Wallace and Dana, they go nine-tenths of the way, and then fly the track. Nature may do a large amount of the lower work; but for the origination of the higher part of man we must appeal to agencies higher than Nature.
Our correspondent does not see the reason of this. He asks why scientists are to be permitted to invoke miraculous agency at the point of the introduction of life, while they reject it at all others along the line of its development. They can only do this at the expense of logical consistency, and, so far as they do it, are unscientific. If a scientist does not know how life began, he should say so; and if he cannot find out himself, he has only to leave the inquiry to others. He is bound to explain it rationally, as he explains other effects in Nature, or to suspend his judgment. It is futile for him to resort to any short-and-easy methods of solving the problem, for it still remains to be worked by the scientific method. The whole history of our knowledge of Nature reveals an immutable order, an invariable and indissoluble chain of causation; and this principle a scientific man is never at liberty to discard because a serious difficulty is encountered; and, as a scientific man, he is never at liberty to discard it at all. Men talk lightly of breaks and supernatural intrusions in the course of Nature, which was well enough ages ago, but is now forbidden by the very conception of what Nature is. For thousands of years nothing was known of natural laws; now they form the basal idea of its constitution. The innermost texture, the essence and spirit, and the very definition of Nature, are unbroken, continuous order. It is by this alone that we know it. It is not enough to say that law is universal. It pervades all Nature, and constitutes the very idea of it. Our intelligence is bound up with it, is a part of it, and we neither know nor can know of any exception or limit to the principle. Men undertake to say where the natural order stops, and the supernatural is reached, but they juggle with words; for, the moment the so-called supernatural is brought within the cognizance of reason, it ceases to be supernatural. The alternative and antithesis of natural order is not the supernatural, but disorder. As the Rev. Baden Powell well remarks, "If Nature could really terminate anywhere, there we should find not the supernatural, but a chaos, a blank—total darkness—anarchy—atheism."
As to the chasm of which Mr. Walworth speaks between dead and living matter, it is, of course, nothing more than a chasm in our knowledge, and none the less a chasm when bridged over by the hypothesis of miraculous interference. The lowest form of life, the material basis from which all living things are spun, is protoplasm; but if Nature can produce a Newton or a Shakespeare in a few years from a formless protoplasmic germ, and by the course of natural causation, why should we say that it is past her power to produce the raw material itself, and fly to the supernatural to account for its earliest appearance? Science cannot take the theological explanation here, any more than elsewhere in Nature, for, if these explanations had been accepted as satisfactory, there never would have been any science. The scientific problem of the origin of life is a recent one. It has not been solved, but what has been already done, so far from disheartening inquirers, only stimulates them to greater effort. Chemistry already begins to build up organic substances artificially in the laboratory, although such an idea was long scouted as hopelessly impossible. A few generations more of work may put a very different aspect upon this profound inquiry; but, even if it takes centuries, the question must be held as belonging solely to the province of reason, and to be solved in accordance with the natural laws of cause and effect.
