INTERPOSITION OF MIR A CLE. 3 7 1 



he has an adequate conception of Cosmos is not utterly 

 deceiving himself? 



Organic life must have had a beginning ; and, until re- 

 cently, Strauss was constrained to admit the chasm between 

 the living and the non-living. Now he exultingly declares 

 that Mr. Darwin has bridged it over. But this conclusion 

 is premature, for has not Mr. Darwin suggested that the 

 Creator may originally have " breathed life " into one or 

 several very simple forms of existence ? What Strauss still 

 requires for the completion of his cosmic conception is 

 spontaneous generation the conversion of the non-living 

 into the living without the previous formation of parental 

 organisms and without the interposition of miracle. But 

 Strauss, instructed by Virchow, will not accept spontaneous 

 generation. He tells us that in the formation of living 

 things, it was only necessary that the " matter and force 

 already in existence should be brought into another kind of 

 combination and motion," and adds that an adequate cause 

 for this, " might exist in the conditions, the temperature, the 

 atmospheric combinations of primaeval times, so utterly 

 different from ours in character." 



Most of us feel compelled to admit that, after all, the 

 " miracle " the apparition of life where there was no life or 

 anything convertible into life has somehow at least once 

 occurred. But Strauss sees no difficulty in accounting for 

 the facts without miracle. If, he triumphantly asks, " under 

 certain conditions, motion is transformed into heat, why 

 may it not, under other conditions be transformed into 

 sensation?" He might, however, just as well detmnd to be 

 informed why, since heat can be transformed into motion, it 

 cannot be transformed into affection ? It is a fact that heat 



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