202 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE 



comes at length to one "primordial form"; but he does 

 not say, so far as I remember, how he supposes this form 

 to have been introduced. He quotes with satisfaction the 

 words of a celebrated author and divine who had "grad- 

 ually learned to see that it was just as noble a conception 

 of the Deity to believe He created a few original forms, 

 capable of self-development into other and needful forms, 

 as to believe He required a fresh act of creation to supply 

 the voids caused by the action of His laws." What Mr. 

 Darwin thinks of this view of the introduction of life I 

 do not know. But the anthropomorphism, which it 

 seemed his object to set aside, is as firmly associated 

 with the creation of a few forms as with the creation 

 of a multitude. We need clearness and thoroughness 

 here. Two courses and two only are possible. Either let 

 us open our doors freely to the conception of creative 

 acts, or abandoning them, let us radically change our no- 

 tions of Matter. If we look at matter as pictured by 

 Democritus, and as defined for generations in our scien- 

 tific text-books, the notion of conscious life coming out 

 of it cannot be formed by the mind. The argument 

 placed in the mouth of Bishop Butler suffices, in my 

 opinion, to crush all such materialism as this. Those, 

 however, who framed these definitions of matter were but 

 partial students. They were not biologists, but mathema- 

 ticians, whose labors referred only to such accidents and 

 properties of matter as could be expressed in their for- 

 mulae. Their science was mechanical science, not the 

 science of life. With matter in its wholeness they never 

 dealt; and, denuded by their imperfect definitions, "the 

 gentle mother of all" became the object of her children's 

 dread. Let us reverently, but honestly, look the question 



