GREAT QUESTIONS IN LITTLE 
VIII. BEGINNINGS 
The problem of the beginning of anything when 
philosophically considered is an elusive problem. 
Everything and every condition has its antecedents, 
and these antecedents have their antecedents. In 
spring the sap begins to mount in the trees, but to 
draw a line between its state of quiescence and its 
state of activity could only be done in imagination. 
It is not like a gun that is ready to go off when the 
trigger is pulled. It goes off slowly and insensibly. 
It is “fixing to begin to get ready”’ to go off all win- 
ter, as the old colored woman said about a like 
matter. The grain begins to sprout in the ground, 
but the insensible changes in the germ that have 
preceded the actual sprouting — what about them? 
Things in nature begin, but they begin away 
back, and so gradually and insensibly that we can- 
not put our finger on the point of actual beginning; 
we have to imagine such a point. Spencer repudi- 
ates the theory of spontaneous generation, or the 
instantaneous birth of living matter from the non- 
living, because such a theory admits of no steps or 
gradations in the process. The theory of generation 
by evolution is more thinkable — an immeasurably 
slow transformation of the non-living into the living 
without any fixed line between them. 
If we cannot say that life ever literally begins, can 
we say that it ever literally ends? It is certainly 
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