Book contents
- Frontmatter
- PREFATORY NOTE
- Contents
- INTRODUCTION
- PART I EVOLUTION, PAST AND PRESENT
- CHAPTER I NATURE AND SCOPE OF EVOLUTION
- CHAPTER II EARLY EVOLUTIONARY VIEWS
- CHAPTER III FOSSILS AND GIANTS
- CHAPTER IV SPONTANEOUS GENERATION AND SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY
- CHAPTER V FROM LORD BACON TO CHARLES DARWIN
- CHAPTER VI CONTROVERSY AND PROGRESS
- CHAPTER VII EVIDENCES OF EVOLUTION
- CHAPTER VIII OBJECTIONS AGAINST EVOLUTION
- PART II EVOLUTION AND DOGMA
- AUTHORS AND WORKS CITED IN “EVOLUTION AND DOGMA.”
- GENERAL INDEX
CHAPTER I - NATURE AND SCOPE OF EVOLUTION
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- PREFATORY NOTE
- Contents
- INTRODUCTION
- PART I EVOLUTION, PAST AND PRESENT
- CHAPTER I NATURE AND SCOPE OF EVOLUTION
- CHAPTER II EARLY EVOLUTIONARY VIEWS
- CHAPTER III FOSSILS AND GIANTS
- CHAPTER IV SPONTANEOUS GENERATION AND SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY
- CHAPTER V FROM LORD BACON TO CHARLES DARWIN
- CHAPTER VI CONTROVERSY AND PROGRESS
- CHAPTER VII EVIDENCES OF EVOLUTION
- CHAPTER VIII OBJECTIONS AGAINST EVOLUTION
- PART II EVOLUTION AND DOGMA
- AUTHORS AND WORKS CITED IN “EVOLUTION AND DOGMA.”
- GENERAL INDEX
Summary
Early Speculation Regarding Nature and Man
FROM time immemorial philosophers and students of nature have exhibited a special interest in all questions pertaining to the origin of man, of the earth on which he lives and of the universe to which he belongs. The earliest speculations of our Aryan forefathers were about the beginnings of things. Questions of cosmology, as we learn from the tablets preserved in the great library of Assurbanipal in Nineveh, received their meed of attention from the sages of ancient Assyria and Babylonia. And long before Assyria, Babylonia and Chaldea had reached the zenith of their power, and before they had attained that intellectual eminence which so distinguished them among the nations of the ancient world, the peoples of Accad and Sumer had raised and discussed questions of geogony and cosmogony. They were a philosophical race, these old Accadians and Sumerians, and, as we learn from the records which are constantly being exhumed in Mesopotamia, they had a breadth of view and an acuteness of intellect, which, considering their environment and the age in which they lived, were simply astonishing. Well have they been called “the teachers of Greece,” for all the subtlety of thought and keenness of perception, all the love of science, art and letters, which were so characteristic of the Greek mind, were possessed in an eminent degree by those old pre-Babylonian masters who thought and taught and wrote many long generations before Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees, untold centuries before Thales taught and Homer sang.
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- Evolution and Dogma , pp. 13 - 22Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009First published in: 1896