Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/302

288 regard the Bible account of the introduction of life upon the earth as a poem, not as a statement of fact, where are we to seek for guidance as to the fact? There does not exist a barrier possessing the strength of a cobweb to oppose to the hypothesis which ascribes the appearance of life to that "potency of matter" which results in natural evolution. This hypothesis is not without its difficulties, but they vanish when compared with those which encumber its rivals. There are various facts in science obviously connected, and whose connections we are unable to trace; but we do not think of filling the gap between them by the intrusion of a separable spiritual agent. In like manner, though we are unable to trace the course of things from the nebula, where there was no life in our sense, to the present earth where life abounds, the spirit and practice of science pronounce against the intrusion of an anthropomorphic creator. Theologians must liberate and refine their conceptions or be prepared for the rejection of them by thoughtful minds. It is they, not we, who lay claim to knowledge never given to man. "Our refusal of the creative hypothesis is less an assertion of knowledge than a protest against the assumption of knowledge which must long, if not always, lie beyond us, and the claim to which is a source of perpetual confusion." At the same time, when I look with strenuous gaze into the whole problem as far as my capacities allow, overwhelming wonder is the predominant feeling. This wonder has come to me from the ages just as much as my understanding, and it has an equal right to satisfaction. Hence I say, if, abandoning your illegitimate claim to knowledge, you place, with Job, your forehead in the dust and acknowledge the authorship of this universe to be past finding out—if, having made this confession, and relinquished the views of the mechanical theologian, you desire, for the satisfaction of feelings which I admit to be in great part those of humanity at large, to give ideal form to the Power that moves all things—it is not by me that you will find objections raised to this exercise of ideality, when consciously and worthily carried out.

Again, I think Prof. Virchow's position, in regard to the question of contagium animatum, is not altogether that of true philosophy. He points to the antiquity of the doctrine. "It is lost," he says, in the darkness of the middle ages. "We have received this name from our forefathers, and it already appears distinctly in the sixteenth century. We possess several works of that time which put forward contagium animatum as a scientific doctrine, with the same confidence, with the same sort of proof, with which the 'Plastidulic soul' is now set forth."

These speculations of our "forefathers" will appeal differently to different minds. By some they will be dismissed with a sneer; to