1 8 Life is not suggested by Matter ^ but CHAP. 



of air and of ocean, their clouds, their storms, their 

 glaciers, their volcanoes, their formation of rock-strata 

 and of mineral veins. If he had knowledge of the 

 properties of matter like ours in kind but much 

 wider and deeper, every stage in the process of this 

 evolution would appear the natural and necessary 

 consequence of that next before it. But when life 

 made its appearance, this would be no longer so : 

 here, for the first time, would be something ex- 

 plicable neither by the inherent properties of matter, 

 nor by the preceding steps of the evolutionary 

 process ; but a new creation, totally unlike any- 

 thing that had appeared before, and not suggested 

 by it. 



To such a being, man's nature would become 

 intelligible only when spiritual life was awakened. 

 Let us further suppose him to watch the evolution 

 of the organic world, and note the ways and the 

 instincts of animals ; and further, not only to see 

 but to understand man as the wisest men understand 

 themselves : would he regard man as merely an 

 animal, distinguished from other animals chiefly by 

 the possession of language, and the power to invent 

 and use tools and machinery ; and having some 

 strange and unaccountable ways, of which the 

 strangest was that of inventing deities and worship- 

 ping them 1 And when spiritual life was awakened 

 by the Spirit of God in some favoured individuals, 

 would this spiritual life, like organic life on its first 

 appearance, seem not only a new creation, but some- 



