IS DEVELOPMENT HYPOTHESIS SUFFICIENT? 95 



operations must have come from a causal power. " Ex nihilo nihil 

 fit " is a maxim going back farther than I am able to tell. The form 

 given it by the great atheistic poet Lucretius is : 



"... Nihil posse creari. 

 De nihilo, neque quod, genitu est ad nihil revocari." 



Persius puts it : 



" . . . Gigni 

 De nihilo nihil, in nihilum nil posse reverti." 



Take either of these forms, or any form, and it insists that we 

 seek a cause of the new kind of operation. It cannot discover that 

 there was anything in that heated, vaporous matter to produce life 

 and sensation, when they appeared millions of years after the world 

 had begun to be formed. I will not decide dogmatically whether the 

 causal action was natural or supernatural. Perhaps we are here come 

 to a place where the distinction between natural and supernatural is 

 lost in the dim distance. The cause may have acted according to a 

 law. But in that case I must hold it to be a divine law. Even in 

 the supposition that it has been brought about by a conjuncture of 

 circumstances, unknown for the indefinite period before, it must have 

 been a pi'ovidential juncture foreseen, nay, ordained by God. 



Life appears ten thousand ages or more after the earth began to 

 form. Whence this life? Prof. Huxley seems to find it in some 

 protoplasm or gelatinous substance. Was this one of the original 

 elements of the nebulous matter? If so, how did it come through 

 that terribly heated temperature ? If it did not exist till after the 

 temperature had cooled, how did it come in ? Prof. Huxley has been 

 the most determined opponent in our day of the spontaneous gener- 

 ation of life, and is thereby left without a means of generating the 

 life of plants and animals. Darwin feels himself obliged, in order to 

 account for the phenomenon, to suppose that there were four or five 

 germs created by God. Tyndall thinks that Darwin has at this point 

 fallen into a weakness. But, meanwhile, Tyndall has no means what- 

 ever of accounting for the appearance of life. Mr. Darwin further 

 calls in a pangenesis which is just another name for the vital force 

 of the older naturalists in order to account for the generation of 

 new animals. But he does not tell us, and evidently cannot tell us, 

 whence this pangenesis, which cannot come from development, of 

 which it is the source, and not the product. Herbert Spencer prefers 

 to bring in physiological units. 



Whence comes sensation ? There was a moment when sensation 

 pleasurable or painful was felt for the first time in the universe. Was 

 this at the beginning ? If so, one wonders how the sentient substance 

 came through the heat, where, so far as we can judge, it must have 

 been suffering intolerable anguish without the power of relieving 

 itself by self-destruction. 



