ve we gained of the
mysteries of our origin?

Of the self-contradictions of evolutionists, we have an instance in
Huxley's treatment of the fundamental fact of his system--protoplasm.
The grand question is: How does the protoplasm become alive? In his
famous lecture on the subject, Physical Basis of Life, he argues
throughout, that life is a property of protoplasm; that protoplasm owes
its properties to the nature and arrangement of its molecules; that
there is no more need to infer or allege a faculty called vitality, to
account for the production of these various properties of the
protoplasm from its chemical constituents, than to infer a power called
aquosity, to account for the generation of water from oxygen and
hydrogen; and that our thoughts are the expression of molecular changes
in that matter of life which is the source of our other vital phenomena.
Briefly, our minds are manufactured by our bodies. But in his more
recent work, the Classification of Animals, 1869, without any retraction
of his previous error, or acknowledgment that he has changed his mind,
he flatly contradicts his Physical Basis, accepting and indorsing "the
well-founded doctrine that life is the cause and not the consequence of
organization."

A still more ridiculous incoherency of the same sort is displayed in the
logical department of Huxley's Physical Basis of Life; where, after
trying to persuade us to put our feet on the ladder which leads in the
reverse direction from Jacob's, and to descend with him into the slough
of materialism, and affirming that "our thoughts are the expression of
molecular changes in that matter of life which is the source of our
other vital phenomena;" he goes on to say, that he does not believe in
materialism. And he tries to vindicate himself by asserting that "we
know nothing about the composition of any body whatever as it is." And
this after deducing our thoughts from the molecular changes of the
protoplasm! A pretty story truly, and an impudent one! Here is a man who
will tell you all about how your body made your soul out of protoplasm,
and in the next page acknowledges that he knows nothing about the
composition of either the body or soul as it is! And yet this man will
mock the believers in the Bible as "smothering their minds under a
respectable feather bed of tradition," because they hesitate to shut
their eyes, and swallow his contradictions.

Mr. Wallace gives us a specimen of this logical incohe