Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/282

268 of Genesis: "Profoundly interesting and indeed pathetic to me are those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the book of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. It is a poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is forever beautiful; in the latter it has been, and it will continue to be, purely obstructive and hurtful." My agreement with Prof. Knight extends still further. "Does the vital," he asks, "proceed by a still remoter development from the non-vital? Or was it created by a fiat of volition? Or"—and here he emphasizes his question—"has it always existed in some form or other as an eternal constituent of the universe? I do not see," he replies, "how we can escape from the last alternative." With the whole force of my conviction I say, "Nor do I;" though my mode of regarding the "eternal constituent" might differ from that of Prof. Knight.

When matter was defined by Descartes, he deliberately excluded the idea of force or motion from its attributes and from his definition. Extension only was taken into account. And, inasmuch as the impotence of matter to generate motion was assumed, its observed motions were referred to an external cause. God, resident outside of matter, gave the impulse. In this connection the argument in Young's "Night Thoughts" will occur to most readers:

 Who Motion foreign to the smallest grain Shot through vast masses of enormous weight? Who bid brute Matter's restive lump assume Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly?"

Against this notion of Descartes the great deist John Toland, whose ashes lie unmarked in Putney Churchyard, strenuously contended. He affirmed motion to be an inherent attribute of matter—that no portion of matter was at rest, and that even the most quiescent solids were animated by a motion of their ultimate particles. It seems to me that the idea of vitality entertained in our day by Prof. Knight closely resembles the idea of motion entertained by his opponents in Toland's day. Motion was then virtually asserted to be a thing sui generis, distinct from matter, and incapable of being generated out of matter. Hence the obvious inference when matter was observed to move. It was the vehicle of an energy not its own—the repository of forces impressed on it from without—the purely passive recipient of the shock of the Divine. The form of logic continues, but the subject-matter is changed. "The evolution of Nature," says Prof. Knight, "may be a fact; a daily and hourly apocalypse. But we have no evidence of the non-vital passing into the vital. Spontaneous generation is, as yet, an imaginative guess, unverified by scientific tests. And matter is not itself alive. Vitality, whether seen in a single cell of protoplasm or in the human brain, is a thing sui generis, distinct from matter, and incapable of being generated out of matter." It may be, however, that, in