Turning from the Orient, it is of interest to interrogate the Greek writers as to the creation schemes that were current in classical times. In the histories of Greece and Rome, we shall have occasion to examine these somewhat more in detail. For the present purpose, perhaps, an excerpt from Diodorus, who wrote with a full knowledge both of Greek and Roman ideas at about the beginning of our era, will be sufficiently illuminative.
Diodorus begins his history of the World with a brief account of the current notions as to the creation. He says: “Of the origin, therefore, of men there are two opinions amongst the most famous and authentic naturalists and historians. Some of these are of opinion that the world had neither beginning nor ever shall have end, and likewise say that mankind was from eternity and there never was a time when he first began to be. Others, on the contrary, conceive both the world to be made, and to be corruptible, and that there was a certain time when men had first a being; for, whereas all things at the first were jumbled together, heaven and earth were in one mass and had one and the same form. But afterward they say when corporeal beings appeared one after another, the world at length presented itself in the order we now see, and that the air was in continual agitation, whose fiery parts ascended together to the highest place, its nature ‘by reason of its levity’ trending always upward, for which reason both the sun and that vast number of stars are contained within that orb; that the gross and earthy matter clotted together by moisture, by reason of its weight sunk down below into which place by continually whirling about. The sea was made of the humid, and the muddy earth of the more solid, as yet very soft, which by degrees at first was made crusty by the heat of the sun, and then, after the face of the earth was parched, and, as it were, fermented, the moisture afterward in many places bubbled up, as may be seen in standing ponds and marshy places, when, after the earth has been pierced with cold, the air grows hot on a sudden without a gradual alteration, and whereas moisture generates creatures from heat, things so generated by being enrapt in the dewy mists of the night grew and increased, and in the day solidified and were made hard by the heat of the sun, and thus the forms of all sorts of living creatures were brought forth into the light, and those that had most heat mounted aloft, and were fowls and birds of the air, but those that had more of earth were numbered in the order of creeping things and other creatures altogether suited to the earth. Then those beasts that were naturally watery and moist, called fishes, presently hastened to the place natural to them; and when the earth afterward became more dry and solid by the heat of the sun and the drying winds, it had not power at length to produce any more of the greater living creatures. And Euripides, the pupil of Anaxagoras, seems to be of the same opinion concerning the first generation of all things, for in his Menilippe he has these verses:
“‘A mass confused
Heaven and Earth once were
Of one form; but after separation
Then men, trees, beasts of the earth with fowls of the air
First sprang up in a generation.’
“But if this power of the earth to produce living creatures at the first origin of all things seem incredible to any, the Egyptians bring testimonies of this energy of the earth by the same things done there at this day; for they say that about Thebes in Egypt, after the overflowing of the river Nile, the earth thereby being covered by mud and slime, many places putrefy by the heat of the sun, and thence are bred multitudes of mice. It is certain, therefore, that out of the earth when it is hardened, and the air changed from its dew and natural temperament, animals are generated, by which means it came to pass that in the first beginning of all things various living creatures proceeded from the earth. And these are the opinions touching the original of all things.”
It would be difficult to say to what extent this Greek conception of creation had its origin in, or was influenced by, Oriental conception. Certainly the resemblance between this description and the Mosaic accounts, as contained in the first two chapters of Genesis, is noteworthy. Quite probably the ideas of both Hebrews and Greeks had been moulded to some extent in the pattern of Egyptian thought. Be that as it may, it was the scheme of cosmogony expressed in the Hebrew legends that was to become dominant in post-classical times, and to rule unchallenged in the Western world for more than a thousand years. Indeed, this estimate of the time of real supremacy of the Hebrew thought is much too low; for that thought, though challenged as to some of its features by the science of the Renaissance which ushered in the period of modern history, was none the less to retain its hold upon the thoughts of men, but little abated in force, for another half millennium.
Not till well toward the close of the eighteenth century was an attempt made to substitute a scientific guess at the riddle of creation for the old poetic ones, and yet another century elapsed before the new explanations availed fully to supplant the old ones. It was Laplace, the great French mathematician, who elaborated toward the close of the eighteenth century a so-called nebular hypothesis, which may fairly be considered the first measurably scientific attempt ever made to explain the origin of the world. The hypothesis conceives that, at a time indefinitely remote, the entire solar system and space far beyond it was filled with a “fire mist,” consisting of the material in a gaseous state which now forms the sun and planets. This gaseous body, contracting through loss of heat, and rotating on its axis, left behind from time to time, successive rings of its own substance, that, consolidating, became the planets; the remaining core of substance contracting finally to constitute the body that we call the sun.
Nineteenth century science elaborated, without essentially modifying, this nebular hypothesis. Elaborate attempts have been made by Dr. Croll and by Sir Norman Lockyer to explain the origin of the “fire mist” itself, from which per hypothesis our solar system and an infinity of like stellar systems were formed. The meteoritic hypothesis of Lockyer supposes that the primeval fire mist was due to the collision of swarms of meteors; Croll’s theory postulates the smashing together of dark stars: but the two theories are essentially identical in their main thought, which is, that previously solidified bodies of the universe are made gaseous through mutual impact, thus affording material for the operation of those changes outlined in the nebular hypothesis of Laplace. True or false, this hypothesis stands to-day as the expression of the profoundest cosmogonic scientific guess that modern thought has been able to substitute for the poetic guesses of antiquity.
As to the creation of the living things on the globe, including man, the Oriental idea, which amounted to no explanation at all, but was rather the hiding of utter ignorance behind a screen of positive assertion, has been supplanted in the latter part of the nineteenth century by the scientific explanations of the evolutionists. The theory of evolution, as first formulated in anything like scientific terms, about the close of the eighteenth century, by the elder Darwin, the poet Goethe, and the French philosophical zoölogist Lamarck, and as given such amazing fertility by Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection in 1859, has taken full possession of the field as an explanation of the development of man through a series of lower organisms. But it must not be forgotten that this theory, with all of its revolutionary implications, does not as yet explain in clear scientific terms the origin of that lowliest organism which is the first in its series of living beings. It is for the science of the future to take this remaining step. Meantime, the developmental theory of to-day suffices to substitute in precise terms a scientific explanation of the origin of man for the vagaries of the old-time dreamers; and the more daring thinkers feel that the gap between the inorganic world and the lowest of man’s ancestors is not an impassable barrier to the application of a theory of universal evolution.