MYISTEKV OF THE CELL 3Tti 



The Fallacy of Eternity as an Explanation of Evolution 



It may perhaps not be out of place here to deal with what 

 seems to me to be one of the common philosophical fallacies of 

 the present day, the iilea that you can get over the difficulty 

 of requiring any supreme mind, any author <jf the cosmos, by 

 assuming that it had no beginning — that it has existed, with 

 all its forces, energies, and laws, from all eternity, and thai it 

 ^vill continue, to exist for all eternity. 



I have already quoted llaeckel and some others on this 

 point. I will now give a similar statement by two writers of 

 to-day. Dr. Saleeby in an article on The Life of the Uni- 

 verse, in The Academy (March 25, 1905), after discussing 

 the theory of dissipation of energy, the infinity of the uui- 

 verse, the littleness of man, and other matters, with his usual 

 clearness and vigour, concludes with this sentence : '' Radium- 

 clocks have been made that will go for a million years ; but I 

 believe that the Universe was never made and will go on for 

 ever." This, of course, is vague, because, if the term "' uni- 

 verse '' is taken to mean " the all that exists," or rather, '' all 

 that exists, that ever has existed, or that ever will exist,'' it is 

 a truism, because that includes all life and God. But " uni- 

 verse " is taken bv llaeckel and his school to mean the ma- 

 terial universe, and to definitely exclude spirit and god. 



A great modern physicist. Professor Svanto Arrhenius, in 

 the preface to his recent work. Worlds in the ^Making, con- 

 cludes thus: 



"My guiding principles in this exposition of cosinogonic pi-(.h- 

 lems has been the conviction that the Universe in its csseiico luis 

 always been what it is now. Matter, energy, and life iiavo only 

 varied as to shape and position in space." 



This will be taken to mean, and T presume does mean, 

 "matter" and "life" as we know them on the earth, and to 

 exclude, as Haeckol does drfinitely, spirit and deity. The 

 general conception of all these writers seems to be, that it is 



