NEW FACT IN PHILOSOPHY. 419 



as the parent's own life and reproductive powers were in it. 

 But then it must have been in it only in the condition of 

 life in that mysterious yet real, but utterly incompre- 

 hensible state of dormant vitality, of which nature's laws 

 which hazy philosophies make the absolute and dominant 

 rule of everything in these days can give us not the very 

 slightest knowledge, and material criteria not the vestige 

 of available measurement. 



There is certainly little corroboration to be derived 

 from facts like the preceding in behalf of the ex nihilo 

 nihilfit philosophy. It is a remarkable circumstance that 

 all who have ventured to state these absolute and ultimate 

 propositions have had but a very limited knowledge of 

 scientific fact, even while claiming to be exclusively 

 scientific men. In the age in which these philosophies 

 sprang up all the science known, even had it been all com- 

 prehended in one mind, was, as compared with that of our 

 own age, limited and imperfect. Among modern philo- 

 sophers who have ventured to reproduce these propositions 

 we have never found one who had a wide and comprehen- 

 sive knowledge of comparative science who was more 

 than distinguished in some particular department within 

 which his knowledge was respectable enough and worthy 

 of being received as authority, but beyond which it* was 

 all but contemptible and feebler than that of a child, as 

 well as more erring because more confident who ever 

 could draw a wider analogy than that which his own 

 limited department of study afforded, or look upon the 

 illimitable range of general philosophy save with a mono- 

 chromatic vision coloured exclusively by the light per- 

 vading his own point of view. If all scientific knowledge 

 when these propositions were first dogmatised was in- 

 adequate as a basis for ultimate and absolute conclusions, 

 how much less can the professor distinguished by merely 

 one branch of study now be justified in rearing up his 



