Life--Its True Genesis.
The profound Newton did not attempt to show what the gravitative force of
the universe was. He bore himself more modestly, only endeavoring to show
that such a force existed, and that it accounted for all the movements of
celestial bodies, even to their slightest perturbations. He frankly
admitted his inability to determine what this force was, but by
observations and calculations made with the greatest care, he ascertained
that its action upon matter was proportional to its mass directly, and to
the square of its distance inversely; and, with the requisite data and the
principles of pure geometry, he demonstrated that this mysterious
force--utterly inapproachable by human conception in its mystery--not only
governs and controls the movements of all the mighty masses of matter
rolling in space, but transmits its influence--not successively, but
instantly and without diminution--to the smallest conceivable molecule on
the outlying boundaries of the universe. In the same calm and
comprehensive spirit, if it be possible for us to reach it, let us look
upon this mysterious force called "life," not to show that it is simply a
"correlate" of this or that motion (a thing utterly impossible of
demonstration, if it actually exists), but to ascertain how and in what
way it acts, and by what known law, if any, it is governed.
In all the vast realm of Reality there is no more conclusive and palpable
fact than that "life" exists--appearing wherever the bright light flashes,
the loving raindrop falls, the dancing brook ripples, the sparkling
streamlet murmurs, and the broad river flows to mingle with the sea. All
along this bright pathway of sunlight and cool translucent wave, this
wonderful principle of vitality manifests itself in all-glorious
life--filling the air with balmy odors; making perennial bud, leaf and
flower, speeding from sire to son, from heart to heart, from spirit to
spirit, from age to age, from time into eternity.[4] For like all living
principles, in this realm of Reality, it cannot die. It is immortal in its
primal source, immortal all along its bright pathway, immortal as it flows
onward to eternity, immortal in its return to the bosom of God. It is no
postulate, no corollary, no mere hypothetical judgment; no "undiscovered
correlative of motion," no "baseless fabric of a vision"--but the one
grand comprehensive _Datum_ on which all the objective, as well as
subjective, data of the universe rest. It is the same "spirit that moved
upon the face of the depths," in that majestic Dawn of Creation when the
"evening and the morning were the first day;" the same spirit that
"upholds the order of the heavens;" that pervades the vast realm of
Reality, that flashes in the bright sunlight, descends in the loving
raindrop, ripples in the dancing brook, sparkles in the murmuring stream,
and forever flows onward bearing its primal fulness to the sea.
To deny the existence of this vital principle because we cannot bottle it
up in our airless flasks: to reduce it to some unknown correlate of motion
because it constantly defies our poor mental grasp; to insist upon its
artificial production because elementary substances may be chemically
handled in our laboratories--is the same sort of preposterous folly that
Newton would have been guilty of, had he attempted to show that there was
no such thing as "gravity" in the universe; that it was only some
undiscovered correlative of a thermal limit,--some unknown molecular
complexity or entanglement in cosmic ether--some spontaneously occurring
affinity or antagonism of ethereal molecules in the interplanetary
spaces--some "potentiated potentiality" of mere sky-mist,--conditions of
which he could have had no experimental knowledge, nor have given the
slightest analogical proof. That we are justified in thus partially
travestying the technical methods of some of our modern scientists, so
called--especially those of the materialistic school--those advocating a
purely physical theory of life, we need only quote a sentence or two from
Professor Lionel S. Beale, of King's College, London. This eminent
physiologist, in his recent work on "The Mystery of Life," says:
"Notwithstanding all that has been asserted to the contrary, not one vital
action has yet been accounted for by physics and chemistry. The assertion
that life is correlated force rests upon assertion alone, and we are just
as far from an explanation of vital phenomena by force-hypotheses as we
were before the discovery of the doctrine of the correlation of forces."
And he further adds that each additional year's labor, in this special
field of investigation, "only confirms him more strongly than ever in the
opinion that the physical doctrine of life cannot be sustained."
Many able and eminently learned physiologists have been disposed to
recognize the presence of pre-existing "germs" in the earth, but not to
the extent of accounting for all life-manifestations therein, as the
doctrine is conclusively taught in the Bible Genesis. The language of this
genesis is too clear and explicit to be misunderstood, in its proper
renderings. It especially emphasizes the remarkable and most extraordinary
statement, at least for the period in which it was written, that all life
comes primordially from the waters and the earth. Note the order in which
the command "to bring forth" was issued:--
1. Let the earth bring forth its vegetation.
2. Let the waters bring forth the fishes, the amphibia, the reptiles, _the
fowl of the air_.
3. Let the earth bring forth the beast, the cattle, every living creature,
and everything that creepeth upon the earth--each after his kind.
4. _Let us make man in our own image_.
And this is the precise order in which the Scientific genesis proceeds,
with all the lithographic pages of nature turned back for its inspection.
Before vegetation there could have been no animal life upon the globe.
This fact is most conclusively proved, not only by geographic and
paleontologic records, but by legitimate induction. From the highly
crystalline, and, for the most part, non-fossiliferous era, far back in
the Laurentian period, down, in the order of time, to the modern or
post-tertiary period, there is one continuous history of
life-manifestations, written upon the stratified rocks, in the order of
the Bible Genesis. Was this mere guess and fancy on the part of the
writer, even to the seemingly improbable element wherein is assigned the
origin of the "fowl of the air?" Bear in mind that nothing was known of
geological distribution at the time this most remarkable genesis was
written. Had there been, it is certain that the careful and painstaking
Hesiod, who suffered no important fact of the _Cosmos_ to escape him,
would have given us some hint of it in his "Works and Days;" for Greece
was, even in his early day, largely the recipient of Phoenician learning
and literature, as she was certainly Phoenicia's foster-child in letters.
But the more conclusive proofs of the correctness of the order of
creation, as given in the Bible Genesis, are to be found in the accurate
observations of modern geological science. Before there could have
appeared in the primeval oceans any living organism, even the lowest
primordial forms of crustacea, there must have been marine
vegetation--that springing from inorganic matter and laying the foundation
of organic life. Plants originate in, and are solely nourished by,
inorganic substances; or, to speak more definitely, they originate from
primordial germs--the first elementary principles of life--whenever
inorganic conditions favor, and, assimilating air, water, and other
inorganic materials, convert them into organic substances, or such as
answer to the conditions of organic life. In doing this, they take up and
decompose carbonic acid, retain the carbon, and give off oxygen--a vital
process not known to occur in the case of animal life. That their
primordial germs, or vital units, are in the earth, as the Bible Genesis
declares, is conclusively shown by the experimental processes first
successfully entered upon by the Abbé Spallanzani, Charles Bonnet, and
others, and more recently renewed and advocated by M. Pasteur, and his
co-laborers in super-heated flask experimentation, as well as logically
established by inductive methods.
_Nihil ex nihilo_ is conceded to be as conclusive an induction as _omne
vivum ex vivo._ That is, as without some chemical unit--some primary least
considered as a whole--there can be no chemical action, so without some
vital unit, in the same primary sense, there can be no vital
manifestation. The doctrine of "chemical units" is universally conceded,
and that of "morphological units" almost as universally claimed. What
greater incongruity is there, then, in assuming the presence between the
two of a physiological or vital unit? [5] At all events, it is as
impossible to demonstrate the non-existence of the one unit as the other.
And so long as legitimate induction supports the doctrine of the Bible
Genesis, it is useless to indulge in a contrary assumption which is wholly
without verification or proof.
But to return to land vegetation. This appeared and flourished throughout
the Devonian period, if not anterior to it, and long before the appearance
of batrachian reptiles and other low air-breathing forms of life. In fact,
there could have been no life-breathing atmosphere until the earlier land
vegetation had whipped out its more destructive elements, and paved the
way, in necessary conditions, for the appearance of air-breathing animals.
Hence the command for the earth to bring forth both marine and land
vegetation--the vegetation of the earth--before there was any similar
command respecting either marine or land forms of organic life. But by
what logical method was this exact order inferred in the Bible Genesis?
Neither the Jews, nor their earlier Hebrew ancestors, nor the Phoenicians
before or after them, were in any sense of the word metaphysicians; nor
did their language admit of those nicer distinctions and speculative
conclusions which would have enabled any writer using it, thousands of
years ago, to draw the commanding induction contained in this remarkable
genesis. There is nothing in the incomparable methods of M. Comte, or the
metaphysical spirit of Herbert Spencer, in his most daring speculations,
which gives the world a more legitimate and conclusive induction than is
contained in this simple statement of the order of creation. That it
should have been a mere piece of guess-work on the part of Moses, or any
other writer of his time,--covering, as it does, so many particularities
of statement, all according with the exact observations of geologic
science, and supported by paleontologic records,--requires quite as much
credulity of judgment as to accept it for divinely inspired truth. A
disciple of M. Comte might object to this conclusion as susceptible of two
interpretations, the one a legitimate induction, and the other not. But
the mind of the profounder reasoner would accept the interpretation which
is supported by the higher reason, and validated by the greater number of
conclusively-established facts. In the case of a strongly intuitive mind,
it might be possible to guess the exact order of three or four apparently
disconnected events, but to arbitrarily associate with them other and more
distinctively subordinate occurrences, like the appearance or
disappearance of whole groups and classes of plants and animals, the
supposition that guess-work, and not positive information, governed in the
formation of a judgment, is at once rejected because of its utter
incredibility.
It is not our purpose, however, either to affirm or dis-affirm the
inspirational claims of the Bible Genesis. We simply take its language as
we find it, stript of its Masoretic renderings and irrational
interpretations, and unhesitatingly aver that the three Hebrew words,
translated in our common version--"whose seed is in itself upon the earth"
--contains, when properly rendered, the key that unlocks the whole
"mystery of life," or, as Dr. Gull emphasizes it, "the grand _questio
vexata_ of the day." It expressly declares that "the primordial germs of
all plant-life (and, inferentially of all life) are in themselves (_i.e._
each after its kind) upon the earth," and we have only to supplement this
physiological statement with the "necessary incidence of conditions," as
formulated by the physicists, to explain every phenomenal fact of life
hitherto occurring upon our globe.
Take all the hints as to the spontaneous origin of life to be met with in
Aristotle; all those subsequently repeated by Lucretius and Ovid; all the
experiments of the renowned Abbé Spallanzani--all the alleged "fantastic
assumptions" of M. Bonnet--all the theories of "panspermism," by
whomsoever advocated--all the fortuitous aggregations of "_molecules
organiques,_" as put forth by the French school of materialists--all the
_primordia viventium_ of the gifted Harvey--all the "molecular machinery"
and "undiscovered correlates of motion" formulated by Herbert Spencer and
Professor Bastian--in fine, all the more brilliant theories of life ever
spun from the recesses of the human brain,--and we shall find that they
all fit into the three simple Hebrew words to be found in the Bible
Genesis, _and all are explained by them._ We say _all_, with one exception
only--that of man. And how inconceivably grand and majestic this
exception! The crowning work of creation was MAN. He came from no "muddy
vesture of decay;" no mere life-creating fiat spoke him into existence. He
who was to have "dominion over all the earth"--who was to be created only
a little lower than the angels--"in the image of God created He him." And,
breathing into his nostrils the breath of life, _he became a living soul_!
Here is the "bridge" over which the "evolutionist" may pass, if he will,
without wearing either the dunce's cap or the ass's ears. It spans the
chasm between the anthropoid ape and man as no other bridge can span it.
Across this bridge is flung the living garment of God, and how grandly,
yet reverently and humbly, did the profound Newton cross it! Oh, ye
defiant iconoclasts of sublime faith in the "old doctrines;" ye who talk
so flippantly of the "potentialities of life in a nebula;" who sit on the
awe-inspiring Matterhorn, at high noon, and muse in sadness over "the
primordial formless fog," teeming with all the mighty possibilities of
myriads of sun-systems like our own; and, musing, sneer, if you can, at
the idea of a "specific creation" in the beginning--of an Infinite
Intelligence that directs and superintends all! Because _you_ cannot
annihilate matter, nor conceive of its annihilation in the infinitessimal
compass of _your_ brain, is that any reason why Infinite power and
intelligence may not have spoken it into existence at _His_ sovereign and
commanding will? If man would presumptuously press towards the threshold
of the Infinite, let him do it reverently, and with humility of spirit,
and not as one "that vaunteth himself of strength," or "multiplieth words
without knowledge."
But let us examine the Bible Genesis a little further in this direction.
It is said in the second verse of the first chapter that "the spirit of
God moved upon the face of the waters," that is, upon the face of the
abyss--the chaotic mass at creation--the earth "without form and void."
What is here meant by "the spirit of God," is that life-giving breath or
power of God which operates (continuously operates) _to impart life to
inanimate nature._[6] From the connection in which it here stands it means
this, as in other connections it means the power which operates
(continuously operates) to produce whatever is noble and good (God-like)
in man. There is no implication in the text that this life-giving
principle or power was suspended in the act of creation. On the contrary,
there is abundant evidence in nature to show that it is just as operative
now as it was in the beginning. One of the definitions given by Professor
Gibbs of this spirit is, "that which operates throughout inanimate
nature," not that which once operated, and then forever ceased its
operations. And Professor Gibbs no doubt meant by "nature," in this
connection, not only all the physical phenomena she presents, but the
aggregate or sum total of all her phenomena, whether active or passive,
animate or inanimate, embracing the world of matter or the world of
mind.[7] "All are but parts of one stupendous whole,"--not a part nature,
and a part not nature.
Again, in the eleventh verse, it is distinctly declared that the _ZRA_.
the "germinal principle of life," is in the earth, producing each living
thing, at least in the vegetable world, after its kind, that is, after its
own class, order, genera, species. Hence, the three distinct and separate
commands given to the earth, or to the earth and its waters, "to bring
forth." No such command would have been given to the earth, had it not
first received its _baptism of life_ from God--in other words, derived the
animating principle of life from the source of all Life.
And hence, also, the two separate averments in the second chapter of
Genesis, both entirely meaningless apart from the construction we here
give it, that "out of the ground made the Lord God to grow" the
vegetation of the earth, and "out of the ground" produced he (or caused
to be produced) every beast of the field, etc.,--all of which has a
definite and comprehensive significance in this one sense only, that the
animating principle of life is in the earth, as the language of this most
remarkable genesis implies. And this seems to have been the patristic
idea, namely, that law and regularity, not arbitrary intervention, nor
any specific act of creation, were what governed in the case of both
vegetal and animal life.
St. Augustine says: "In prima institutione naturæ non quseritur
miraculum, sed quid natura rerum habeat." And it is certain that both St.
Thomas Aquinas and St. Basil held the same view. And they further held
that the animating principle of life once implanted in nature, held good
for all time. But we are not seeking for early and mediæval authority.
What we propose to show is, that nature is still implicitly obeying just
such a law as that implied in the command given her "to bring forth,"
however doubtful may be the authority on which it rests, in the opinion of
our modern scientists.
And how completely does this genesis of life take man out of the
definitional formula embracing the "beasts of the earth." From the lowest
vertebrate, in Mr. Darwin's plexus, to the highest quadrumane (his nearest
allied type to man), covering almost an infinite variety of distinct
living forms, the distance to be traversed, in order to reach man, is
hardly more than one-third the length of the still unlinked and
uncompleted chain. In the average capacity of the monkey's brain-chamber,
to say nothing of his other characteristic differences, the distance is
not half traversed. As a "beast of the earth," he remains allied to his
own type, and nothing higher. Both Darwin's vertebral _plexus_, and
Herbert Spencer's "line of individuation," must begin with the lancelet
and its disputed head, and end in the Catarrhine or Old World monkey. No
_a priori_ induction will ever extend this line _or plexus_ to man. The
developmental chain, if indeed there be one, has no congenital link that
will either drag man down to the "beast of the earth," or lift the latter
up to the transcendent plane of humanity. Each must remain specifically in
his own type, whatever may be their vertical tendencies, upwards or
downwards.[8] And this word "type" implies a fundamental ground-plan--an
archetype--an original conception of what each should unconditionally be,
and what plane each should as unconditionally occupy. Man's place in
nature can never be changed or modified by materialistic speculations.
Whatever theories the materialists may spin into the unsubstantial warp
and woof of their scientific formulæ respecting life, will never stand
before the tenacious and stubborn physiological facts which almost any
thoroughly-informed and well-read scholar of nature may readily present
against them.
Even the wild Indian of our prairies has a more rational conception of
life and its accountabilities, than some of these learned professors
whose theoretical conclusions we find it imperative to handle. With all
his rude, rough nature, hanging like so many mental clogs about him,
this unlettered savage recognizes the fact that the earth is the
_genetrix omnium viventium_, or the living _mother_ on whose bosom he
shall rest when his spirit has passed to the happy hunting-fields
beyond. Unlettered as he is, and unread in any genesis of life, he fails
not to perceive that the earth is forever teeming with the germinal
principles of life, and that when his prairie fires have invaded the
forests in which he had previously hunted the deer, other and different
forest growths are constantly making their appearance, without any
apparent intervention of seeds, but not without the supervisional care
and direction of the Great Spirit,--while many of his hardier prairie
grasses have disappeared, only to give place to the more nutritious
_gramma_ coveted by his favorite game.
And here we may as well anticipate an objection which will be raised
against the presence of this animating principle of life in the earth, as
to meet and answer it further on in the argument. But as the objection to
which we refer is one of those dragon's teeth we do not care to leave
behind us, we will meet it at the very threshold of the controversy. It
will probably be admitted that the vegetation of the earth may appear in
the way and manner indicated in the biblical genesis, the same as
infusorial forms appear in super-heated and hermetically-sealed flasks.
But how about the preëxisting germs or vital units of the mastodon, the
megatherium, and other gigantic mammiferous quadrupeds of the Eocene
period? From what experimental flasks, in the great laboratory of nature,
did they first make their appearance? The objection is a legitimate one,
and we will answer it.
But first, let us do so from the materialist's own stand-point. Time, they
all agree, is practically infinite--past time, as well as future; while
matter is susceptible of an infinite number of diverse movements, changes,
modifications, combinations, etc.,[9] chemically as well as molecularly
considered. This, they claim, is not a mere hypothetical judgment, but a
mathematically demonstrable proposition. Grant it for the sake of the
argument, and then see if the mastodon does not promptly emerge from some
one of their "experimental flasks," as they choose to put it.
For if the number of these diverse movements, changes, modifications,
etc., of matter, have been infinite, in its progress from the lowest
statical to the highest dynamical manifestation, then every possible, as
well as conceivable, form of matter, must have existed somewhere, and at
some time, in nature, even to its highest and most potentially endowed
plasmic form in which there is life. And if this be true, and the
materialists will not deny but rather affirm it, then the inter-uterine
conditions of matter, in the case of all animals (the mastodon included),
as well as the inter-cellular conditions in the case of all plant-life,
must have existed, with their necessary environments, somewhere and at
some time, in the all-hutched laboratory of nature. Hence, in the infinite
number of these changes and combinations--in the countless collocations of
molecules and chemically changed conditions of matter, we have the
possibilities of all terrestrial life-manifestations, as we have, in the
infinite number of cosmical changes, the possibilities of all planetary,
cometary, and asteroidal manifestations. For whenever these vital changes
occur, the life-manifestations dependent thereon, must as inevitably
follow as that infinitely diffused matter should be aggregated by gravity,
or by what Humboldt calls, in his "Cosmos," the "world-arranging
Intelligence" of the universe.
Who shall say, then, that in that immensely remote and long-protracted
era--the Eocene period--in which the gigantic elephantoids first made
their appearance, there did not exist somewhere, in some one of nature's
more cunning and prolific recesses, the exact plasmic conditions necessary
for the appearance of the mastodon? If they existed anywhere (which is
concessively possible), with the necessary environment (also concessively
possible), then the mastodon could no more help wallowing out of his
essential plasma than the earth can help responding to its axial motion.
All things are framed in the prodigality of nature, and she never commits
an abortion upon herself. If both the conditions and necessary environment
were at any time present, as they must have been on the materialistic
theory, the mastodon is just as easily accounted for as the first fungus,
or the first fungus-spore. [10]
All physicists, as well as physiologists, agree that individual species of
both plants and animals have _disappeared_ from the earth for the want of
the "necessary conditions" under which they once lived and flourished.
What greater fallacy is there, then, in the assumption that they
originally _appeared_ from the presence of these identical conditions,
whatever they may have been, and whenever they may have occurred? We put
this question not simply because the Bible Genesis asserts that "_out of
the ground_ made the Lord God to grow" every plant of the field "before it
was in the earth," as well as every herb of the field "before it grew;"
nor because it declares that their primordial germs are in the earth; nor
because it speaks of the earth as containing within itself the "animating
principle of life." But we put it on the irrefragable logic of the
materialist's own premises and conclusions. They may use other and
different physiological terms from what we should care to employ, but
their "correlates of motion," their "molecular force," their "highly
differentiated life-stuff," etc., may possibly mean nothing more than what
we mean by "vital units," "vital forces," "vital conditions," etc. Their
preference for the terms they employ, over essential "qualities" or
"properties" of matter, is entirely due to the obvious invalidity of their
conclusions, except as their physical theory of life may help them out of
an unpleasant dilemma. "Force" is a more convenient term on which to
allege the _de novo_ origin of life--its spontaneous manifestation in
their experimental flasks--than any vital principle primarily inhering in
matter, and manifesting itself whenever conditions favor. It is to
validate their own reasoning that they construct their fallacious
force-premises, from which to draw their materialistic inductions. In
other words, theirs is the fallacy of _non causa pro causa,_ or that
vicious process of reasoning which alleges some other than the real cause
of vital manifestation, and fastens induction where none is legitimately
inferable.
Burdach, Buffon, Pouchet, Needham, and other professed vitalists, agree
that in all life-manifestations there must be some preëxisting vital force
or principle, without which no living thing, whether plant or animal, can
come into existence.[11] M. Pouchet says: "I have always thought that
organized beings were animated by forces which are in no way reducible to
physical or chemical forces." The Abbé Needham is satisfied to formulate a
"force végetative," so far as plant-life is concerned; Buffon invariably
falls back on vital force or energy; and Burdach on a "force plastique,"
which is essentially inseparable from nature in her vital manifestations.
According to the latter, the whole universe is an "_organisme absolu_"
constantly endowed with life, and giving expression to it in all
conceivable directions. And all that these vitalists need, to give a full
interpretation to their facts of observation, is to supplement their
theories with the Bible declaration that the animating principle of life
is in the earth, from which all living things make their appearance, each
distinctively after its own kind, whenever environing conditions favor.
For they severally recognize these "necessary conditions" as inseparable
from all vital manifestation.
An effort has been made to show that Goethe was the great inspired prophet
of the doctrine of "Evolution," as a ceaselessly progressive
transformation of one thing into another, in the metamorphoses of plants
and animals; and Haeckel quotes this passage from him as entirely
conclusive of this point: "Thus much we should have gained (towards
solving the problem of life) that all the more perfect organic beings,
among which we include fishes, amphibians, birds, mammals (and at the head
of the latter, man), to be formed according to an archetype, [12] which
merely fluctuates more or less in its ever persistent parts, and moreover,
day by day, completes and transforms itself by means of reproduction." But
this attempt to give a poetic glorification to Haeckelism in Goethe's
speculations, and bring his commanding name into support of the evolution
theory of development, will prove utterly futile in the light of his
"archetype," and the persistency with which he concedes that nature
adheres to perfected forms.
Goethe accepts the doctrine of _vis centripeta_, beyond the influence of
which no developmental progress can be made in the way of diversifying or
variegating ideal types. In other words, he virtually fixes limits to
variability, from the outermost circumference of which reversion must
inevitably take place. His whole doctrine may be summed up generally, if
not specially, in these words: "The animal is fashioned _by_ circumstances
_to_ circumstances," as the eagle to the air and mountain top, the mole to
the loose soil in which it burrows, the seal to the water in which he
frolics, and the bat to the cave, the twilight, and the night air. We
should rather say that the animal is fashioned, after the Great
Architect's pattern, _to_ circumstances, and is only varied _by_
circumstances, and that within the narrowest limits of variability. For
the most that Goethe means by his "archetype" is an ideal pattern, after
which, or on which, a natural group of plants or animals has been
fashioned within the limits of possible variability. But by whose mind, or
rather within whose mind, was this ideal pattern--this essential
archetype--fashioned? Whence this ideal type, this natural group, this
_Archeus_ pervading all nature and fashioning all organic matter? Not from
the mind of Goethe certainly, nor from that of Aristotle or Lucretius, but
from the one supreme mind of the universe, in which the groups of all
living things were originally fashioned in the archetypal world--that
world "which," according to Bolingbroke, "contains intelligibly all that
is contained sensibly in our world."
This archetypal doctrine of Goethe, coupled, as he couples it, with the
influences of environment, or necessary external conditions, with typical
modifications only, while it entirely harmonizes with the Bible genesis of
types (everything modeled after its kind), is far from aiding, or in any
way abetting, the materialistic hypothesis of Haeckel, unless we make
nature at once the creator and modifier of her own archetype. And even
then the variability of species remains unaccounted for, except as we
attribute to nature a _purpose_ to modify persistent forms under a law
that is immutable even in its variability. For the assumption of an
archetype carries with it an archetypal plan and purpose, with a degree of
intelligence, either in or above nature, capable at once of conceiving the
type and determining the limits of its variability. The question is not,
therefore, as many may seem to think, whether species originate by miracle
or by law, but whether laws and causes can exist independently of any
predetermining will or agency in the universe.
Our language, and that of all civilized peoples on the globe, must be
thoroughly recast, not only in its philological and etymological
character, but in its ideologic, etiologic, and other significations,
before we can successfully fall back on an antecedent cause without an
effect, or an effect without an antecedent cause. Besides, the human mind
would have to undergo as complete a subversion of structure as language
itself, before any such attempt at recasting it, on the basis of modern
materialistic ideas, could possibly prove successful. And then, at least
one-third of our language would have to disappear in this iconoclastic
reform. For instance, take any well-tabulated synopsis of our categories
and their relations, and they would nearly all have to be recast or
entirely abandoned. Time, space, matter, motion, intellect, abstract
ideas, volitions, affections, etc., with their several correlates or
co-relations, would all have to undergo a thorough recasting process. The
personal, intersocial, sympathetic, moral, and religious relations and
obligations, would have to be summarily set aside for future revision, if
not for sweeping rejection. All our ideas of life, materiality,
spirituality, animality, vegetability, sensibility, etc., would have to
fall into greater or less desuetude, the language disappearing with the
ideas. All the words expressing our ideas of a superhuman agency, of God,
angels, heaven, revelation, religious doctrines, sentiments, acts of
worship, piety, human accountability to divine institutions, rites,
ceremonies, etc.,--to say nothing of maleficent spirits, mythological and
other fabulous divinities, entering so largely into the spirit and
machinery of all our best poetry--would utterly disappear from our
language. All our churches, minsters, chapels, tabernacles, cathedrals,
and temples erected to the "living God," embracing the finest and most
majestic architecture of the world, would have to succumb to the
iconoclastic zeal of these materialistic reformers. The ten categories of
Aristotle would disappear in the one category of Haeckel, or possibly the
two categories of Bastian--Matter and Motion! Philologically speaking, we
should all be at sea, drifting, like a set of deaf-mutes, on a wide and
inaudible ocean--all inarticulate, tongue-tied, voiceless--with only the
screeching of the sea-mew, or some other sepulchral bird of the night, to
greet us as in wide-mouthed derision of our speechlessness and folly.
But let us see how the incontestible facts of nature, and the truths of
science, fit into the three simple Hebrew words referring to "germs," or
the germinal principle of life, instead of the natural "seeds" of plants
or trees. We have given what we claim to be the true rendering of these
words. To show how perfectly they harmonize with all the phenomenal
manifestations of life in nature, we hurriedly pass to our third chapter.