266 THE CHAIN OF LIFE. 



iron or steel are purely physical, and it might ev^n be within 

 the bounds of possibility that somewhere in the universe a 

 mass of natural loadstone may have been so balanced as to 

 swing in harmony with the earth's magnetism. Yet we should 

 surely be regarded as very credulous if we could be induced to 

 believe that the mariner's compass has originated in that way. 

 This argument applies with a thousandfold greater force to 

 the origin of life, which involves even in its simplest forms so 

 many more adjustments of force and so much more complex 

 machinery. 



Fourthly, these hypotheses are partial, inasmuch as they fail 

 to account for the vastly varied and correlated interdepen- 

 dencies of natural things and forces, and for the unity of plan 

 which pervades the whole. These can be explained only by 

 taking into the account another element from without. Even 

 when it professes to admit the existence of a God, the evolu- 

 tionist reasoning of our day limits itself practically to the 

 physical or visible universe, and leaves entirely out of sight the 

 power of the unseen and spiritual, as if this were something 

 with which science has nothing to do, but which belongs only 

 to imagination or sentiment. So much has this been the case 

 that when recently a few physicists and naturalists have turned 

 to this aspect of the subject, they have seemed to be teaching 

 new and startling truths, though only reviving some of the 

 oldest and most permanent ideas of our race. From the 

 dawn of human thought it has been the conclusion alike of 

 philosophers, theologians, and the common sense of mankind, 

 that the seen can be explained only by reference to the unseen, 

 and that any merely physical theory of the world is necessarily 

 partial. This, too, is the position of our sacred Scriptures, and 

 is broadly stated in their opening verse ; and indeed it lies alike 

 at the basis of all true religion and all sound philosophy, for it 

 must necessarily be that " ths things that are seen are temporal, 

 the things that are unseen, eternal." With reference to the 

 primal aggregation of energy in the visible universe, with 



