5 6 METAPHYSICS 



and adaptation has prevailed, and at last revealed man, 

 with attributes fitting him, to some extent, voluntarily to 

 adapt himself to his own altering surroundings and aspira- 

 tions, and so, it may be, to fit him to aid in the evolutionary 

 work of the cosmos throughout the future ages. 



Biogenesis, however primarily initiated, whether by unal 

 or multiple creation or creative acts, has been at work 

 since the commencement of that process in perpetuating 

 and securing the continuance of life, and each biogenic 

 act has marked a rising in complexity of organisation, 

 and has consisted essentially of the repeated and repeated 

 innervation of a passively living mass of specially prepared, 

 alternately fixed and free, protoplasm, by a dynamically 

 active body of also specially prepared but mobile protoplasm, 

 each of the two being usually contributed by different 

 organic or parental factors in response to specific initial 

 influences and conditions for the consummation of the one 

 communal biogenic object ; in other words, ovulation and 

 fecundation characterise every such biogenic occurrence, 

 the great exception to this prevailing rule being effected 

 by gemmation, segmentation, or kariokinesis, in which 

 cases the whole biogenic phenomena are unal, or confined 

 to the one organism, and repeated in continuity so long as 

 the environment and conditions of such life are maintained. 



We, moreover, take it, notwithstanding what has been 

 urged to the contrary, that life constantly proceeds from, 

 or is preceded by, life, the only exception to this, so far as 

 reasoned assumption and observation enable us to form 

 a definite opinion on such a transcendental problem, 

 being the act or acts of creation referred to, the 

 materio-dynamic necessity for which it is impossible to 

 gainsay, even though we admit the subsequent, or after, 

 universality of the operation of the law of evolution in 

 the determination and sequence of natural inorganic 

 events, and the organic procession of life forms. 



The main developmental events, in the more usual 

 biogenic and elementary forms of procedure and 

 sequence, as already observed, are the direct, dual or 

 parental, contributions of a specially prepared protoplasm 

 to the organic formation and evolution of a uni-cellular 

 organism, the dynamic endowment of the resultant or 



