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Evolutionary ideas of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment developed as natural history became more sophisticated during the 17th and 18th centuries, and as the scientific revolution and the rise of mechanical philosophy encouraged viewing the natural world as a machine whose workings were subject to analysis. Despite this the evolutionary ideas of the early 18th century were of a religious and spiritural nature. In the 2nd half of the 18th century more materialistic and explicit ideas about biological evolution began to emerge making this an important era in the history of evolutionary thought. ==17th and early 18th century== The word ''evolution'' (from the Latin ''evolutio'', meaning "to unroll like a scroll") appeared in English in the 17th century, referring to an orderly sequence of events, particularly one in which the outcome was somehow contained within it from the start. Notably, in 1677 Sir Matthew Hale, attacking the atheistic atomism of Democritus and Epicurus, used the term ''evolution'' to describe his opponent's ideas that vibrations and collisions of atoms in the void — without divine intervention — had formed "Primordial Seeds" (semina) which were the "immediate, primitive, productive Principles of Men, Animals, Birds and Fishes." For Hale, this mechanism was "absurd", because "it must have potentially at least the whole Systeme of Humane Nature, or at least that Ideal Principle or Configuration thereof, in the evolution whereof the complement and formation of the Humane Nature must consist ... and all this drawn from a fortuitous coalition of senseless and dead Atoms."〔 While Hale (ironically) first used the term evolution in arguing ''against'' the exact mechanistic view the word would come to symbolize, he also demonstrates that at least some evolutionist theories explored between 1650 and 1800 postulated that the universe, including life on earth, had developed mechanically, entirely without divine guidance. Around this time, the mechanical philosophy of Descartes, reinforced by the physics of Galileo and Newton, began to encourage the machine-like view of the universe which would come to characterise the scientific revolution.〔Bowler 2003 pp. 33-38〕 However, most contemporary theories of evolution, including those developed by the German idealist philosophers Schelling and Hegel (and mocked by Schopenhauer), held that evolution was a fundamentally ''spiritual'' process, with the entire course of natural and human evolution being "a self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute".〔Schelling, ''System of Transcendental Idealism'', 1800〕 Typical of these theorists, Gottfried Leibniz postulated in 1714 that "monads" inside objects caused motion by internal forces, and maintained that "the 'germs' of all things have always existed ... () contain within themselves an internal principle of development which drives them on through a vast series of metamorphoses" to become the geological formations, lifeforms, psychologies, and civilizations of the present. Leibniz clearly felt that evolution proceeded on divine principles — in his ''De rerum originatione radicali'' (1697), he wrote: "A cumulative increase of the beauty and universal perfection of the works of God, a perpetual and unrestricted progress of the universe as a whole must be recognized, such that it advances to a higher state of cultivation."〔Lovejoy 1936, p. 257〕 Others, such as J. G. von Herder, expressed similar ideas.〔Lovejoy 1936, pp. 183–184, 279–280, 369〕 Between 1603 and 1613 Sir Walter Raleigh was a prisoner in the Tower of London awaiting execution; in this period he wrote a history of the world in five volumes where he described his American experiences and adventures, in it he wondered whether all the new species discovered in the new continent could have found their place on Noah's Ark. A very serious question at the time, he postulates that only animals from the old continent found place on the Ark; eventually, after the Flood, some of these animals would migrate to the new continent and, under environmental pressure, change their appearances to create new species.〔Wendt Herbert, ''In Search of Adam'', 1955, pp. 38-39〕Fifty years later, Matthew Hale went even further, and said that only the prototypes of all animal species were welcomed on the Ark; these would eventually differentiate after their release.〔Wendt Herbert, ''In Search of Adam'', 1955, pp. 40〕 Many clergymen were happy with Raleigh and Hale ideas since they appeared to solve the problem of the Ark's tonnage. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Evolutionary ideas of the Renaissance and Enlightenment」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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