54 DARWINIAN1SM. 



animals long before other families of them, shall we 

 conjecture that one and the same kind of living filament 

 is and has been the cause of all organic life ? " 



So much for organic life, though this is accompanied 

 by much else in regard to spontaneous generation, 

 sexuality and asexuality, etc. ; but, as we have already 

 seen in reference to lime, Erasmus lias not grudged to 

 direct his regards to the whole also. The world is to be 

 supposed due to generation from smalls to smalls rather 

 than from creation at once " produced from very small 

 beginnings, increasing by the activity of its inherent 

 principles rather than by a sudden evolution of the 

 whole by the Almighty Fiat. For it would seem to 

 require a greater infinity of power to cause the causes of 

 effects than to cause the effects themselves." So Hume 

 at one time held (Inquiry, vii. 1) that it argued "more 

 wisdom in the Deity " to conceive a world, not further 

 dependent on Himself, but, for advance, with inherent 

 principles of its own. It is with as much as this in his 

 mind that Erasmus exclaims, " What a magnificent idea 

 of the infinite Power ! " 



Dr. Darwin opens his Zoonomia with a motto from 

 Virgil the well-known four lines from the sixth ^Eneid, 

 according to which a spirit within nourishes all, a mind, 

 infused throughout, animates the mass. And his very 

 first paragraph reprobates those who, " idly ingenious, 

 busied themselves in attempting to explain the laws of 

 life by those of mechanism and chemistry, and con- 

 sidered the body as an hydraulic machine, and the fluids 

 as passing through a series of chemical changes, forget- 

 ting that animation was its essential characteristic." 

 To this he had a perception which was wanting to 

 Charles a perception possessed as yet only by one other 

 known to me. Cause he saw, as cause, was a category 

 confined to the lower elements, and had no place in the; 



