54 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



absence of tliat full evidence must not, on the other 

 hand, stand in the way of investigations in such 

 directions as may appear to us most promising. 



Now the reasons we have given for regarding the 

 organic and the inorganic as one, for the development 

 of vitality in its higher forms from the interaction of 

 certain inorganic substances with complex colloid 

 bodies, and its disappearance by the resolution of all 

 these complex structures into their constituent 

 elements, have forced on us the theory that they 

 are equivalent to the integration and the dis- 

 integration of atoms. We cannot see why if life can 

 disappear by disintegration it should not also have 

 appeared by integration. Why, in a word, death 

 should be natural, but birth unnatural. And I 

 myself am loth to think that there is any reason 

 to suppose that these effects should be purely the 

 performance of Nature unless there is a real 

 continuity between the organic and the inorganic, 

 between the animate and the inanimate, between 

 life and death. 



This is biogenesis carried to its logical extreme. 

 Naegeli, and Haeckel with him, maintains that " to 

 reject abiogenesis is to admit a miracle"; our own 

 view is that to reject biogenesis, if this term is to 

 be applied to certain types of inorganic bodies, is to 

 deny the continuity of Nature, and the unity of those 

 performances which make the Universe a consistent 

 whole. In other words, to presuppose a miracle. 



Haeckel denies, if we understand him rightly, that 

 there is a vital principle in inorganic Nature, 

 but supposes it to develope into the organic ; 



