But now, in all soberness, what is really to be said of this German logic; this German philosophy of war and war methods; this holy justification on a basis of natural law of everything that seems worst and utterly hopeless to most of the rest of the world? Let us look at the whole matter, both the biology and the Germanism, in the light of freedom from dogma and outraged feeling. Let us look both at the alleged natural law and the German creature so camouflaged by it that he deceives himself into believing that he is really the superman that his philosophy paints him. For it is quite true that many Germans, many educated Germans, do believe what they say of themselves and of their Holy Crusade under the banner of Natural Law. First we can say of this natural law that it isn't natural law. Evolution is not all caused and controlled by natural selection; natural selection is not all based on cruel and extinguishing struggle; struggle is not all blood and violence. In a word, Nature is not all red in tooth and claw. And, finally, human evolution is not all identical with brute evolution. The last score of years has brought us a wonderful new knowledge of biology. And it has brought us, too, a new realization of the great deal that we do not know about biology. The most conspicuous and significant part of our new positive knowledge has to do with the processes and results of heredity. The most conspicuous and significant part of our realization of our lack of knowledge has to do with the explanation of evolution. And the two things are intimately connected. The time has come when the explanations of evolution need to be, and can be, looked on in a light free from control by dogma. When this is done the hollowness and the hatefulness of the long reign of the much more than Darwinian Neo-Darwinism is clear as day. * * * * * Let us glance over the history of the doctrine. The Greeks had ideas about evolution based less on known facts than on the visions and promptings of minds endowed with creative imagination. Yet these ideas foreshadowed in curiously close approximation the evolution conceptions, not only of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to whom are usually ascribed the first formulations of the evolution doctrine, but even many of the newer formulations of the present and just passed centuries. Even the essence of Darwin's famous explanation of evolution by natural selection is suggested in the expressions of some of the Attic philosophers. As, for example, in the writings of Empedocles, who conceived of a creation of separate animal parts of a great variety of kinds and the coming together of some of these parts to form viable organisms and of others to form combinations unable to persist as successful creatures, because unfit to meet the demands of natural conditions.