7. Life arose out of non-living matter.
Although modern biology leaves the origin of life as an insoluble problem, it supports the theory of fundamental continuity between the inorganic and the organic.
8. Plants came before animals: the higher organisms are of separate sex, and appeared subsequent to the lower.
Generally confirmed by modern biology, but with qualification as to the undefined borderland between the lowest plants and the lowest animals. And, of course, it recognises a continuity in the order and succession of life which was not grasped by the Greeks. Aristotle and others before him believed that some of the higher forms sprang from slimy matter direct.
9. Adverse conditions cause the extinction of some organisms, thus leaving room for those better fitted.
Herein lay the crude germ of the modern doctrine of the “survival of the fittest.”
10. Man was the last to appear, and his primitive state was one of savagery. His first tools and weapons were of stone; then, after the discovery of metals, of copper; and, following that, of iron. His body and soul are alike compounded of atoms, and the soul is extinguished at death.
The science of Prehistoric Archæology confirms the theory of man’s slow passage from barbarism to civilization; and the science of Comparative Psychology declares that the evidence of his immortality is neither stronger nor weaker than the evidence of the immortality of the lower animals.
Such, in very broad outline, is the legacy of suggestive theories bequeathed by the Ionian school and its successors, theories which fell into the rear when Athens became a centre of intellectual life in which discussion passed from the physical to those ethical problems which lie outside the range of this survey. Although Aristotle, by his prolonged and careful observations, forms a conspicuous exception, the fact abides that insight, rather than experiment, ruled Greek speculation, the fantastic guesses of parts of which themselves evidence the survival of the crude and false ideas about earth and sky long prevailing. The more wonderful is it, therefore, that so much therein points the way along which inquiry travelled after its subsequent long arrest; and the more apparent is it that nothing in science or art, and but little in theological speculations, at least among us Westerns, can be understood without reference to Greece.