e fruit to the tree
that bore it, or the child to the mother that carried it in her womb,
and yet, if only mechanical and chemical forces entered into his
genesis, he does not feel himself well fathered and mothered.

One may evade the difficulty, as Helmholtz did, by regarding life as
eternal--that it had no beginning in time; or, as some other German
biologists have done, that the entire cosmos is alive and the earth a
living organism.

If biogenesis is true, and always has been true,--no life without
antecedent life,--then the question of a beginning is unthinkable. It is
just as easy to think of a stick with only one end.

Such stanch materialists and mechanists as Haeckel and Verworn seem to
have felt compelled, as a last resort, to postulate a psychic principle
in nature, though of a low order. Haeckel says that most chemists and
physicists will not hear a word about a "soul" in the atom. "In my
opinion, however," he says, "in order to explain the simplest physical
and chemical processes, we must necessarily assume a low order of
psychical activity among the homogeneous particles of plasm, rising a
very little above that of the crystal." In crystallization he sees a
low degree of sensation and a little higher degree in the plasm.

Have we not in this rudimentary psychic principle which Haeckel ascribes
to the atom a germ to start with that will ultimately give us the mind
of man? With this spark, it seems to me, we can kindle a flame that will
consume Haeckel's whole mechanical theory of creation. Physical science
is clear that the non-living or inorganic world was before the living or
organic world, but that the latter in some mysterious way lay folded in
the former. Science has for many years been making desperate efforts to
awaken this slumbering life in its laboratories, but has not yet
succeeded, and probably never will succeed. Life without antecedent life
seems a biological impossibility. The theory of spontaneous generation
is rejected by the philosophical mind, because our experience tells us
that everything has its antecedent, and that there is and can be no end
to the causal sequences.

Spencer believes that the organic and inorganic fade into each other by
insensible gradations--that no line can be drawn between them so that
one can say, on this side is the organic, on that the inorganic. In
other words, he says it is not necessary for us to think of an absolute
commencement of organic life, or of