Let us now first of all glance at the most important of all the supernatural histories of creation, I mean that of Moses, as it has been handed down to us in the Bible, the ancient document of the history and laws of the Jewish people. The Mosaic history of creation, since in the first chapter of Genesis it forms the introduction to the Old Testament, has enjoyed, down to the present day, general recognition in the whole Jewish and Christian world of civilization. Its extraordinary success is explained not only by its close connection with Jewish and Christian doctrines, but also by the simple and natural chain of ideas which runs through it, and which contrasts favourably with the confused mythology of creation current among most of the other ancient nations. First the Lord God creates the earth as an inorganic body; then he separates light from darkness, then water from the dry land. Now the earth has become inhabitable for organisms, and plants are first created, animals later—and among the latter the inhabitants of the water and the air first, afterwards the inhabitants of the dry land. Finally God creates man, the last of all organisms, in his own image, and as the ruler of the earth. Two great and fundamental ideas, common also to the non-miraculous theory of development, meet us in this Mosaic hypothesis of creation, with surprising clearness and simplicity—the idea of separation or _differentiation_, and the idea of progressive development or _perfecting_. Although Moses looks upon the results of the great laws of organic development (which we shall later point out as the necessary conclusions of the Doctrine of Descent) as the direct actions of a constructing Creator, yet in his theory there lies hidden the ruling idea of a progressive development and a differentiation of the originally simple matter. We can therefore bestow our just and sincere admiration on the Jewish lawgiver’s grand insight into nature, and his simple and natural hypothesis of creation, without discovering in it a so-called “divine revelation.” That it cannot be such is clear from the fact that two great fundamental errors are asserted in it, namely, first, the _geocentric_ error that the earth is the fixed central point of the whole universe, round which the sun, moon, and stars move; and secondly, the _anthropocentric_ error, that man is the premeditated aim of the creation of the earth, for whose service alone all the rest of nature is said to have been created. The former of these errors was demolished by Copernicus’ System of the Universe in the beginning of the 16th century, the latter by Lamarck’s Doctrine of Descent in the beginning of the 19th century.