Origins of Darwin's Theory

Sharing for careful study: A serious scholarly contribution to this deep & world-troubling subject: Vladimir Moss: "The Origins of Darwin's Theory"    Inbox

Dan Everiss <oregdan@hotmail.com> Mon, Jul 9, 2018 at 2:22 PM Reply | Reply to all | Forward | Print | Delete | Show original *Especially, give attention as to how Charles Darwin's false teachings have affected and taught the monstrous bloody mass murderers and oppressors of most of our modern monsters, who all rejected God, but accepted Darwin.  Without God, Who restrains,.... any evil...... is made possible. Morality is thrown out the door.  Man has no real worth or meaning, and thus we can do to each other...anything.  Today, Darwin, world-wide, is still very much worshipped, and his atheist false teachings form the basis of the modernist's false worship of  godless utopianism's  leftist-liberal,  myth of 'Progress'...i.e.  that the world and especially mankind are 'getting better and better all the time'. Clearly, such is just not the true picture....JUST LOOK AROUND and SEE!   Rather, we are moving steadily towards the unfolding of The Mystery of Iniquity, the open reign upon earth of Antichrist.... a total hell on earth, not a utopian paradise. Even so, come quickly Lord Jesus, come quickly! Rd. Daniel in Oregon   "The fool hath said within  his heart, there is no God!" "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom!" "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth!" ALLELUIA!  ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THE ORIGINS OF DARWIN'S THEORY Written by Vladimir Moss THE ORIGINS OF DARWIN’S THEORY      The Bible of the new, mid-nineteenth-century rationalism was Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, published in 1859 but written considerably earlier.[1] The year 1859, according to M.S. Anderson, "can be seen as the beginning of a new era in intellectual life"; for it "gave birth not merely to the Origin of Species but also to Marx's Critique of Political Economy and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde".[2] If eighteenth-century Deism had banished God to the heavens, leaving for Him only the function of Creator, Darwinism deprived Him even of this function, ascribing all creativity to the blind will of nature working entirely through chance. Of course, this could be seen as the height of irrationalism - which it was, and a return to the crudest pagan nature-worship - which it also was. But Darwin succeeded in ascribing to his pagan mysticism the aura ofscience - and few there were, in the 1860s, who dared to question the authority of science.      The theory maintains that all life, even the most complex, has evolved from the simplest organisms over a period of hundreds of millions of years. This process is entirely random, being propelled forward by two mechanisms: natural selection, which "selects out" for survival those organisms with advantageous variations (this was Darwin's preferred mechanism), and genetic mutations, which introduce variations into the genotypes of the organisms (this is the favoured mechanism of the "neo-Darwinists").      "Therefore," writes Bertrand Russell, "among chance variations those that are favourable will preponderate among adults in each generation. Thus from age to age, deer run more swiftly, cats stalk their prey more silently, and giraffes' necks become longer. Given enough time, this mechanism, so Darwin contended, could account for the whole long development from the protozoa to homo sapiens."[3]      "Given enough time…" Time - enormous amounts of it - was indeed a critical ingredient in Darwin's theory; in fact it took the place of a satisfactory causal mechanism. But such a theory chimed in with the historicist temper of the times. It also chimed in with the idea, as Jacques Barzun writes, "that everything is alive and in motion - a dynamic universe"[4], which in turn chimed in with the great dogma of the day, the idea of PROGRESS.      Liberals believed in gradual progress, socialists believed in progress through revolution, everyone except for a few diehards like the Pope believed that things had to change, and that change had to be for the better. Above all, evolution appealed to man's pride, in the belief that man was destined for greater and greater things. "You know," says Lady Constance in Disraeli's novel Tancred (1847), "all is development - the principle is perpetually going on. First, there was nothing; then - I forget the next - I think there were shells; then fishes; then we came - let me see - did we come next? Never mind, we came at last and the next change will be something very superior to us, something with wings."[5]      It will be noted that this was written twelve years before Darwin's Origin of the Species, which shows that the "scientific" theory filled an emotional need already expressed by poets and novelists. Evidently not feeling this need himself, Disraeli said that as between the idea that man was an ape or an angel, he was "on the side of the angels"[6]; but he forgot that, as Lady Constance had opined in his novel, evolution was for many a way of attaining angelic status ("something with wings") in the very long run. For those who did not believe in the deification of man through Christ, evolution provided another, secular and atheist form of deification. This elicited the not unfounded derision of the conservatives. Thus Gobineau said that man was "not descended from the apes, but rapidly getting there".[7]      Thus “doubts there were aplenty”, writes A.N. Wilson, about various questions. “But we who live in a fragmented society have become like an individual addicted to psychoanalysis, struggle with our uncertainties, pick at our virtues and vices as if they were scabs. The Victorian capacity not to do this, to live, very often, with double standards, is what makes so many of them – individually and collectively – seem to be humbugs and hypocrites.”[8]      Darwin himself was not a hypocrite. He knew that his theory was incompatible with Christianity. Thus in 1880 he wrote to Francis McDermott: “I am sorry to have to inform you that I do not believe in the Bible as a divine revelation & therefore not in Jesus Christ as the son of God.”[9]      But the great and the good of the British establishment managed to square the circle of Christianity and the de facto atheism of evolutionism. Thus Newman “regarded Darwin’s theory as compatible with his Catholic beliefs. Darwinism was soon being interpreted optimistically as the means used by God in creating a progressive universe. As the devout High Church Anglican Gladstone put it, ‘Evolution, if it be true, enhances in my judgement the proper idea of the greatness of God.’”[10]      In 1860 a famous debate on Darwinism took place between Thomas Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce (“soapy Sam”), the Bishop of Oxford, at the British Association for the Advancement of Science. According to Isabella Sidgwick, “The Bishop rose, and in a light scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us there was nothing to the idea of evolution, rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? On this Mr. Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us and spoke these tremendous words – words which no one seems sure of now, nor I think, could remember just after they were spoken for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth…”[11]      Paradoxically, Darwin's book never actually discussed the origin of species - the very first and simplest step in evolution, the supposed transformation of inorganic matter into organic. This was perhaps because Darwin knew of Louis Pasteur's contemporary discovery that spontaneous generation is impossible. But modern scientists have continued to try and prove the impossible to be possible in their laboratories, if not in nature - with no success whatsoever.      Darwin himself had doubts about natural selection. "To suppose,” he wrote. “that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree."[12] Instead he turned to the discredited theory of Lamarck, that acquired characteristics are inherited - a theory accepted, in modern times, only by Stalin's scientists...      The German philosopher Nietzsche rejected Darwinism, pointing out, as Copleston writes, "that during most of the time taken up in the formation of a certain organ or quality, the inchoate organ is of no use to its possessor and cannot aid it in its struggle with external circumstances and forces. The influence of ‘external circumstances’ is absurdly overrated by Darwin. The essential factor in the vital process is precisely the tremendous power to shape and create forms from within, a power which uses and exploits the environment."[13]Nietzsche’s insight has been definitively vindicated by the modern discovery of DNA, which shows that most characteristics of species are implanted in them from birth in accordance with a pre-existing code. More recently, Michael Behe has proved that even the simplest living cell is irreducibly complex - that is, it cannot be built up piece-meal from simpler ingredients, but every single ingredient has to be in its place in the extraordinarily complex structure of the cellfrom the beginning.      The idea that all things came into being out of nothing by chance was rejected already in the fourth century by St. Basil the Great: "Where did you get what you have? If you say that you received it by chance, you are an atheist, you do not know your Creator and are not grateful to your Benefactor."[14] And St. Nectarios of Aegina, writing in 1885, was withering in his rejection of this new version of the old heresy: "The followers ofpithecogeny [the derivation of man from the apes] are ignorant of man and of his lofty destiny, because they have denied him his soul and Divine revelation. They have rejected the Spirit, and the Spirit has abandoned them. They withdrew from God, and God withdrew from them; for, thinking they were wise, they became fools... If they had acted with knowledge, they would not have lowered themselves so much, nor would they have taken pride in tracing the origin of the human race to the most shameless of animals. Rightly did the Prophet say of them: 'Man being in honour, did not understand; he is compared to the dumb beasts, and is become like unto them."[15]      A little later, St. Nektary of Optina affirmed that the fossils, the only scientific evidence for evolution, were actually laid down by the Great Flood: "Once a man came to me who simply couldn't believe that there had been a flood. Then I told him that on very high mountains in the sand are found shells and other remains from the ocean floor, and how geology testifies to the flood, and he came to believe. You see how necessary learning is at times." And again the elder said: "God not only permits, but demands of man that he grow in knowledge. However, it is necessary to live and learn so that not only does knowledge not ruin morality, but that morality not ruin knowledge."[16]      The ruination of morality by false theories such as Darwin's was emphasized by St. Nektary's fellow-elder at Optina, St. Barsanuphius (+1912): “Darwin created an entire system according to which life is a struggle for existence, a struggle for the strong against the weak, where those that are conquered are doomed to destruction. This is already the beginning of a bestial philosophy, and those who come to believe in it wouldn't think twice about killing a man, assaulting a woman, or robbing their closest friend - and they would do all this calmly, with a full recognition of their right to commit their crimes.”[17]      It was the implicit denial of the rational, free and moralizing soul that particularly shocked the early critics of Darwinism. For as Darwinism rapidly evolved from a purely biological theory of origins into universal evolutionism going back to what scientists now call the Big Bang, the image of man that emerged was not simply animalian but completely material. Man was made in the image, not of God, but of dead matter.      Moreover, evolutionism turned out to be an explanation of the origins of the whole universe on the basis of a supposedly new philosophy or religion that was in fact very old and very pagan. For "all things were made" now, not by God the Word, the eternal Life and Light of the world, but by blind mutation and "natural selection" (i.e. death). These were the two hands of original Chaos, the father of all things - a conception as old as the pre-Socratic philosophers Anaximander and Heraclitus and as retrogressive as the pre-Christian religions of Egypt and Babylon.          Darwin’s idea of species evolving into and from each other also recalls the Hindu idea of reincarnation. A more likely contemporary influence was Schopenhauer’s philosophy of Will. For both Schopenhauer and Darwin the blind, selfish Will to live was everything; for both there was neither intelligent design nor selfless love, but only the struggle to survive; for both the best that mankind could hope for was not Paradise but a kind of Buddhist nirvana.          Schopenhauer in metaphysics, Darwin in science, and Marx in political theory formed a kind of unholy and unconsubstantial trinity of false prophets, whose essence was Will.[18] Marx liked Darwinism because it appeared to justify the idea of class struggle as the fundamental mechanism of human evolution. "The idea of class struggle logically flows from 'the law of the struggle for existence'. It is precisely by this law that Marxism explains the emergence of classes and their struggle, whence logically proceeds the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead of racist pre-eminence class pre-eminence is preached."[19]          However, Darwinism’s blind historicism and implicit atheism was also congenial to Marx. As Richard Wurmbrand notes: "After Marx had read The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, he wrote a letter to Lassalle in which he exults that God - in the natural sciences at least - had been given 'the death blow'".[20] "Karl Marx," writes Hieromonk Damascene, "was a devout Darwinist, who in Das Kapital called Darwin's theory 'epoch making'. He believed his reductionist, materialistic theories of the evolution of social organization to be deducible from Darwin's discoveries, and thus proposed to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. The funeral oration over Marx's body, delivered by Engels, stressed the evolutionary basis of communism: 'Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.'"[21]      “Darwinism and Marxism,” wrote Fr. Seraphim Rose, “are inextricably linked. Karl Marx, one of world history’s biggest villains, dedicated his book Das Kapital to Darwin. The five biggest mass murderers in world history, Pol Pot, Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, were all heavily influenced by Darwin. With Darwinist-utilitarian logic, Pol Pot stated, ‘Keeping you is no gain. Losing you is no loss.’ Adolf Hitler dedicated his memoir Mein Kampf (My Struggle) to the subtitle ofThe Origin of Species, and tried to put Darwin’s theory into practice by conducting the Holocaust. Vladimir Lenin said, ‘Darwin put an end to the belief that the animal and vegetable species bear no relation to one another, except by chance, and that they were created by God, and hence immutable.’ He also owned a bronze statue of an ape gazing at an oversized human skull on a stack of his books, one of them being The Origin of Species. His right-hand man, Leon Trotsky also talked about Darwin’s influence on himself. When Joseph Stalin came across Darwin as a young kid, he became convinced that God does not exist, and told a classmate all about him. When he took power, he said, ‘There are three things that we do to disabuse the minds of our seminary students. We had to teach them the age of the earth, the geologic origin, and Darwin’s teachings.’ Stalin also tried to create ape-men super warriors by putting human semen into female apes. Mao Tse-tung listed Darwin as the most influential Westerner in his life, along with Darwin’s followers Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, and Herbert Spencer. Mao also said ‘The basis of Chinese socialism rest on Darwin and his theory of evolution.’”[22]      "The years after 1870," writes Gareth Stedman Jones, "were dominated by the prestige of the natural sciences, especially that of Darwin. Playing to these preoccupations, Engels presented Marx's work, not as a theory of communism or as a study of capitalism, but as the foundation of a parallel 'science of historical materialism'. Socialism had made a transition from 'utopia' to 'science'"...[23]      Not only Marxism, but also its rival, Capitalism, found support in Darwinism. For Darwinism can be seen as the application of the principles of capitalist competition to nature. Thus Bertrand Russell writes: "Darwinism was an application to the whole of animal and vegetable life of Malthus's theory of population, which was an integral part of the politics and economics of the Benthamites - a global free competition, in which victory went to the animals that most resembled successful capitalists. Darwin himself was influenced by Malthus, and was in general sympathy with the Philosophical Radicals. There was, however, a great difference between the competition admired by orthodox economists and the struggle for existence which Darwin proclaimed as the motive force of evolution. 'Free competition,' in orthodox economics, is a very artificial conception, hedged in by legal restrictions. You may undersell a competitor, but you must not murder him. You must not use the armed forces of the State to help you to get the better of foreign manufacturers. Those who have the good fortune to possess capital must not seek to improve their lot by revolution. 'Free competition', as understood by the Benthamites, was by no means really free.      "Darwinian competition was not of this limited sort; there were no rules against hitting below the belt. The framework of law does not exist among animals, nor is war excluded as a competitive method. The use of the State to secure victory in competition was against the rules as conceived by the Benthamites, but could not be excluded from the Darwinian struggle. In fact, though Darwin himself was a Liberal, and though Nietzsche never mentions him except with contempt, Darwin's 'Survival of the Fittest' led, when thoroughly assimilated, to something much more like Nietzsche's philosophy than like Bentham's. These developments, however, belong to a later period, since Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, and its political implications were not at first perceived…"[24]      As for the political implications of Darwin's book, they are obvious from its full title: On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the struggle for life. Darwin did not mean by "races" races of men, but species of animals. However, the inference was easily drawn that certain races of men are more “favoured” than others; and this inference was still more easily drawn after the publication of The Descent of Man in 1871.      Darwin’s writings are definitely racist. In The Descent of Man he wrote, “At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world.” And again: “With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated. … We civilized men, on the other hand … build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. … Thus the weak members propagate their kind. No one who had attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. … Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. …” Darwin continued: “Civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. … The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”      Very soon different races or classes or groups of men were being viewed as if they were different species. "Applied to politics," writes Jacques Barzun, "[Darwinism] bred the doctrine that nations and other social groups struggle endlessly in order that the fittest shall survive. So attractive was this 'principle' that it got the name of Social Darwinism."[25] Thus Social Darwinism may be defined as the idea that "human affairs are a jungle in which only the fittest of nations, classes, or individuals will survive".[26      Social Darwinism leads to the conclusion that certain races are congenitally superior to others. "Only congenital characteristics are inherited," writes Russell, "apart from certain not very important exceptions. Thus the congenital differences between men acquire fundamental importance."[27] As Fr. Timothy Alferov writes: "The ideas of racial pre-eminence - racism, Hitlerism - come from the Darwinist teaching on the origin of the races and their unequal significance. The law of the struggle for existence supposedly obliges the strong races to exert a strong dominance over the other races, to the extent of destroying the latter. It is not necessary to describe here the incarnation of these ideas in life in the example of Hitlerism, but it is worth noting that Hitler greatly venerated Darwin."[28]      Social Darwinism also had an important effect on criminology. Thus, as Evans writes, “Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909), who served with the Italian army in 1863 fighting brigands in Calabria, came to the view that criminals were not made but born, representing throwbacks to an earlier stage of human evolution. In 1876 he published Criminal Man, which took advantage of the development of photography to argue that born criminals had long arms, simian features and other physical attributes of the ape. Lombroso’s idea of atavism, of criminals as evolutionary throwbacks, never received much support, and as time went on he modified his arguments to suggest that hereditary criminality was also the consequence of generations of alcoholism, or sexually transmitted diseases, or malnutrition; but more generally the basic idea that criminality was inherited began to exert a growing influence across Europe in the late nineteenth century.      “The consequences of Lambroso’s basic argument, popularized by his student Enrico Ferri (1856-1929) in Italy, by Gustav Aschaffenburg (1866-1944) in Germany, by Francis Galton (1822-1911) in Britain, and by Rafael Salillas (1854-1923) in Spain, were momentous. The study of crime and criminality became the province not of law and its practitioners but of medicine and of professional criminology. Increasingly, n the 1890s and beyond, arguments began to be raised in favour of the compulsory sterilization of the ‘inferior’ who might be found work but should not be allowed to reproduce. Lombroso himself, along with many others who shared at least some of his views, began to argue for capital punishment on new grounds, namely that the extremely degenerate offender, the criminal with inherited violent traits, could neither be rendered safe nor removed from the chain of heredity unless he or she was eliminated altogether. Punishment had come full circle, from the medieval and early modern punishment of the body to the Enlightenment and Victorian punishment of the mind, and back again to the turn-of-the-century punishment of the body again.”[29]      However, while appearing to widen the differences between races and classes of men, Social Darwinism also reduces them between men and other species - with startling consequences.      Thus Russell writes: "If men and animals have a common ancestry, and if men developed by such slow stages that there were creatures which we should not know whether to classify as human or not, the question arises: at what stage in evolution did men, or their semi-human ancestors, begin to be all equal? Would Pithecanthropus erectus, if he had been properly educated, have done work as good as Newton's? Would the Piltdown Men have written Shakespeare's poetry if there had been anybody to convict him of poaching? A resolute egalitarian who answers these questions in the affirmative will find himself forced to regard apes as the equals of human beings. And why stop at apes? I do not see how he is to resist an argument in favour of Votes for Oysters. An adherent of evolution should maintain that not only the doctrine of the equality of all men, but also that of the rights of man, must be condemned as unbiological, since it makes too emphatic a distinction between men and other animals."[30]       Since Russell’s time this idea of the essential quality between men and animals has come to be taken more seriously than he evidently took it…      Arthur Balfour, who became British Prime Minister in 1902, described the world-view that universal evolutionism proclaimed as follows: "A man - so far as natural science is able to teach us, is no longer the final cause of the universe, the Heaven-descended heir of all the ages. His very existence is an accident, his story a brief and transitory episode in the life of one of the meanest of the planets. Of the combination of causes which first converted a dead organic compound into the living progenitors of humanity, science indeed, as yet knows nothing. It is enough that from such beginnings famine, disease, and mutual slaughter, fit nurses of the future lords of creation, have gradually evolved after infinite travail, a race with conscience enough to feel that it is vile, and intelligent enough to know that it is insignificant. We survey the past, and see that its history is of blood and tears, of helpless blundering, of wild revolt, of stupid acquiescence, of empty aspirations. We sound the future, and learn that after a period, long compared with the individual life, but short indeed compared with the divisions of time open to our investigation, the energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude. Man will go down into the pit, and all his thoughts will perish…"[31]      A truly melancholy philosophy – but fortunately there is no reason to believe in it. C.S. Lewis wrote: "By universal evolutionism I mean the belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to perfect, from small beginnings to great endings, from the rudimentary to the elaborate, the belief which makes people find it natural to think that morality springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual maladjustments, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from inorganic, cosmos from chaos. This is perhaps the deepest habit of mind in the contemporary world. It seems to me immensely implausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of nature we can observe. You remember the old puzzle as to whether the owl came from the egg or the egg from the owl. The modern acquiescence in universal evolutionism is a kind of optical illusion, produced by attending exclusively to the owl's emergence from the egg. We are taught from childhood to notice how the perfect oak grows from the acorn and to forget that the acorn itself was dropped by a perfect oak. We are reminded constantly that the adult human being was an embryo, never that the life of the embryo came from two adult human beings. We love to notice that the express engine of today is the descendant of the 'Rocket'; we do not equally remember that the 'Rocket' springs not from some even more rudimentary engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself - namely, a man of genius. The obviousness or naturalness which most people seem to find in the idea of emergent evolution thus seems to be a pure hallucination…"[32] June 25 / July 8, 2018. [1]Darwin may have waited many years before publishing his theory partly because, as Robert Tombs writes, “the socio-economic and political climate was calmer” (The English and their History, New York: Alfred A. Knopfer, 2014, p. 470) and partly because, as David Quammen writes, he was anxious "about announcing a theory that seemed to challenge conventional religious beliefs - in particular, the Christian beliefs of his wife, Emma. Darwin himself quietly renounced Christianity during his middle age, and later described himself as an agnostic. He continued to believe in a distant, impersonal deity of some sort, a greater entity that had set the universe and its laws into motion, but not in a personal God who had chosen humanity as a specially favored species. Darwin avoided flaunting his lack of religious faith, at least partly in deference to Emma. And she prayed for his soul…" ("Was Darwin Wrong?", National Geographic, November, 2004, p. 9)  [2]Anderson, The Ascendancy of Europe, 1815-1914, London: Longman, 1985, p. 365. [3]Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen & Unwin, 1946, p. 752. [4] Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 501. [5]Disraeli, in Barzun, op. cit., p. 502. [6] Barzun, op. cit., p. 571. [7] Barzun, op. cit., p. 571. [8] Wilson, The Victorians, London: Hutchinson, 2002, p. 53. [9]“A Matter of Faith for Darwin”, The Irish Times, Fine Arts and Antiques Section,September 19, 2015, p. 21. [10] Tombs, op. cit., p. 470. [11] Sidgwick, in Richard Evans, Europe. The Pursuit of Power, London: Penguin, 2017, p. 472. [12]Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, 1909 Harvard Classics edition, p. 190. [13]Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 7, part II: Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books, 1965, pp. 185-186. [14]St. Basil the Great, Sermon on Avarice. [15]St. Nectarios, Sketch concerning Man, Athens, 1885. [16]Zhitia prepodobnykh Startsev Optinoj Pustyni (The Lives of the Holy Elders of Optina Desert), Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, 1992. [17]Victor Afanasyev, Elder Barsanuphius of Optina, Platina: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000, p. 488. [18]Marx's task was "to convert the 'Will' of German philosophy and this abstraction into a force in the practical world" (A.N. Wilson, After the Victorians, London: Hutchinson, 2005, p. 126). [19]Fr. Timothy Alferov, Pravoslavnoe Mirovozzrenie i Sovremennoe Estestvoznanie (The Orthodox World-View and the Contemporary Science of Nature), Moscow: "Palomnik", 1998, p. 158. [20]Wurmbrand, Was Karl Marx a Satanist?, Diane Books (USA), 1976, p. 44. [21]Hieromonk Damascene, in Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2000, p. 339, note. [22] Rose, Genesis, Creation, and Early Man. [23]Gareth Jones, "The Routes of Revolution", BBC History Magazine, vol. 3 (6), June, 2002, p. 36. [24] Russell, op. cit., pp. 807-808 [25] Barzun, op. cit. pp. 571-572. [26] Norman Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 794. [27] Russell, op. cit., p. 753. [28] Alferov, Pravoslavnoe Mirovozzrenie i Sovremennoe Estesvoznanie (The Orthodox World-View and the Contemporary Science of Nature), Moscow: "Palomnik", 1998, pp. 157-158. [29] Evans, op. cit., pp. 439-440. [30] Russell, op. cit., p. 753. A British television programme once seriously debated the question whether apes should have the same rights as human beings, and came to a positive conclusion...  See Joanna Bourke, What it Means to be Human, London: Virago, 2011. [31]Balfour, The Foundations of Belief, 1895, pp. 30-31; in Wilson, The Victorians, London: Hutchinson, 2002, p. 557. [32]Lewis, "Is Theology Poetry?", in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, New York: Macmillan, 1949.