CHAP, in THE APPEAL TO BIOLOGY 33 



of biogenesis. The book really offers us Neo-Calvinist 

 religion, or even Neo-Gnostic, more truly than biological 

 religion ; but it shows the same contempt for meta- 

 physics and the same blind confidence in empirical 

 science which distinguish Comte and many lesser 

 sceptics. Its religious teaching is often admirable, but 

 the parable on which it is built misleads the author, 

 because he supposes it to be more than a parable. 

 Intellectually, the best feature in the book is the de- 

 termination to trace continuity between different worlds 

 of thought. This effort reappears in Drummond's later 

 book, The Ascent of Man, of which we may have some- 

 thing to say hereafter. Otherwise, the later treatise is 

 largely an inversion of the previous one. It obliterates 

 the theological discontinuousness between the natural 

 and the spiritual man, which had been so strangely 

 supported by the assertion that the laws of physical 

 nature must be viewed as continuous and operative in 

 all regions of experience, even the most spiritual.] 



