8 THEORIES OF SPONTANEOUS GENERATION 



Platonists (in the third century a.d.). The leader of this 

 philosophical school, Plotinus, taught that living things could 

 originate from earth, and that this method of origin was not 

 confined to the past but also continues now, in the course of 

 decay. He explained this phenomenon as the result of the 

 animation of matter by a life-giving {vivere facit) spirit, and 

 it seems that he was the first to formulate the concept of 

 the ' Life Force ' which has persisted even up to the present 

 in the teachings of the contemporary vitalists/^ 



Early Christianity borrowed guiding ideas concerning spon- 

 taneous generation from the Bible, which in its turn borrowed 

 its material from the mystical tales of Egypt and Babylon. 

 The theological authorities of the end of the fourth and 

 beginning of the fifth centuries a.d., ' the fathers of the 

 Christian Church ', combined these legends with the teachings 

 of the neo-PIatonists and elaborated their mystical conception 

 of the origin of life on this basis. 



Living in the middle of the fourth century a.d. was St. 

 Basil the Great who was then and still is one of the leading 

 religious authorities of the Eastern Church. It was under 

 his influence that the leaders of the Orthodoxy formulated 

 their beliefs concerning the origin of life. His book 

 Hexaemeron still retains its place in Church literature, 

 particularly in the Russian language. Discussing the problem 

 in which we are interested, he writes as follows : 



For if there are creatures which are successively produced by 

 their predecessors, there are others that, even today, we see born 

 from the earth itself. In wet weather she brings forth grass- 

 hoppers and an immense number of insects which fly in the air 

 and have no names because they are so small ; she also produces 

 mice and frogs. In the environs of Thebes in Egypt, after abun- 

 dant rain in hot weather, the country is covered with field mice. 

 We see mud alone produce eels ; they do not proceed from an 

 egg, nor in any other manner ; it is the earth alone which gives 

 them birth. ^■^ 



According to Basil the Great all these instances of the 

 spontaneous generation of life (many of which were obviously 

 borrowed from Aristotle) occurred by divine command which 

 has continued to act with undiminished force from the 

 creation of the world to the present day. 



