"Theory of evolution" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... never was a theory before believed by as many educated people without proof as the theory of evolution. It is an unproved theory; there is not a fact beneath it. That you have low forms of life, and forms rising higher and higher till you get to man, is fact. But that a higher species ever came from a lower is without proof. Let those who doubt this say when and where such a thing ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... with the wise provisions of the Encyclical Providentissimus Deus, with which all educated Catholics should make themselves familiar, conflicts have been avoided on this, and on other points, such as the general theory of evolution and the various problems connected with it; the antiquity of man upon the earth and other matters as to which science is still uncertain. Some of these points might seem to conflict with the Bible ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... very little doubt in any impartial mind which duly considers the subject, that in some way or other the moral sense has been evolved. The body of scientific evidence which has now been collected in favour of the general theory of evolution is simply overwhelming; and in the presence of so large an analogy, it would require a vast amount of contradictory evidence to remove the presumption that human conscience, like everything else, has been evolved. Now, for my own part, I am quite unable to distinguish any such evidence, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... the religious world shrink from the theory of evolution? To know the path by which God has advanced is not to ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... oppose the explanation I have given of the facts adduced in this essay, I would again respectfully urge that they must grapple with the whole of the facts, not one or two of them only. It will be admitted that, on the theory of evolution and natural selection, a wide range of facts with regard to colour in nature have been co-ordinated and explained. Until at least an equally wide range of facts can be shown to be in harmony with any other theory, we can hardly be expected to abandon ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... question how we came to have moral ideas has been a disputed one. At first it was thought that there existed in man a distinct innate faculty or moral sense which was capable of deciding categorically man's duty without reference to history or condition. But in modern times the theory of evolution has discredited the inviolable character of conscience, and sought rather to determine its nature and significance in the light of its origin and development. Only the barest outline of the subject can ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... But science has already done something for us. It cannot yet tell us our first ancestor, but it can tell us much of an ancestor very high up in the line of descent. We cannot get the least idea (even upon the full assumption of the theory of evolution) of the first man; but we can get a very tolerable idea of the Paulo-prehistoric man, if I may so say—of man as he existed some short time (as we now reckon shortness), some ten thousand years, before history began. Investigators whose acuteness and diligence can hardly ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... other hand by employing the theory of evolution was able to unite man and nature once more. And since man is so self-centered that his imagination refuses to extend sympathetic treatment to nature unless he can feel a vital bond of fellowship with it, the poetry of romance became ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... the great continental ice-sheet which in Pleistocene times covered most of the northern part of the continent, and played such a part in shaping the land as we know it. That bold man was Agassiz, who, however, was not bold enough to accept the theory of evolution as propounded by Darwin. The idea of the great glacier did not conflict with Agassiz's religious predilections, and the theory of evolution did. It was a bold generalization, this of the continental ice-sheet, one of the master-strokes of the scientific imagination. It was about ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... philosophic speculations comprehended not only the ancient thought, and that current at his time, but also reached out toward the future and the results of modern science. He perceived some of the facts which were later formulated in the theory of evolution. "The mind of man differs from that of lower animals and of plants not in quality but only in quantity.... Each individual is the resultant of innumerable individuals. Each species is the Starting point for the next.... No individual is the same ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... in any form and lay prostrate before the Unknown, yet she herself was an enthusiastic delver into scientific hypothesis and the teachings of Darwin, Spencer, Haeckel had satisfied her intellect if they had failed to content her soul. The theory of evolution as applied to life on her own little planet appealed strongly to her because it accounted plausibly for the presence of man on earth. The process through which we had passed could be understood by every intelligence. ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... to earth with the rain. Anaxagoras considered animals higher in the scale than plants, for while the latter participated in pleasure (when they grew) and pain (when they lost their leaves), animals had in addition "Nous." In Empedocles' theory of evolution, the vegetable world preceded the animal. Plato, in the Timaeus, describes the whole organic world as being formed by degradation from man, who is created first. Man sinks first into woman, then into brute form, traversing all the stages from the higher to the ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... scholarly study of the theory of evolution down the ages "From the Greeks to Darwin" rather startled the world of science by showing not only how old was a theory of evolution, but how frequently it had been stated and how many of them anticipated phases ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... cavalierly reject the Theory of Evolution as not being adequately supported by facts, seem to forget that their own theory is supported by no facts at all. Like the majority of men who are born to a given belief, they demand the most rigorous proof of any adverse belief, but assume that their own ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... consideration of moment. And if any further defence is needed for the idea of a Third Kingdom it may be found in the singular harmony of the whole conception with this great modern truth. It might even be asked whether a complete and consistent theory of Evolution does not really demand such a conception? Why should Evolution stop with the Organic? It is surely obvious that the complement of Evolution is Advolution, and the inquiry, Whence has all this system of things come, ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... animal kingdom was based mainly upon the belief that animals had no language, but this has been proved a mistake and no longer exists. In the light of modern knowledge and a better understanding of the marvellous theory of evolution, we are thoroughly convinced that there is no break whatever in the long chain of living beings. Man has no art, has developed no thing whatever, no mode of language or communication, that is not to be found in some degree among animals. They ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... theory of evolution was true, those times would come, so he decided to set to work at once upon ...
— The Silver Lining - A Guernsey Story • John Roussel
... examples of great beauty as well as of singular, almost grotesque hideousness; the New Zealand myth is surely the best type of the former, and perhaps the Fijian of the latter. As Mr. Lang says: "all the cosmogonic myths waver between the theory of construction, or rather of reconstruction and the theory of evolution very ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... persistent and indestructible, thus proving, as Professor Tyndall says, that "to nature, nothing can be added; from nature, nothing can be taken away." Together, the work of Darwin and Grove, with kindred discoveries, resulted in the theory of evolution, or development. Later on, Herbert Spencer and other students of evolution endeavored to make it the basis of a system of philosophy embracing the whole ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... part of Divus Thomas; and that he affirms his own view to be that which is supported by the authority of the Fathers of the Church. So that, when Mr. Mivart tells us that Catholic theology is in harmony with all that modern science can possibly require; that "to the general theory of evolution, and to the special Darwinian form of it, no exception ... need be taken on the ground of orthodoxy;" and that "law and regularity, not arbitrary intervention, was the Patristic ideal of creation," we have to choose between his dictum, as a theologian, ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... endowed as an institution of learning, the Culpeper generations had weathered both the restraints and the assaults of the centuries. The need to make a living, that grim necessity which is the mother of democracy, had brushed them as lightly as the theory of evolution. Saturated with tradition as with an odour, and fortified by the ponderous moral purpose of the Victorian age, they had never doubted anything that was old and never discovered anything that was new. About them as about the ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... immediate interest to us are the "observations on animals and plants in reference to the theory of evolution of living forms" which the title-page announces as a part of the narrative, and which indeed form the main portion of the work. Upon the publication of Darwin's "Origin of Species" in 1859, Belt had become ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... place to which the larger beds of remains found in the system belong. Besides being a practical and original geologist, Miller had a fine imaginative power, which enabled him to reconstruct the past from its ruinous relics. The fact that he unfortunately set himself the task of combating the theory of evolution, which was fast gaining ground in his day, should not blind us to the high value of his geological experiences. The results of his observations provide some of the most cogent proofs of the theory he disputed. Late ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... of Relativity," says a critic whose eyelids, like the Lady Lisa's, are a little weary, "promises to develop into a principle as adequate to universal application as was the theory of Evolution. This latter theory, from being a technical biological hypothesis, became an inspiring guide to workers in practically every branch of knowledge: manners and customs, morals, religions, philosophies, arts, steam engines, electric ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... whereby each animal was made once for all "after his kind," and according to which there is no further reason that the instincts are what they are than that they were made so; apart from this "special creation" view, two different ideas have had currency, both based upon the theory of evolution. Each of these views assumes that the instincts have been developed from more simple animal actions by a gradual process; but they differ as to the elements originally entering into the actions which afterward ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... palaces[658] were but one form which this popular belief assumed, and when a colt was observed to have a lion's or a dog's claw, an ocular demonstration was afforded which at once strengthened and served to maintain a belief that at bottom is naught but a crude and primitive form of a theory of evolution. In a dim way man always felt the unity of the animal world. Animals resembled one another, and man had some features in common with animals. What more natural than to conclude that at some period, the animals were composite creatures, and that even mankind and ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... (Newton). Also (Beuchot's ed.) xv. 351 (Essai sur les Moeurs) and passim. The date usually set by Voltaire's modern followers is that of the publication of the Origin of Species; although no error is more opposed than this one to the great theory of evolution.] And similar expressions are frequent in his writings. The sectaries, from that day to this, have never been wanting in the most glowing enthusiasm. In this respect they generally surpass the Catholics; in fanaticism (or the quality of being cocksure) ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... the sheriff. 2. How a motor works. 3. How wheat is harvested. 4. Why the tide exists. 5. How our schoolhouse is ventilated. 6. What is meant by the theory of evolution. 7. The manufacture of ——. 8. How to ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... the proximate, end. Moral Science a deduction from the laws of life and the conditions of existence. There have been, and still are, developing in the race, certain fundamental Moral Intuitions. The Expediency-Morality is transitional. Reference to the general theory of Evolution. ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain |
