Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 23.djvu/746

726 determine the growth of a plant or animal are physical forces; any assumption to the contrary, remember, even Dr. Beale avows that "we can not in any way prove." Why can not physical forces, in this case as in others, originate what they develop? It is for him who denies that they can do both or either to show why. This has never been done; and, till that which Dr. Beale admits to be unprovable is proved, never will be. The denial is a bald negation, leaving the presumption to stand, like the allied one, strengthened by a fruitless contradiction.

But we are not left to philosophical presumptions, insurmountable though they are. The evolution of living from not-living matter, it should be borne in mind, is an essential part of the hypothesis of evolution at large, and shares evenly in all the evidence, direct and indirect, which supports the general hypothesis, and which, against rooted predispositions of every kind, and amid the continual uproar of detraction and abuse, has revolutionized the thought of our time, putting Dr. Beale and his school of thinkers, but lately in an overwhelming majority, in a minority that he fairly terms a "very small number," and taking the chair of authority, as he ruefully complains, not simply in the laboratory and the closet, but in the study and the school, and, he might have added by "prophetic assumption," the Church, that loving mother of most of us beginning dimly to perceive that evolution founds science and religion on the self-same basis, and, in place of being the enemy of either, is the truest friend of both. The evidence which, in the course of a single generation, has wrought this marvelous change in unwilling minds, and the more distinctly in the higher minds, goes in its full strength, I repeat, to support the special hypothesis in hand. Manifestly, the leaders of thought, in both hemispheres, estimate this evidence differently from Dr. Beale. It is truly irresistible to an open and enlightened mind.

Furthermore, the earth, we should not forget, is her own biographer; and in the geologic chapter of her authentic sketch is recorded a time when life did not exist within her limits. Life on the earth had a beginning, then. This is not denied. Nor is it denied that up to the beginning of life all terrestrial phenomena were the effects of physical forces.

So much is conceded by every one, Dr. Beale not excepted. And, now came life. Whence did it come? Whence does it come? Physical forces, undeniably, are the constant antecedents of life; which, moreover, varies in fixed correspondence with determinate variations in them. This Dr. Beale must likewise concede, or assail the foundations of his art. But it is an axiom in scientific inquiry that anything, upon whose variations the variations of an effect are uniformly consequent, is the cause or connected with the cause of that effect; and, since the physical forces accompanying life are connected with no other cause except the Ultimate Cause, it results that they