I have fully appreciated the merit of Lamarck in the fifth chapter, and of Darwin in the sixth and seventh chapters, of the _Natural History of Creation_. Darwin, fifty years afterwards, not only gave a solid foundation to all the essential parts of the theory of descent, but he filled up the _lacunae_ of Lamarck's work by his theory of selection. Darwin reaped abundantly the success that Lamarck had never seen, with all his merit. His epoch-making work on _The Origin of Species by Natural Selection_ has transformed modern biology from its very foundations, in the course of the last forty years, and has raised it to a stage of development that yields to no other science in existence. Darwin is _the Copernicus of the organic world_, as I said in 1868, and E. du Bois-Reymond repeated fifteen years afterwards.[27] IV.--MONISTIC ANTHROPOGENY The fourth and last phase of the world's history must be for us men that latest period of time which has witnessed the development of our own race. Lamarck (1809) had already recognized that this evolution is only rationally conceivable as the outcome of a natural process, by "descent from the apes," our next of kin among the mammals. Huxley then proved, in his famous essay on _The Place of Man in Nature_, that this momentous thesis is an inevitable consequence of the theory of descent, and is thoroughly established by the facts of anatomy, embryology, and palæontology. He considered this "question of all questions" to be substantially answered. Darwin followed with a brilliant discussion of the question under many aspects in his _Descent of Man_ (1871). I had myself devoted a special chapter to this important problem of the science of evolution in my _General Morphology_ (1866). In 1874 I published my _Anthropogeny_, which contains the first attempt to trace the descent of man through the entire chain of his ancestry right up to the earliest archigonous monera; the attempt was based equally on the three great "documents" of evolutionary science--anatomy, embryology, and palæontology. The progress we have made in anthropogenetic research during the last few years is described in the paper which I read on "Our Present Knowledge of the Origin of Man" at the International Congress of Zoologists at Cambridge in 1898.[28] CHAPTER XIV THE UNITY OF NATURE The Monism of the Cosmos--Essential Unity of Organic and Inorganic Nature--Carbon-Theory--The Hypothesis of Abiogenesis--Mechanical and Purposive Causes--Mechanicism and Teleology in Kant's Works--Design in the Organic and Inorganic Worlds--Vitalism--Neovitalism--Dysteleology (the Moral of the Rudimentary Organs)--Absence of Design in, and Imperfection of, Nature--Telic Action in Organized Bodies--Its Absence in Ontogeny and Phylogeny--The Platonist "Ideas"--No Moral Order Discoverable in the History of the Organic World, of the Vertebrates, or of the Human Race--Prevision--Design and Chance