Conservatism, Liberalism and Nationalism:

SCIENCE CONTINUES It was no just in relationship to commerce, industry and social welfare, however, that the great scientific achievements of the nineteenth century had an impact. By this time the perspectives of the Enlightenment had so affected both philosophy and science that the climate was more favorable than ever for asking totally new kinds of questions and for challenging old assumptions. The work of Kepler, Galileo and others had completely shattered old concepts of astronomy and physics, and Newton’s brilliant exposition of the laws of gravity demonstrated that the entire universe operated on the basis of certain natural laws. Such laws, many people believed, governed not only the relationships between physical bodies, but everything, including human development, social institutions, and political institutions. Moreover, these laws could be discovered. It was this exhilarating possibility that led not only to great scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century but also to new economic and political philosophies, including those of Karl Marx. Charles Darwin. The theory of biological evolution did not originate with Darwin, but it was Darwin who discovered the laws governing the evolution of species. He became the most influential of all nineteenth-century evolutionists. Beginning in 1831 he was the official naturalist on a five-year cruise to Latin America and the South Pacific, during which time he collected numerous specimens of many animal species. As he went from island to island he also observed significant variations between species of both flora and fauna. The matter haunted him, he said, for he could only conclude that somehow these species had been gradually modified. Later, influenced by all this as well as by his study of fossils, he concluded that life did not begin as a special creation, but rather all life evolved from a common ancestral origin. This meant that life forms are capable of change, that variations develop by a process of natural selection, and that in the struggle for survival it is the fittest of each species that survives. The details of Darwin’s theory have been modified many times. Scientists still disagree on numerous issues, but virtually all of them accept his general principles of evolution. Darwinism and Its Consequences. The presentation of Darwin’s theories had profound consequences for himself as well as for the religious and social perspectives of the world. His famous work, On the Origin of Species, was published in 1859, and it had immediate religious repercussions. Darwin himself did not believe that his theories undermined belief in God – in fact, he felt that his theory actually presented a grander view of life. He wrote in the last paragraph of his book: