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| Friedrich Nietzsche |
In the late
nineteenth century, many biologists and thinkers, atheists or agnostics, relied
on Darwin's theories to build philosophical schools that combined the newly
discovered evolution with the eighteenth-century idea of progress,
to assert that the history of life and man shows clear traces of indefinite
progress, and to predict that such progress will continue indefinitely into the
future.
Among the biologists
who ascribed to these theories the best known are T.H. Huxley and Ernest
Haeckel. The philosophers were many, each one giving rise to a school of his
own, often incompatible with those of others: Karl Marx (Marxism), Herbert
Spencer (social Darwinism), Auguste Comte (positivism) and Friedrich Nietzsche
(nihilism) were the more influential. In their forecasts for the future of
evolution, the last-mentioned was the most exalted and predicted that man would
soon be succeeded and supplanted by a superior species, the superman.
