Change takes place by means of opposites; all opposites, such as night and day, good and evil, birth and death, and all other opposites produce change. The tension of opposites in the physical world produces the upward and downward ways between fire and earth. In physical things fire is the basic element that becomes all things. Earth liquefies into sea, sea into storm clouds, vapor and fire. This upward and downward ways is used by Heraclitus to explain day and night. The change of things with their upward and downward ways takes place in a vast cycle of time of 360 generations, known as the world year; taking a generation as 30 years, this cycle of time brings things back to their original condition in 10,800 ordinary years.
Through collisions of the atoms, vortices are set up out of which the worlds are generated. There are worlds in the process of formation and worlds in the process of dissolution. Just as worlds are generated through collisions of atoms, so worlds may be destroyed by collision with larger worlds. Life developed out of primeval slime, and is related to warmth and fire. Indeed, the atoms of fire and souls are similar in nature being smaller and more spherical than atoms of other things. Democritus believed that thought is a kind of motion, and so is capable causing motion in other things. He held that consciousness is a function of soul atoms which are diffused throughout our bodies, and which are inhale and exhale. A slight loss in their number causes sleep and a more radical loss occurs in fainting, and a total loss in death. Perception and sensation is a physical process, and occurs through the impact of images or eidola upon our sense organs, the images being something like detached outline of the objects we perceive.
Since personal immortality is not possible in this philosophy, there are no moral absolutes with eternal consequences; the value theory of Democritus is hedonistic. The end of all human actions is the seeking of enjoyment or pleasure, and the advoidance of pain. Accordingly the way to determine good or evil, useful and harmful, is in terms of the pleasure or pain involved. But not all pleasures are equally good; the pleasures of mind are more enduring and good than the pleasures of sense. Moderation is the appropriate means to arrive at general well-being and cheerfulness, a state of untroubled pleasure known as ataraxia.
To this metaphysical dualism there corresponds the epistemological dualism of knowledge and opinion. Opinion comes from the realm of change through the senses and knowledge comes from the realm of the unchanging Ideas through the mind.
In the Timaeus the category of Being is represented by an eternal God in communion with the universal forms. The category of Becoming is represented by the World-Soul, a self-moving initiator of change having world as its internal environment, and interpreted according to organic principles. Plato also mentions a demiurge with the function of bridging the gap between the unchanging World of Ideas and Forms and the changing world of Becoming.
The system of Plato seems antithetical to the idea of evolution, yet Plato refers to great cycles of time involving death and rebirth, at least of cultures. But he apparently viewed the process as devolving, not evolving, in its current cycle.
Aristotle believed that there has always been change and that there must be an eternal cause of change, that is, the first cause and prime mover. This first mover is the mover of a whole series of moved movers but itself is unmoved. It causes all motion without itself being moved. This unmoved mover is God. Thus Aristotle believed that he had proved the existence of God. This argument from change along with others was fully developed in Aristotle's Metaphysics.
Although Aristotle held to a great chain of being from pure matter (potentiality) to pure form (actuality), he did not express this as development in time from one species to another. The potentiality-actuality contrast allowed him to develop a dynamic view of reality, but he limited it within rather narrow limits. He was able to express dynamically the the way an acorn is potentially an oak, but he did not extend it to how an entire species might develop from a potentiality. In fact he viewed species as fixed and immutable. And furthermore, potentiality was limited to the three basic types of change: "alteration", or change of quality, "growth and diminution", and "locomotion", or change of place. There is no place for evolution or development within these three basic types of change.
Augustine rejected the Neoplatonic theory of emanations and held to the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo ("out of nothing") at the moment chosen by God. The world and time thus had a definite beginning. But what God wills to create is determined by what God's knowledge has determined to be good. God's intellect is the primary motive to create. From Neoplatonism he also derived his conception of God as timeless. The One is unchanging, therefore, timeless. God is not only eternal, having no beginning nor end, but He is without time, no past nor future, but just an eternal "now". In this eternal "Now", God sees all the past, present, future of the world that He will and has created. According to Augustine eternity is motionless, no succession; everything is present at once; there is no past nor future. Time was created by God out of nothing, ex nihilo. It is not an independent principle nor a being, the Receptacle, nor non-Being, the void.
Soon after 1800 many hypotheses and theories began to appear to explain the mechanism involved in the origin of the mountains. Thus Historical Geology was born. The study of successive rock layers, called stratigraphy, was carried on everywhere rock layers were exposed. Among the many hypotheses that have been put forth since 1800 to explain world-wide mechanisms of mountain building, the following are most important.
In 1795 Hutton published his major work Theory of the Earth in which he proposed seriously and systematically modern uniformitarianism as theory for earth history. Hutton took it for granted that the earth had never experienced castastrophes except perhaps on a strictly local scale. He assumed that the Scottish Highlands to have been uplifted at an extraordinarily slow rate, measured in millimeters per millenia and millions of years. He probably inferred it from contemporary experience and concluded it as an universal principle.
Hutton's views attained limited acceptance during his lifetime, but they became respectable only when they were reworked, refined, and republished by Lyell 36 years later. Lyell's geology formed the background for the biological theories of Charles Darwin; Darwin later wrote, "I feel as if my books came half out of Sir Charles Lyell's brain." The uniformitarian time-revolution disposed of one the major objections to the evolutionary theory, that is, there is not enough time for evolution to take place. But Lyell was no evolutionist. He could not find in the fossils sufficient evidence for the transformation and progression of species, that is, one species growing out another. And this has remained the main obstacle to the acceptance of theory of evolution. This dogma of the fixity of the species goes back to Aristotle and modern biological evidence seems to support it. No examples of such a change of species is found in the fossil record or in the biological data; the evidence, notably the sterility of animal hybrids, show the opposite.
Darwin attempted to establish beyond any reasonable doubt that all living things, including man, have developed from a few extremely simple forms, perhaps from one form, by a gradual process of descent with modifications. Furthermore, he developed a theory of natural selection, supporting it with a large body of evidence, to account for this process and particularly to explain the "transmutation of Species" and the origin of adaptations. The following are main outline of his theory of natural selection.
Though Darwin made some attempt to appease the religious in his book, he was not a religious man, and steadily grew less so. In his Autobiography (in the undeleted version) he explains how he rejected Christianity in about 1840; later he also dropped the "theism" that appears in the last two pages of his book. Darwin apparently shared the position popularized by his vigorous proponent Thomas H. Huxley (1825-1895) as "agnosticism." Huxley coined the term "agnostic" to express his position of suspended belief; he insisted that one should not believe beyond the evidence of the senses and since no satisfactory evidence concerning the nature of the universe is available, one should not be dogmatic, but an agnostic, "one who does not know." The term has usually been applied to the suspension of belief with respect to God. Huxley believed that all living forms constituted mechanical systems in such a fashion that consciousness is epiphenomenal. It is the effect of bodily processes and the cause of nothing. This mechanistic materialism was a complete rejection of Biblical creationism. The acrimony with which the war between science and religion soon began to be waged was due to the belligerence and arrogance of Huxley, as well as to the stubbornness of his most famous adversary, the Bishop "Soapy Sam" Wilberforce. Huxley and Wilberforce met in a debate in 1860 on which occasion a famous exchange of insults took place, the clergyman observing that he would rather not claim a monkey for an ancestor and Huxley retorting that he rather be descended from an honest ape, than from the one though endowed with brains refused to use them! Not all the foes of Dawinism were clergymen, its foes included many nonclergymen, scientists among them. But not all clergymen rejected Darwinism and some began to find it agreeable to theism. The Roman Catholics were more inclined to accept, or at least to tolerate, Darwinism because they were freer from Biblical literalism. These clergymen and theologians accepted the view that evolution is merely the instrument which God used to create the universe, or the mode of His activity in bringing about the events of creation. They argued that whether God did so or not is a question of fact to be decided by evidence, and the evidence seems to show that evolution was the way God created it.
Darwin, who was early quite pious, was led away from Biblical Christianty by the geology of Lyell; then the hypothesis of natural selection destroyed in his mind the classical arguments for existence of God, the arguments from the evidences of design and purpose in organisms. Originally, in the concluding paragraphs of his Origins Darwin points toward a theism that was quite widely accepted; he argues that it is not less wonderful, but more so, that God choose to plant the seeds of all life in a few simple forms of life instead of creating each species separately. But Darwin abandoned this position, as a study of his letters and later published writings show. There was too much chance and too much evil in the biological world that he saw to permit him to believe in a benevolent plan. "I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would designedly created Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the bodies of catepillars, or that cats would play with mice." This was the old Problem of Evil that destroyed Darwin's faith, along with muddle and untidiness in the evolutionary picture which went far to decredit the concept of orderly design and plan. Darwin was not, like Huxley, a deliberately irreligious man; he was driven to unbelief in a "beneficent and omnipotent God" by the biological facts upon which the theory of evolution focused.
Later the thought occurred to Darwin that the mind of man itself is the product of evolution, thus merely the tool of survival. This idea has jolted others. The result is to dethrone the mind or intellect as a separate principle, making it merely a factor in evolutionary adaptation. But this not only destroyed theology, but biology and all other sciences, as having higher validity; everything would have become just a weapon in the struggle for survival. This confusing speculation of Darwin has also occurred to others; all has been thrown in confusion by this new "knowledge." But being unwilling to dogmatic, Darwin called himself an "agnostic." He did not consider himelf an atheist, even though many of those who have accepted the philosophy of evolution have called themselves by that name.
Darwin was careful to disavow any supposed ethical implications of his theories. The widespread view of the "Social Darwinist," that those who are best adapted to survive ought to survive, is no part of what Darwin himself sought to prove. The famous slogan "the survival of the fittest" is not Darwin's, but was coined by Herbert Spencer. Darwin was very careful to observe the limits of his hypothesis. He did not profess to explain the origins of life itself; nor did he claim to know the precise cause of those variations which determine different organic species in the first place. And he rejected the implication which some sought to draw from his theory, that is, that "higher" species are most perfectly adapted to their environment than the "lower" ones. It remained for his contemporary, Herbert Spenser, to draw out the philosophical implications of the evolutionary theory. In his hands, Spencer transformed evolution into a grand synthesis of human knowledge, complete with a cosmology, an ethics, and a politics.
When Charles Darwin published in 1859 his Origin of Species, Spencer was emboldened in 1860 to announce his scheme for a Synthetic Philosophy of evolution, in which the conception was applied to all of the sciences. He coined the phrase "the survival of the fittest" to describe the working of the principle of natural selection. From 1860 to 1893 he kept continuously at this project, writing separate volumes on metaphysics, biology, sociology, and ethics. He revised his Principles of Psychology, already published in 1855, and incorporated it into the series of works on evolution. Although some years passed before Spencer's Synthetic Philosophy won some recognition, it finally became famous, and during his last years his works were widely read, and he was regarded by some as the world's greatest philosopher.
Spencer's father, a schoolmaster, and his uncle, a clergyman, gave him an excellent elementary education and secondary education, largely by private instruction. He showed slight interest and aptitude in languages, some skill in drawing and sculpture, and a decided ability in mathematics and the natural sciences. He refused to go to a university, which he thought would be waste of time; he probably was right since the curriculum in those days consisted chiefly of classical languages and neglected the natural sciences for which he had most talent. As a young man he supported himself by successful but not highly remunerative work of engineering and journalism. From 1860 to 1893 he devoted himself to the elaboration of his Synthetic Philosophy. During these early years he subsisted meagerly upon his savings, small legacies from relativies, a gift from American admirers, and subscriptions for his books contributed in advance by well-wishers. Gradually the sale of his books increased, and he ended his life in confortable circumstances. He never married, his means be insufficient until he was passed the age when marriage seemed desirable. From 1855 he suffered from ill-health. He ended his days as a somewhat eccentric old bachelor, whom his intimates understood and respected.
Following the empiricism of Hamilton and J. S. Mill, Spencer regarded science as a discovery of the laws of regularities in phenomena, each science working a circumscribed area and representing a partial unity. Philosophy differs from the sciences in terms of its scope, its principles being universally applicable; it goal is a total unification of knowledge. From this standpoint the principle of evolution is philosophical, and Spencer proceeded to make this principle the focus of his comprehensive Synthetic Philosophy. Evolution is thus expressible as a principle of increasing complexity; and Spencer identified "more complex" with "higher." Intelligence emerges from the increasing complexity as do sympathy and sociality, these latter characteristics calling forth the state. Spencer acknowledge his indebtedness to Carl Ernst von Baer (1792-1876), who was a pioneer in modern embryology, from whom Spencer derived the conception of progressive change from homogeneity to heterogeneity. It became a central thesis of Spencer's theory of evolution that in general the homogeneous was unstable and that a trend to heterogeneity is characteristic of evolution in all its phases, whether it is a characteristic of individual organism or groups of organism, of the earth, the solar system, or the entire cosmos.
Spencer in working out the implication of this principle soon realized that it could not stand alone, but must be recognized as incidental to a more fundamental process which he calls "integration of matter and the comcomitant dissipation of motion." In accordance to the law of gravity diffused matter tends to become more consolidated; at same time, energy or motion, whether sensible or insensible, which the matter contains, tends to become more and more uniformly diffused. Next Spencer distinguished between simple and compound evolution. Simple evolution is uncomplicated integration of matter and dissipation of motion which has just been described. Compound evolution covers the vast multitude of cases in which the primary redistribution of matter and motion is accomplished by secondary redistributions. While the whole is consolidating, it is also differentiating into parts in each of which the double process of integration and dissipation continues with some degree of independence. Thus the change is from a less coherent to a more coherent structure as well as from a more homogeneous to a less homogeneous or more heterogeneous state. Thus, in Spencer's own words,
"Evolution is an integration of matter and comcomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite, heterogeneity; and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation."Spencer presents this, not just as a definition of evolution, but as statement of what is constantly happening in nature; this was a statement of the "law" of evolution. Spencer saw this as a "natural law", a rule for expecting events that was arrived by the empirical, inductive method. Having arrived at this law of evolution inductively, Spencer goes on to state as an inference the persistence of matter and motion, or, as it is called today, the law of conservation of matter and energy. Spencer used these principles to explain, not only the origin of solar system, the geological evolution of the earth, the development of plants and animals, but also of the production of life and consciousness, and every thing that characterize animals and human beings, regarded either as individuals or as societies. Spencer maintained that what are known subjectively as states of consciousness are objectively states of motion.
(H. Spencer, First Principles, [New York, 1885], p.396)
Haeckel believed that all matter, and the aether, possessed a low-grade will and sensibility. This hylozoistic (from the Greek, hyle [matter] and zoe [life], "matter is alive") and panpsychistic (from the Greek, pan [all} and psyche [soul], "everything has a soul") hypothesis supported his naturalistic interpretation of reality, allowing him to view human consciousness as a function of man's bio-organism, facilitated by the presence of a central nervous system. To this world-view Haeckel gave the name "monism"; he was particularly opposed to theological dualism and sought to destroy the dualist antithesis of God and the world, where God was understood to be a personal, extra-mundane and transcendent being. He held that monistic philosophy destroys the three central dogmas of a dualistic system: the personality of God, the immortality of the soul, and the freedom of the will. Although pantheism is compatible with a monistic system, Haeckel quotes approvingly of Schopenhauer's remark, "Pantheism is only a polite form of atheism." And his monism was atheistic.
But Haeckel did not reject all religion; in fact, he put forth a monistic religion and ethics. His admiration for Spinoza and Goethe and his belief that mankind's ethical aspirations needed some support led him to advocate a monistic religion.
"The ethical craving of our emotion is satisfied by monism no less than the logical demand for causality on the part of religion." He had great respect for the ethical values of primitive Christianity and felt that Christianity had been so influential in social and political movements of civilized history that "we must appeal as much as possible to its existing institutions in the establishment of our monistic religion."He maintained that he sought a rational reformation, rather than a revolution, in religion. His criticisms, however, particularly of Roman Catholicism, appear revolutionary. In ethics Haeckel wanted to give rational support to the true, the good, and the beautiful, and he preferred that trinity instead of the Christian Trinity. Truth is to be found in the study of nature by means of critical observation and thinking, instead of revelation and faith. The good is to be found in charity, toleration, compassion, and assistance, and these are not original to Christianity. Haeckel maintained that Christian ethics was marred by too much altrusim, and denunciation of egoism, while the monistic ethics lays equal emphasis on both, and finds perfect virtue in a just balance between love of self and love of one's neighbor. The beautiful is to be found in the natural world, and that Christianity was in error in preaching the valuelessness of this-worldly things, with a view that this life was only a preparation for eternity. Hence the beautiful was of little importance. Haeckel was especially interested in art forms in nature and believed that the microscope had newly aroused our aesthetic sense.
(The Riddle of the Universe, p. 336).
Although Haeckel was especially opposed to theological dualism, he was very careful to distinguish his monism from both materialistic and idealistic monisms. Haeckel interpreted materialism as holding that atoms are "dead," and moving only by external forces. In opposition he maintained that both matter and aether possess sensation and will in lowest grade. They experience a dislike for strain, and struggle against it, and have a liking for "condensation" for which they strive. Haeckel denied the existence of empty space and of forces acting at a distance. Those parts of space not occupied by ponderable atoms are filled with aether; and forces act either by immediate contact or through the mediation of the aether. On the other hand, Haeckel rejected the idealist attempt to regard the world as immaterial or nonnatural. He held that infinitely extended matter and sensitive and thinking spirit, or energy, are two fundamental attributes of the all-embracing universal substance. Every living cell has psychic functions, and multicellular organisms has as their psychic functions the totality of psychic properties of their parts. Although Haeckel insisted that his view of substance was Spinoza-like rather than materialistic, many of his views are similar to those of nineteenth century materialism. His confidence that "consciousness, thought, speculation" are "function of the ganglionic cells of the cortex of the brain," his "hard" determinism, his mechanism, his complete rejection of the supernatural, and his enthusiasm for science all led his contemporaries to consider him a materialist.
Bergson believed that change is more real than permanence, and time must be taken more seriously and not regarded as an appearance. The dynamic and static aspects of experience are paralleled by similar aspects of the world. The world in its temporal aspect is fluid, dynamic and continuous. In its spatial aspect the world is static and discontinuous. Bergson identified the temporal aspect of things with the spirit; and the spatial aspect of things with the material aspect, with effete spirit. He illustrated the difference using the simile of a fountain. The water shooting forth is spirit; the water falling back is matter.
Since God is spirit, this means that God works in things to make them go. God is the force, the Elan Vital, which makes things go. This means that God is the process of evolution. Evolution is a creative process, going on in time, not predetermined in advance, neither by an omnipotent and omniscient Creator, nor by matter governed by mechanical laws. Evolution works out its course spontaneously under the guidance of the vital impulse or vital impetus. Thus evolution has purpose and adventuring. One of the goals of evolution, Bergson states, was freedom. But each achievement fell back into mechanism until the creation of man when, through heightened complexity, and mechanism cancelling out mechanism, the breakthrough into freedom was achieved.
The view of time consistent with this view of freedom is that the future is open, and is being decided moment by moment. According to Bergson, time is qualitiative change. Were the details of the temporal process already settled, time could accelerate toward instantaneity. But these details are not settled, and time moves at its own pace. The future is not in existence, and both God and man create the alternatives and then acts upon them; this insures freedom. The past continues to exist, internal in the present. In man it exists as memory. Bergson compares the situation to a rolling snowball in which it present state contains all its earlier states.