if it has been repeated, how often or under what special conditions.
The abstract dicta—the vague verbal propositions on the strength of which the possibility of this repetition has been denied, are splendid specimens of those cobwebs of the brain which used to entangle thought in the meshes of the scholastic philosophy. The "law of parsimony" is the ambitious phrase under which theorists have hid the stupid notion that what Nature does once she never repeats again, or that results which she has obtained by one method at some one time must never be compassed by the same method again. Hear how magniloquently the great agnostic professor sets forth this marvelous dogma: "If all living beings have been evolved from pre-existing forms of life, it is enough that a single particle of living protoplasm should have once appeared upon the globe as the result of no matter what agency. In the eyes of a consistent evolutionist any further independent formation of protoplasm would be sheer waste."[1] This is very grand. The limitation of the possibilities of creation by the vision of a "consistent evolutionist" is delicious. It reminds one of the American joke that the planets revolve round the sun, "always subject to the Constitootion of the United States." But, unfortunately for the dogma, it renounces the testimony of facts, while sounder reasonings upon them are dead against it. Nature is economical, but she is not miserly. The prodigality of Nature is more conspicuous than her parsimony. The habitual expenditure and repetition of all her processes is at least more clear to us than her refusals to repeat them. Her fondness for identity of principle in all her various operations is more pervading than her casting aside of any method merely because it has been used already. That bits of living protoplasm, with inconceivably complex potentialities within them, should have been called into being once, and that nothing similar should ever have been done again, may possibly be true; but it is not according to analogy and we can not accept it on the authority of Prof. Huxley. Still less can so weighty a conclusion be hung securely on a gossamer structure of abstract and empty words.—Nineteenth Century.
- ↑ Encyclopedia Britannica, ninth edition, Biology, p. 689.
