i 5 4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



In the order of Nature what goes atop of the animal world is the world 

 of consciousness, the world of mind and spirit which attains to its full 

 flowering in man. This is no limited or accidental world, thrust upon 

 the few, and denied to the many, but a world which belongs to the 

 natural order of the universe. The passage to it from the animal is 

 so gradual that science can not say where the one ends and the other 

 begins. In the same manner the animal fades into the vegetable, and 

 the vegetable into the mineral. There are no breaks, there are no 

 gulfs fixed. " There exists no insurmountable chasm between organic 

 and inorganic nature," says Hankel, speaking for the most thorough 

 science of his times. Huxley and Tyndall and the leading French 

 scientists have reached the same conclusion. The organic and the 

 inorganic are composed of the same elements ; their differences arise 

 solely from the different chemical combination of these elements, a 

 combination so peculiar and complex that Science has not yet been 

 able to reproduce it in her laboratory. But the fact that spontaneous 

 generation has not yet taken place under the highly artificial condi- 

 tions imposed by experimental chemistry proves what ? Proves only 

 that it has not yet taken place, that science with its limited means and 

 brief space of time has not yet accomplished that which must have 

 occurred under vastly different conditions in the abysm of geological 

 time, and in the depths of the primordial seas. Science starts with 

 matter and with force ; back of these it does not go ; more than these 

 it does not require. To account for them, or to seek to account for 

 them, is unscientific, for the simple reason that no such accounting 

 can be verified. Out of the potencies of matter itself science traces 

 the evolution of the whole order of visible things. Theology may step 

 in and assume to know all that Science leaves unsaid, but, in doing so, 

 let it not assume to speak with the consent and the authority of its 

 great rival. 



In the light of the most advanced biological science, organic and 

 inorganic appear but relative terms, like heat and cold. There are 

 all degrees of heat, and there are probably all degrees of life. There 

 are probably degrees of life too low in the scale for our discern- 

 ment, just as there is heat where our senses report only cold. If 

 there are degrees of consciousness, why may there not be degrees of 

 life ? The child grows gradually into consciousness, just as the race 

 has grown gradually into consciousness. Dare we affirm that in either 

 case the leap from the unconscious to the conscious was or is suddenly 

 made ? No more dare we affirm that the leap from the inorganic to 

 the organic was suddenly made. Is the crystal absolutely dead ? See 

 it shape itself according to a special plan, see how sensitive it is to the 

 surrounding medium ; see it grow when the proper food is given it, so 

 to speak. Pasteur has noted that it cicatrizes or repairs itself when 

 wounded. When placed in the fluid of crystallization, as in the ani- 

 mal, the injured part sears over and gradually regains its original shape. 





