178 REV. G. F. WHIDBORNE, M.A., ON QUESTIONS INVOLVED 
in any way account for its origin per sé, nor is there anything 
provable about abiogenesis which can in any way support it 
by analogy. To produce an ameba from warm oilis jugglery 
not science. Let the oil-amoeba reproduce itself, and go on 
reproducing itself, and we will believe it. Otherwise it is no 
more an animal than an automaton isa man. Even the cell 
in embryology implies its parent. “Ex nihilo, mihil fit” 
remains a principle. “There can be no effect without a 
cause.” But to primeeval protoplasm no ancestry is con- 
ceivable, and for its origin no cause whatever can be assigned, 
excepting one—and that is all-sufficient—the action of an 
outside creative Power. It knows no parentage but the 
power of God. 
(2) Still less is any rational explanation of the endowment of 
primeval protoplasm with evolutionary potency conceivable except 
by the action of an outside Power, Evolution implies not only 
variation but advance. Whatever advance has come ab intus 
must be measured by the original potency of the protoplasm ; 
and therefore its assumed simplicity can be no more real 
simplicity than is the elaborateness of the highest resultant 
organism. The infinitesimal calculus of evolution gives only 
an explanation of the method of advance; it no more 
explains the cause of the power to advance, than if the 
whole advance had been effected by a single instantaneous 
operation. Either the force producing the advance must 
come actively and independently from outside, in which case 
it is not evolution; or it must be constantly immanent in the 
advancing org eanism, and therefore originally to its full extent 
potentially immanent in the primordial protoplasm. It is 
therefore no easier to explain the origination of that proto- 
plasm, than to explain (without taking count of its ancestry) 
the origination of the highest organism that has resulted 
from it. That is to say, the outside power that produced the 
protoplasm with such a potency, must have been at the very 
least as mighty as if it had directly produced the highest 
organism that has resulted therefrom. 
(3) The introduction of the consideration of circumstance, or 
correspondence to environment, does not account for the cause of 
the action of evolution.—Correspondence to environment must 
result, as to any particular organism, either from animate or 
from inanimate circumstances. If the former, it is only due 
(on the theory of extreme evolution) to the development 
elsewhere of the same original protoplasm that gave rise to 
that organism itself. Its action, therefore, is covered by the 
