It is true [he writes] that there were philosophers who[{11}] spoke of the evolution of things a thousand years ago; but the recognition that such a law dominates the entire universe, and that the world is nothing else than an eternal "evolution of substance," is a fruit of the nineteenth century.
So far as concerns the world which we actually inhabit, its first beginning, we must, he tells us, suppose[11] to have been a vast nebula of infinitely attenuated and light material, rotating upon its own axis.[12]
Given this first beginning of the cosmogonic movement, it is easy, on mathematical principles, to deduce and mathematically establish the further phenomena of the foundation of the cosmic bodies, the separation of the planets, and so forth.
Nor are we to suppose that the beginning of this particular process was in any true sense a beginning at all. Evolutionary philosophy such as Professor Haeckel's, necessarily teaches that beginnings and endings succeed one another everlastingly, one world-system arising phoenix-like from the ashes of another.
The nebular hypothesis above described has recently [we are told][13] been strongly confirmed and enlarged by the theory that this cosmogonic process did not simply[{12}] take place once, but is periodically repeated. While new cosmic bodies arise and develop, out of rotating masses of nebula in some parts of the universe, in other parts old, extinct, frigid suns come into collision, and are once more reduced by the heat generated to the condition of nebulæ.
It appears, in fact, to be assumed that this cyclic process has been actually demonstrated, for we are told[14] that astronomy reveals, in the endless depths of space, "Millions of circling spheres, larger than our earth, and, like it, in an eternal rhythm of life and death."
Moreover, "life" is here to be understood literally, for it is a cardinal article of such evolutionary belief that equally with the foundation of cosmic bodies and the separation of planets, the production of organic life, of plants and animals, has been wrought by forces which the material universe contains within itself,[15] and accordingly,[16]
We now definitely know that the organic world on our earth has been continuously developed "in accordance with eternal iron laws." ... An unbroken series of natural events, following an orderly course of evolution according to fixed laws, now leads the reflecting human spirit through long aeons from a primeval chaos to the present order of the cosmos.
Finally, at the back of all these processes, we are to recognize the one ultimate reality, the universe itself, which originates and undergoes all these evolutions. In its regard Professor Haeckel tells us[17] that,