162 THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 
world of matter. But the objection which endeavours 
to cut away the ground from under the doctrine of 
Descent, not the theory of selection, and represents the 
origin of life as incomprehensible and supernatural, we 
naturally regard as an attempt to gain a precedent for 
the supernatural creation of language. Between begin- 
ning and end, we naturalists may do as we please. 
Put it is strange that the very side which is so ready 
to reproach us with a want of philosophic method and 
induction, should here, where the material substratum 
is deficient, dispute the claims of the investigation of 
nature to its logical inferences. In the last page of 
the “Origin of Species,” Darwin says: “There is 
grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, 
having been originally breathed by the Creator into 
a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet 
has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of 
gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms 
most beautiful and most wonderful have been and 
are being evolved.” In this concession, Darwin has 
certainly been untrue to himself; and it satisfies neither 
those who believe in the continuous work of creation 
by a personal God, nor the partizans of natural evolution. 
It is directly incompatible with the doctrine of Descent, 
or, as Zéllner*? says: “The hypothesis of an act of 
creation (for the beginning of life) would not be a logi- 
cal but a merely arbitrary limitation of the causal series 
against which our intellect rebels by reason of its inherent 
craving for causality. Whoever does not share this crav- 
ing is beyond help, and he cannot be convinced. To 
hold the beginning of life as an arbitrary act of creation, 
is to break with the whole theory of cognition.” 
