Page:Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1906).djvu/567

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Genesis
551

must father these absurdities, for both the material senses and their reports are unnatural, impossible, and unreal.

Either Mind produces, or it is produced. If Mind is first, it cannot produce its opposite in quality and quantity, The real producer called matter. If matter is first, it cannot produce Mind. Like produces like. In natural history, the bird is not the product of a beast. In spiritual history, matter is not the progenitor of Mind.

One distinguished naturalist argues that mortals spring from eggs and in races. Mr. Darwin admits this, but he The ascent of species adds that mankind has ascended through all the lower grades of existence. Evolution describes the gradations of human belief, but it does not acknowledge the method of divine Mind, nor see that material methods are impossible in divine Science and that all Science is of God, not of man.

Naturalists ask: “What can there be, of a material nature, transmitted through these bodies called eggs, — Transmitted peculiarities themselves composed of the simplest material elements, — by which all peculiarities of ancestry, belonging to either sex, are brought down from generation to generation?” The question of the naturalist amounts to this: How can matter originate or transmit mind? We answer that it cannot. Darkness and doubt encompass thought, so long as it bases creation on materiality. From a material standpoint, “Canst thou by searching find out God?” All must be Mind, or else all must be matter. Neither can produce the other. Mind is immortal; but error declares that the material seed must decay in order to propagate its species, and the resulting germ is doomed to the same routine.

The ancient and hypothetical question, Which is first,