75 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



"Wallace and Dana, they go nine-tenths 

 of the way, and then fly the track. 

 Nature may do a large amount of the 

 lower work; hut for the origination of 

 the higher part of man we must appeal 

 to agencies higher than Nature. 



Our correspondent does not see the 

 reason of this. He asks why scientists 

 are to be permitted to invoke miraculous 

 agency at the point of the introduction 

 of life, while they reject it at all others 

 along the line of its development. They 

 can only do this at the expense of logi- 

 cal consistency, and, so far as they do 

 it, are unscientific. If a scientist does 

 not know how life began, he should say 

 so ; and if he cannot find out himself, he 

 has only to leave the inquiry to others. 

 He is bound to explain it rationally, as 

 he explains other effects in Nature, or 

 to suspend his judgment. It is futile 

 for him to resort to any short-and-easy 

 methods of solving the problem, for it 

 still remains to be worked by the scien- 

 tific method. The whole history of our 

 knowledge of Nature reveals an im- 

 mutable order, an invariable and in- 

 dissoluble chain of causation; and this 

 principle a scientific man is never at 

 liberty to discard because a serious 

 difficulty is encountered ; and, as a 

 scientific man, he is never at liberty 

 to discard it at all. Men talk light- 

 ly of breaks and supernatural intru- 

 sions in the course of Nature, which 

 was well enough ages ago, but is now- 

 forbidden by the very conception of 

 what Nature is. For thousands of years 

 nothing was known of natural laws; 

 now they form the basal idea of its 

 constitution. The innermost texture, the 

 essence and spirit, and the very defi- 

 nition of Nature, are unbroken, con- 

 tinuous order. It is by this alone that 

 we know it. It is not enough to say 

 that law is universal. It pervades all 

 Nature, and constitutes the very idea 

 of it. Our intelligence is bound up 

 with it, is a part of it, and we neither 

 know nor can know of any exception 

 or limit to the principle. Men under- 



take to say where the natural order 

 stops, and the supernatural is reached, 

 but they juggle with words; for, the 

 moment the so-called supernatural is 

 brought within the cognizance of rea- 

 son, it ceases to be supernatural. The 

 alternative and antithesis of natural 

 order is not the supernatural, but dis- 

 order. As the Rev. Baden Powell well 

 remarks, "If Nature could really ter- 

 minate anywhere, there we should find 

 not the supernatural, but a chaos, a blank 

 total darkness anarchy atheism." 



As to the chasm of which Mr. "Wal- 

 worth speaks between dead and living 

 matter, it is, of course, nothing more 

 than a chasm in our knowledge, and 

 none the less a chasm when bridged 

 over by the hypothesis of miraculous 

 interference. The lowest form of life, 

 the material basis from which all living 

 things are spun, is protoplasm ; but if 

 Nature can produce a Newton or a 

 Shakespeare in a few years from a 

 formless protoplasmic germ, and by the 

 course of natural causation, why should 

 we say that it is past her power to pro- 

 duce the raw material itself, and fly to 

 the supernatural to account for its earli- 

 est appearance ? Science cannot take the 

 theological explanation here, any more 

 than elsewhere in Nature, for, if these 

 explanations had been accepted as satis- 

 factory, there never would have been 

 any science. The scientific problem of 

 the origin of life is a recent one. It has 

 not been solved, but what has been 

 already done, so far from dishearten- 

 ing inquirers, only stimulates them to 

 greater effort. Chemistry already be- 

 gins to build up organic substances arti- 

 ficially in the laboratory, although such 

 an idea was long scouted as hopelessly 

 impossible. A few generations more 

 of work may put a very different aspect 

 upon this profound inquiry ; but, even 

 if it takes centuries, the question must 

 be held as belonging solely to the prov- 

 ince of reason, and to be solved in ac- 

 cordance with the natural laws of cause 

 and effect. 



