Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/168

154 In the order of Nature what goes atop of the animal world is the world of consciousness, the world of mind and spirit which attains to its full flowering in man. This is no limited or accidental world, thrust upon the few, and denied to the many, but a world which belongs to the natural order of the universe. The passage to it from the animal is so gradual that science can not say where the one ends and the other begins. In the same manner the animal fades into the vegetable, and the vegetable into the mineral. There are no breaks, there are no gulfs fixed. "There exists no insurmountable chasm between organic and inorganic nature," says Hankel, speaking for the most thorough science of his times. Huxley and Tyndall and the leading French scientists have reached the same conclusion. The organic and the inorganic are composed of the same elements; their differences arise solely from the different chemical combination of these elements, a combination so peculiar and complex that Science has not yet been able to reproduce it in her laboratory. But the fact that spontaneous generation has not yet taken place under the highly artificial conditions imposed by experimental chemistry proves what? Proves only that it has not yet taken place, that science with its limited means and brief space of time has not yet accomplished that which must have occurred under vastly different conditions in the abysm of geological time, and in the depths of the primordial seas. Science starts with matter and with force; back of these it does not go; more than these it does not require. To account for them, or to seek to account for them, is unscientific, for the simple reason that no such accounting can be verified. Out of the potencies of matter itself science traces the evolution of the whole order of visible things. Theology may step in and assume to know all that Science leaves unsaid, but, in doing so, let it not assume to speak with the consent and the authority of its great rival.

In the light of the most advanced biological science, organic and inorganic appear but relative terms, like heat and cold. There are all degrees of heat, and there are probably all degrees of life. There are probably degrees of life too low in the scale for our discernment, just as there is heat where our senses report only cold. If there are degrees of consciousness, why may there not be degrees of life? The child grows gradually into consciousness, just as the race has grown gradually into consciousness. Dare we affirm that in either case the leap from the unconscious to the conscious was or is suddenly made? No more dare we affirm that the leap from the inorganic to the organic was suddenly made. Is the crystal absolutely dead? See it shape itself according to a special plan, see how sensitive it is to the surrounding medium; see it grow when the proper food is given it, so to speak. Pasteur has noted that it cicatrizes or repairs itself when wounded. When placed in the fluid of crystallization, as in the animal, the injured part sears over and gradually regains its original shape.