cs. However, this hypothesis also only defers the solution
of the question, and, supposing its scientific possibility, leads either to
the remoter question, how life did originate in those other spheres, or to
the metaphysical assertion of the eternity of life and of the eternal
continuity of the living in the world, and shows therewith very clearly the
impossibility of its explanation.

This inexplicability would still exist, if what is quite improbable should
happen, namely, that the experimental attempts at _artificially producing
organic life_ should be successful, and if thus the question as to the
_generatio aequivoca_, which during the past decades so much alarmed the
minds of scientists and theologians, should be experimentally solved and
answered in the affirmative. For in view of the hopes of a possible
explanation of life, which is expected to be the reward for the success of
{139} these attempts, Zoellner is fully right in saying: "That the
scientists to-day set such an extremely high value on the inductive proof
of the _generatio aequivoca_, is the most significant symptom of how little
they have made themselves acquainted with the first principles of the
theory of knowledge. For, suppose they should really succeed in observing
the origin of organic germs under conditions entirely free from objection
to any imaginable communication with the atmosphere, what could they answer
to the assertion that the organic germs, in reference to their extension,
are of the order of ether-atoms, and, with these, press through the
intervals of the material molecules which form the sides of our apparatus?"

How little life is explained, at least according to the present state of
our knowledge, also follows from the _insufficiency of all attempts_ at
_defining it_. The latest and most thorough attempt at such a definition of
life, with which we are familiar, is that made by Herbert Spencer in his
"First Principles", Sec. 25, and in his "Principles of Biology," Vol. I, Part
I, Chap. 4 and 5. Having made thorough investigations, he arrives at the
general formula: "Life is the continuous adjustment of internal relations
to external relations." To this definition we will not make the objection
that it is nothing but a logical abstraction from the common quality of all
processes and phenomena of life; for it certainly lies in the nature of a
definition that it can be nothing else but that. Nevertheless, we will
state that such a de