The great majority of the older ideas that thoughtful men had formed on the origin and nature of the world and their own frame were far removed from the notion of "self-development." They culminated in more or less obscure creation-myths, which generally put in the foreground the idea of a personal Creator. Just as man has used intelligence and design in the making of his weapons and tools, his houses and his boats, so it was thought that the Creator had fashioned the world with art and intelligence, according to a definite plan. Among the many legends of this kind the ancient Semitic story of creation, familiar to us as the Mosaic narrative, but drawn for the most part from Babylonian sources, has obtained a very great influence on European culture owing to the general acceptance of the Bible. The belief in miracles, that is involved in these religious legends, was bound to come in conflict, at an early date, with the evolutionary ideas of independent philosophical research. On the one hand, in the prevalent religious teaching, we had the supernatural world, the miraculous, teleology: on the other hand, in the nascent science of evolution, only natural law, pure reason, mechanical causality. Every step that was made by this science brought into greater relief its inconsistency with the predominant religion.[1] If we glance for a moment at the various fields in which the idea of evolution is scientifically applied we find that, firstly, the whole universe is conceived as a unity; secondly, our earth; thirdly, organic life on the earth; fourthly, man, as its highest product; and fifthly, the soul, as a special immaterial entity. Thus we have, in historical succession, the evolutionary research of cosmology, geology, biology, anthropology, and psychology.