he young Charles Darwin had listened to his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, since childhood.
46 Actually, it was Erasmus Darwin who first proposed the idea of evolution in England. He was known as a physicist, a psychologist and a poet and exercised considerable influence, although he led a dark personal life and had at least two illegitimate children.
47 But Erasmus Darwin was one of the most well-known naturalists in England. Naturalism believed that the essence of the universe lay in nature and that it had a creative power. While the roots of this doctrine go back to the naturalist philosophy found in ancient Greek and Sumerian myths, its major proponent by the 19th century was the Masonic organization.
This fact was confirmed in 1884 by Pope Leo XIII, the leader of the Catholic world, in his encyclical Humanum Genus (The Human Race), which was directed particularly at the Masons: At this period, however, the partisans of evil seems to be combining together, and to be struggling with united vehemence, led on or assisted by that strongly organized and widespread association called the Freemasons. No longer making any secret of their purposes, they are now boldly rising up against God Himself.
Erasmus Darwin |
The Pope continued to describe the relation between this organization and naturalism:
For, from what we have above most clearly shown, that which is their ultimate purpose forces itself into view – namely, the utter overthrow of that whole religious and political order of the world which the Christian teaching has produced, and the substitution of a new state of things in accordance with their ideas, of which the foundations and laws shall be drawn from mere naturalism. The Masons who adopted naturalism had their greatest representative in Erasmus Darwin, who was one of the masters of the Canongate Kilwinning Masonic lodge in Edinburgh, Scotland.
49 Additionally, he seems to have been involved to some degree with the Jacobin clubs in France, or with the Illuminati, which was connected with certain Masonic lodges in France and whose primary duty was to oppose religion.
50 Erasmus educated his son Robert Darwin (the father of Charles) to be like himself and made him a member of Masonic lodges.
Robert Darwin |
51 Therefore, Charles Darwin inherited Masonry from his father and grandfather.
The main lines of Darwin's theory were, in reality, determined by his grandfather, whose naturalist works were designed as a guide for him. Erasmus Darwin developed the basic logic that was to give form to Darwinism and expounded it in books titled
The Temple of Nature and
Zoonomia. It was a renewal of the ancient pagan belief that nature has creative power. In 1784 a society was founded to assist in the dissemination of these ideas – The Philosophical Society – which, decades later, would become one of the largest and most passionate supporters of Charles Darwin's ideas.
52 Darwin's own theory of evolution, however, was first proposed in the Galapagos Islands.
