=Arthur M. Lewis.= Chicago, Dec. 27, ’07. EVOLUTION, SOCIAL AND ORGANIC I. THALES TO LINNAEUS. “Early ideas,” says Herbert Spencer, “are usually vague adumbrations of the truth,” and however numerous may be the exceptions, this was undoubtedly the case with the evolutionary speculations of the ancient Greeks. The greatness of that remarkable republic finds one of its most striking manifestations in the fact that so many great modern ideas trace their ancestry back to Greece. Sir Henry Maine, the historical jurist, said that, “except the blind forces of nature, nothing moves that is not Greek in its origin.” Compared with her dreamy oriental neighbors, Greece shone like a meteor in a moonless night. As Professor Burnet says, “They left off telling tales. They gave up the hopeless task of describing what was, when as yet there was nothing, and asked instead what all things really are now,” while the Oriental shrunk from the search after causes, looking, as Professor Butcher aptly remarks “on each fresh gain of earth as so much robbery of heaven.” The Greeks very largely discarded the theological mind, peopled with its pious phantasms, and sought to probe into the nature of the material universe. This is why we discover a fairly distinct, and sometimes startlingly clear “adumbration” of the theory of evolution running like a chain of gold through the immortal fragments of their greatest thinkers. What is it that really is, and what that only seems to be? What is real, and what is only apparent? This is the theme which Greek philosophy has in common with modern thought, and this is why the remnants of Greek literature are so precious in the twentieth century. Thales, of Miletus, in Asia Minor, is conceded to have been the founder of Greek philosophy. “He asserted water to be the principle of all things,” says Diogenes Laertius, and he regarded all life as coming from water, a position by no means foreign to modern science. Anaximander, also a Milesian and a younger contemporary of Thales, who like him flourished between 500 and 600 B. C., said that the material cause of all things was the Infinite. “It is neither water nor any other of what are now called the elements, but a substance different from them which is infinite, from which arise all the heavens and the worlds within them.” “Man,” he boldly asserts, “is like another animal, namely, a fish, in the beginning,” a shrewd guess which is now an established fact.