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Updated: May 5, 2025
And within the same group we find the contrasts of believers in monophyletic and believers in polyphyletic evolution, the mechanists and the half-confessed or thoroughgoing vitalists, the preformationists and the believers in epigenesis. Opinions differ even more widely in regard to the rôle of the “struggle for existence” in the production of species.
Harvey proceeds to contrast this view with that of the "Medici," or followers of Hippocrates and Galen, who, "badly philosophising," imagined that the brain, the heart, and the liver were simultaneously first generated in the form of vesicles; and, at the same time, while expressing his agreement with Aristotle in the principle of epigenesis, he maintains that it is the blood which is the primal generative part, and not, as Aristotle thought, the heart.
Thus the problem of the “development of form” or of “heredity” was, so to speak, ruled out of court; all that was assumed was continuous growth and self-unfolding. Opposed to this theory was one of later growth, the theory of epigenesis, which maintained that the organism developed without preformation from the still undifferentiated and homogeneous substance of the egg.
Many embryological investigations were performed during the eighteenth century, but most relate to the controversy regarding epigenesis and preformationism as the true expression of embryonic development. Withal, the seventeenth-century embryologists, and particularly the embryologists of seventeenth-century England, had contributed much to the progress of the discipline.
It advances embryology by its demonstration of certain facts of development, by its aggressive espousal of epigenesis and the origin of all animals from eggs, and by its dynamic approach stressing the temporal factors in development and the initial independent function of embryonic organs.
Nevertheless, though the doctrine of epigenesis, as understood by Harvey, has definitively triumphed over the doctrine of evolution, as understood by his opponents of the eighteenth century, it is not impossible that, when the analysis of the process of development is carried still further, and the origin of the molecular components of the physically gross, though sensibly minute, bodies which we term germs is traced, the theory of development will approach more nearly to metamorphosis than to epigenesis.
But we cannot leave M. Flourens without calling our readers' attention to his wonderful tenth chapter, "De la Préexistence des Germes et de l'Epigénèse," which opens thus: "Spontaneous generation is only a chimæra. This point established, two hypotheses remain: that of pre-existence and that of epigenesis. The one of these hypotheses has as little foundation as the other."
"The doctrine of epigenesis is derived from Harvey: following by ocular inspection the development of the new being in the Windsor does, he saw each part appear successively, and taking the moment of appearance for the moment of formation he imagined epigenesis." It is formed at once at the single individual moment at which the conjunction of the male and female elements takes place."
Or if Natural Selection did it, or orthogenesis or epigenesis, or any other genesis, have we not in any of these found a god equal to the occasion? Darwin goes wrong, if I may be allowed to say so, when he describes or characterizes the activities of Nature in terms of our own activities. Man's selection affords no clue to Nature's selection, and the best to man is not the best to Nature.
The foregoing considerations may be summed up in the form of three dogmata, all of which orthodox Christianity teaches. These are, first, that Christ's pre-resurrection body was real and natural; second, that His resurrected and ascended body is real and supernatural; third, that there was a real continuity, whether by development or by epigenesis between the two.
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