Correspondence. 
243 
1881.] 
principle ot analogy, and indeed of common sense. It strikes 
me, however, that when (at p. 84) he challenges those who, like 
Haeckel, deride Teleology, and substitute for it Spontaneity, — • 
as a vera causa of living beings, to account for the intelligence 
so conspicuous in their construction, — he might have turned the 
tables upon them, or (to use an equally familiar phrase) “ hoisted 
them with their own petard.” He might have demanded the 
meaning of this word spontaneity , or spontaneous generation. 
Every tyro knows that these words are derived from “ sponte ” 
(1 anglice , by will). Whose will, then, is meant when they speak 
of spontaneity ? Will is a function of mind, not of matter, — 
an aCtive attribute of a personal entity, or living being, — or it 
has no meaning at all. Do they mean, then, that the will that 
generates an organism can be its own , i.e., that it could act 
before it existed ? Such self-generation only exhibits self-contra- 
diCtion in those who assert it ; and the only alternative is, that 
the will is that of another being, and, as the result of its exercise 
is the production of what did not previously exist, this is no less 
than an aCt of creation ; and if matter can create the term is an 
absurd misnomer, and should be replaced by that of God. 
Nor will philosophic atheism gain much by calling this creative 
power Nature, or Monism, or any other ism. Call the Being 
which produces so unique a result what they will, this is the 
Being we Christians worship and adore as the Maker of all 
things and the Moral Governor of his rational creation. M. 
Haeckel himself admits (vol. i., p. 341) that such an event as he 
calls spontaneous generation must have occurred, at any rate, in 
the remote past, and may have occurred at any time since. We 
may congratulate the learned Professor on having discovered 
what the vast mass of thoughtful observers of Nature have been 
convinced of from the earliest times. 
I must confess myself to be uncertain whether I understand 
the author’s meaning in the following sentence (p. 82). Refer- 
ring to the vast epochs of geology, he says — “ Each of these 
eras presents different stratifications and forms, which stratifica- 
tions could only have arisen from a solidification of the gaseous 
substance which we term the ether.” Presuming that it is the 
lumi in germs that is here alluded to, which he seems to con- 
sider as a gas more subtle than those composing our atmosphere, 
I would observe that this theory is a mere assumption, and that 
it is more probable that this universal medium is a form of matter 
sui generis , and that the Creator, having made it absolutely inde- 
pendent of the force (whatever it is) which we call gravity, has 
rendered it thereby incapable of solidification. It is quite as 
conceivable that He should have originated a hundred or a 
thousand differing forms of matter as that He should have made 
one , and then so altered it by successive modifications and con- 
densations that it became totally different in ten thousand other 
forms. In reality these two conceptions are little better than a 
distinction without a difference. 
