Darwin’s Formation of Vegetable Mould — its philosophical basis

Abstract

The name of the great naturalist Charles Darwin is connected in the mind of humanity primarily with the theory of natural selection and with his strictly materialistic theory of organic evolution. Using consistently materialistic premises, Darwin has shown the possibility of the origin of the multitude of plants and animals and of the rise of new species as a result of the accumulation of small hereditary changes of ancestral forms. Darwin’s methodology was a pontaneously dialectic one; his theoretical constructions and conclusions may serve as brilliant illustrations of the philosophical law of transition by quantitative changes into the new quality.