havi nothing to do with the question of the origin of life, or the first formation of organic bodies. In dealing with his ideas, we must start, as he started, with life as existing on the earth. Organic matter is given. The question is how, organic or living matter once in being, the many diverse forms of plants and animals have arisen....
