Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 10.djvu/769

Rh attitude of mind to which we referred, that an extract from it will be here useful. Mr. Walworth remarks:

This last question implies, what is perfectly well known, that many scientific men, naturalists, and even advanced biologists like Mr. Darwin, do invoke miraculous agency to explain the origin of life upon earth; that is, after admitting generally the great principle of natural causation, at a certain point they throw it up as insufficient, and appeal to supernatural causation.

It is surely unnecessary to waste words here in showing that the conception of the order of Nature has had an historic growth; that in the early times all the operations of the world were explained on the hypothesis of supernatural agents which science has so far dispelled as imaginary that the great phenomena of the heavens, the changes of the crust of the earth, and even atmospheric disturbances, are now referred for explanation to the operation of inflexible and universal physical laws. Where explanation breaks down and difficulties remain, in these branches of inquiry, the course pursued is to attribute the unexplained effects to lack of knowledge, and to wait for further light from the sources that have already afforded it. Nor can it be necessary to multiply words in showing that it is not so in biology, the science which deals with the phenomena of life. When a formidable difficulty occurs here, such as explaining the origin of species or the first advent of living things upon the earth, there is no waiting, but the knot is cut at once by appealing to miraculous intervention—to causes that are above Nature and out of Nature, and which cannot be investigated. There are, indeed, but few, even in the circles of science, who avowedly maintain the inviolable supremacy of natural causes, here as elsewhere, in Nature. They assume it generally, but affirm its inadequacy to explain all efforts. How many are there who recognize man, in his origin, to be as strictly and essentially a part and result of the order of Nature as any other creature? Like