210 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



system, life included, stand to each other in the relation 

 of the germ to the finished organism, I reaffirm here, 

 not arrogantly, or defiantly, but without a shade of in- 

 distinctness, the position laid down at Belfast. 



Not with the vagueness belonging to the emotions, 

 but with the definiteness belonging to the understand- 

 ing, the scientific man has to put to himself these ques- 

 tions regarding the introduction of life upon the earth. 

 He will be the last to dogmatise upon the subject, for 

 he knows best that certainty is here for the present 

 unattainable. His refusal of the creative hypothesis 

 is less an assertion of knowledge than a protest against 

 the assumption of knowledge which must long, if not 

 for ever, lie beyond us, and the claim to which is the 

 source of perpetual confusion upon earth. With a 

 mind open to conviction he asks his opponents to show 

 him an authority for the belief they so strenuously and 

 so fiercely uphold. They can do no more than point to 

 the Book of Genesis, or some other portion of the Bible. 

 Profoundly interesting, and indeed pathetic, to me are 

 those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease 

 its hunger for a Cause. But the Book of Genesis has 

 no voice in scientific questions. To the grasp of geo- 

 logy, which it resisted for a time, it at length yielded 

 like potter's clay; its authority as a system of cos- 

 mogony being discredited on all hands, by the aban- 

 donment of the obvious meaning of its writer. It is a 

 poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former aspect 

 it is for ever beautiful: in the latter aspect it has been, 

 and it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurt- 

 ful. To knowledge its value has been negative, leading, 

 in rougher ages than ours, to physical, and even in our 

 own ' free ' age to moral, violence. 



No incident connected with the proceedings at Bel- 

 fast is more instructive than the deportment of the 



