find one's
self compelled often to make in his thinking. It is so difficult to keep
out of mind the idea of substance in connection with the Natural Laws,
the idea that they are the movers, the essences, the energies, that one
is constantly on the verge of falling into false conclusions. Thus a
hasty glance at the present argument on the part of any one
ill-furnished enough to confound Law with substance or with cause would
probably lead to its immediate rejection. For, to continue the same line
of illustration, it might next be urged that such a Law as Biogenesis,
which, as we hope to show afterward, is the fundamental Law of life for
both the natural and spiritual worlds, can have no application
whatsoever in the latter sphere. The _life_ with which it deals in the
Natural World does not enter at all into the Spiritual World, and
therefore, it might be argued, the Law of Biogenesis cannot be capable
of extension into it. The Law of Continuity seems to be snapped at the
point where the natural passes into the spiritual. The vital principle
of the body is a different thing from the vital principle of the
spiritual life. Biogenesis deals with {bios}, with the natural life,
with cells and germs, and as there are no exactly similar cells and
germs in the Spiritual World, the Law cannot therefore apply. All which
is as true as if one were to say that the fifth proposition of the First
Book of Euclid applies when the figures are drawn with chalk upon a
blackboard, but fails with regard to structures of wood or stone.

The proposition is continuous for the whole world, and, doubtless,
likewise for the sun and moon and stars. The same universality may be
predicated likewise for the Law of life. Wherever there is life we may
expect to find it arranged, ordered, governed according to the same Law.
At the beginning of the natural life we find the Law that natural life
can only come from preexisting natural life; and at the beginning of the
spiritual life we find that the spiritual life can only come from
preexisting spiritual life. But there are not two Laws; there is
one--Biogenesis. At one end the Law is dealing with matter, at the other
with spirit. The qualitative terms natural and spiritual make no
difference. Biogenesis is the Law for all life and for all kinds of
life, and the particular substance with which it is associated is as
indifferent to Biogenesis as it is to Gravitation. Gravitation will act
whether the substanc