THE KEV. J. J. B. COLES, ON THEOSOPHY. 



47 



the outside. Power was exercised from without. In a word, life 

 was given to the earth. All the errors of those who have distorted 

 the thesis of evolution into something called, inappropriately 

 enough, Darwinism, have arisen from the supposition that life is a 

 consequence of organisation. This is unthinkable. Life, as Huxley 

 admitted, is the cause and not the consequence of organisation. 

 Admit life, and the hypothesis of evolution is sufficient and 

 unanswerable. Postulate organisation first, and make it the origin 

 and cause of life, and you lose yourself in a maze of madness. An 

 honest and unswerving scrutiny of nature forces upon the mind 

 this certain truth, that at some period of the earth's history there 

 was an act of creation, a giving to the earth of something which 

 before it had not possessed ; and from that gift, the gift of life, has 

 come the infinite and wonderful population of living forms." 



Discussion. 



Mr. Maunder of the Koyal Observatory, Greenwich, said : There 

 is one sentence in the paper which I should like to see amended 

 (p. 45, lines 26 and 27) ; for " in many important details " read 

 absolutely." I think we are much indebted to Mr. Coles for his 

 paper, which deals with a subject of great importance. It does not 

 seem to me right that such systems, as that which he has described 

 to us to-day, should be spoken of without knowledge : and it is 

 therefore necessary that from time to time able men should investi- 

 gate them, and ascertain their true character. It is not the duty of 

 every one to take up such an investigation, just as it is not the duty of 

 every one to examine into diseases. But the service which is 

 rendered to the community by the medical men who do study 

 obscure diseases is of the highest order. My own particular line of 

 study is that of astronomy and necessarily it touches very little upon 

 the subject of Mr. Coles' paper ; but he has referred incidentally to 

 a subject to which I have given long attention, namely, the record in 

 the constellation figures of the promise of the Seed of the Woman, and 

 the bruising of the serpent. Now it is abundantly clear that the 

 designers of the constellation figures had a considerable "knowledge 

 of a genuine and practical astronomy. But it is also clear from 

 Babylonian tablets and inscriptions, that though the Babylonians 

 retained the constellation figures, they had lost the astronomical 



