of these organisms; they were not
discovered until many years after his death. But he surmised that there
was something which brought corruption into the fluids; he excluded that
something, with the result that the fluids remained untainted. From our
point of view, however, there are several things to be learnt. In the
first place quite a number of ignorant persons have thought that the
discovery of spontaneous generation would upset religious dogmata. That
of course is quite absurd. From what has been said above it will be seen
that St. Thomas Aquinas--in common with all the men of learning of his
day--fully believed in it, as did Needham, another ecclesiastic as to
whose orthodoxy there is no doubt. Further, the entire controversy is a
complete confutation of the false allegation that between Catholicism
and science there is a great gulf set. There have been few longer and
more remarkable controversies in the history of science, and scarce any
other--if indeed any other--which has such important bearings upon
health and industry than that which relates to bio- or abio-genesis. It
is significant to find that the names of so many of the protagonists in
this controversy were those of men who were also convinced adherents of
the Catholic Church.

IX. A THEORY OF LIFE[36]

Of the making of books on the question of Vitalism there would seem to
be no end; and, following upon quite a number of others comes this
handsome, well-illustrated, intensely interesting book, by one whose
writings are always worth study. It purports to deal with the Origin and
Evolution of Life; but, as to the first, it leaves us in no way advanced
towards any real explanation of that problem on materialistic lines. As
to the second, though there is a vast amount of valuable information,
often illuminating and suggestive, again we confess that we fail to
discover any real philosophy of that process of evolution which the
author postulates. These propositions we must now proceed to justify. We
can consider them from the most rigidly scientific standpoint, since, if
every word or almost every word in the book were proved truth, it would
not make the slightest difference to Catholic Philosophy, nor, indeed,
to Theistic teachings, since in the imperishable words of Paley: "There
may be many second causes, and many courses of second causes, one behind
another, between what we observe of nature and the Deity; but there
must be intelligence somewhere