250 TRANSACTIONS OF THE PLYMOUTH INSTITUTION. 
in accounting for the origin of the one, we have virtually said all 
that may be needful as to the origin of the other. Or it may 
turn out, as we proceed, that " Consciousness " comprehends much 
more than is implied in or connotated by the term "Life"; and 
in that case we shall have to mark the distinction, and, so far as 
they are radically different, seek to explain either their concomitant 
or their separate emergence. In any case it is well, in such a 
discussion as we are entering upon, to have what Leibnitz calls 
clear and distinct ideas on this matter of the relation of one to 
the other. The point at issue is not so easily decided off-hand as 
some may at first imagine. For its decision there is required a 
careful consideration of some of the most subtle and intricate 
phenomena presented in the history of the mental and the organic 
worlds. But of this more anon. 
At the outset we have to accept the position that Life emerged 
in this world, in some most minute and elementary form, very far 
back in the earth's history as compared with the present, though not 
very far back as compared with the time of the first concentration 
of the earth's material. Whether we take 100,000,000 years as 
the extreme limit of time during which life has been possible on 
the earth, according to Sir William Thomson's calculation on the 
basis afforded b} r physical science ; or 300,000,000 as required by 
Darwin for the rational structure of his hypothesis of Natural 
Selection ; or 1,000,000,000 as some wild enthusiasts for organic 
evolution would claim — makes no real difference to us on this 
occasion. Evolutionists and ?z (^-evolutionists, such as Dawson, 
or Louis Agassiz, have equally accepted the fact that geological 
evidence conclusively points to the appearance of life on the 
earth, in the first instance, in some form extremely simple. So 
that the question for solution, if possible, is, How did that pri- 
mordial form of life arise ? From whence did it come What 
conditions, if any, antecedent to it, issued in its appearance as a 
new phenomenon in the midst of a world otherwise exclusively 
inorganic The importance of this question, and the difficulty of 
answering it, springs largely from the fact, which all scientific men 
of every school admit; namely, that the difference between the 
organic and the inorganic is most decisively marked. As we shall 
see, attempts have been made by some to minimise the difference 
with a view to a certain theory as to the origin of Life ; but apart 
from theories of origin, and looked at as a phenomenon in the 
