The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society: A Poem, with Philosophical Notes

"The Temple of Nature, or, the Origin of Society," is a book by Erasmus Darwin, the forgotten grandfather of the prominent scientist Charles Darwin. Charles played down his paternal grandfather's importance as a forerunner to the theory of evolution, but the rediscovered works of Erasmus now excite considerable interest among scientists. Erasmus believed that it was not only life that had developed from a simple original condition into more and more complicated organisms, but the whole universe had, through self-organizing processes, developed from formless chaos into the cosmos we now live in. Human progress should also be seen as a part of this universal tendency toward perfection.