Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 8.djvu/159

Rh battle long before Döllinger. His Jesuit colleagues, he knew, inculcated the belief that every human soul is sent into the world from God by a separate and supernatural act of creation. In a work entitled "The Origin of the Human Soul," Prof. Froschammer, the philosopher here alluded to, was hardy enough to question this doctrine, and to affirm that man, body and soul, comes from his parents, the act of creation being, therefore, mediate and secondary only. The Jesuits keep a sharp lookout on all temerities of this kind, and their organ, the Civiltà Cattolica, immediately pounced upon Froschammer. His book was branded as "pestilent," placed in the Index, and stamped with the condemnation of the Church.

It will be seen in the "Apology for the Belfast Address" how simply and beautifully the great Jesuit Perrone causes the Almighty to play with the sun and planets, desiring this one to stop, and another to move, according to his pleasure. To Perrone's Vorstellung God is obviously a large Individual who holds the leading-strings of the universe, and orders its steps from a position outside it all. Nor does the notion now under consideration err on the score of indefiniteness. According to it, the Power whom Goethe does not dare to name, and whom Gassendi and Clerk Maxwell present to us under the guise of a "Manufacturer" of atoms, turns out annually, for England and Wales alone, a quarter of a million of new souls. Taken in connection with the dictum of Mr, Carlyle, that this annual increment to our population are "mostly fools," but little profit to the human heart seems derivable from this mode of regarding the Divine operations.

But if the Jesuit notion be rejected, what are we to accept? Physiologists say that every human being comes from an egg, not more than $1/120$th of an inch in diameter. Is this egg matter? I hold it to be so, as much as the seed of a fern or of an oak. Nine months go to the making of it into a man. Are the additions made during this period of gestation drawn from matter? I think so undoubtedly. If there be anything besides matter in the egg, or in the infant subsequently slumbering in the womb, what is it? The questions already asked with reference to the stars of snow may be here repeated, Mr. Martineau will complain that I am disenchanting the babe of its wonder; but is this the case? I figure it growing in the womb, woven by a something not itself, without conscious participation on the part of either father or mother, and appearing in due time, a living miracle, with all its organs and all their implications. Consider the work accomplished during these nine months in forming the eye alone