Page images
PDF
EPUB

thing, differentiate, assort, adapt, combine themselves. After further myriads of ages, arise those beginnings of life which are not beginnings. At length come the protophyta, real beginnings, which insensibly advance into fragrant flowers, cereal plants, fruit and forest trees. With the protophyta, or soon after, grow the protozoa into all the animals.

This doctrine is commended as natural and reasonable by

men

"Too comic for the solemn things they are,
Too solemn for the comic touches in them,"

who tell us that the special creation hypothesis must now be consigned to that limbo where hover the ghosts of slaughtered theories. Instead of the declaration-" God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature," we are to take the following natural, simple, reasonable explanation, concerning life" It is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion, during which the matter passes from an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, to a definite, coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation."1 Compare it with the words of Moses-"God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself. Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowls that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind." Ask a truly scientific assembly whether "the earth bringing forth and the waters bringing forth," do not equally well explain the very doing of the thing, as the integration and concomitant dissipation, and the passing from some sort of indefinite, incoherent homogeneity, into another sort of definite, coherent heterogeneity? Yet we are told-" Now that we have arrived at this formula, we find ourselves expressing it in terms that are universal. Instead of a mere law of biology, we have enunciated the widest generalisation concerning the concrete universe as a whole. . . . This leap of inference on Mr. Spencer's part, like the similar leap taken 1 "First Principles," p. 396: Herbert Spencer.

1

Development of the Ovum.

109

by Newton from the fall of the apple to the motions of the moon, is the daring act which completes the formation of the hypothesis." So that when a man, translating the formula, says "the joining of stuff into a lump, then the equal unjoining and sending out of movement from it, the making stuff pass from a no sort of unstickingness into some sort of holding-togetherness, while the movement not sent out undergoes a like change from no sort of keeping-togetherness into some sort of sticking," he explains the concrete universe as a whole. Really, we should not have known it unless very clever people had told us.

There are individual developments actually taking place, more marvellous than the mysteries of evolutionists. Take a vertebrate animal. The germinal vesicle of the ovum contains one or more germinal spots, and is included within a vitellus. The first step in the development of the embryo is the division of the vitelline substance into cleavage masses, each of which contains a nucleus, and the germinal vesicle is now no longer seen. In this process, the nucleus is the first to divide, its substance separating into two poles. A constriction then appears in the protoplasmic mass, and the single cell is subdivided; each of these again divides into two, until the mulberry stage is reached. This globular lump of cells gives rise to the fiddle-shaped area, from which may proceed fish, amphibious animal, reptile, bird, mammal, man. It is a simple oblong, violin-shaped, thin disc of three connected membranes, lying one above another. Out of the lower layer arises the inner delicate skin (epithelium) for the intestinal tube from the mouth to the anus, lung, liver, salivary glands, etc. Out of the middle layer arise all the other organs, muscles, bones, blood-vessels. Out of the upper or outer layer arise the skin (epidermis) and the central parts of the nervous system (spinal marrow and brain). A central line or streak divides the whole into two equal lateral halves. On both sides of this furrow arises a longitudinal fold, which, growing over and joining, forms a cylindrical tube, the medullary canal, the foundation of the central nervous system, the spinal marrow. Mr. W. Kitchen Parker says-" The spinal axis is 1 "Cosmic Philosophy," vol. i. p. 351: John Fiske.

not originally pointed anteriorly in anything but amphioxus, in all other vertebrates it is dilated from the first. This dilatation is soon seen to be divided into three vesicles, the primitive fore, mid, and hind brain. The fore-brain gives rise to the olfactory lobes, the cerebral hemispheres, and the vesicle of the third ventricle, from which latter arise the optic vesicles, which give rise to the optic nerve, retina, and choroid. The mid-brain gives rise to the corpora quadrigemina (in birds and reptiles corpora bigemina-the so-called optic lobes), and the crura cerebri. The hind-brain is differentiated into the cerebellum, the pons Varolii, and the medula oblongata." All these, originally arranged in the same way, develop into such different groups that it is very difficult to recognise their corresponding parts in fully organised brains. As yet, in this gradual commencement and apparently original equality, you cannot distinguish mammal, bird, reptile, from one another. The heart, the liver, the limbs, all parts of the body, are originally the same in all vertebrates; but from this stage proceed the ever-increasing separation and differentiation of the higher animals, every one after his own order. It is a multiplication of mysteries.

Materialists inquire-" Why this process of natural genesis? Why should not Omnipotence be proved by the supernatural production of plants and animals everywhere throughout the world from hour to hour?" As if God were to begin at the end; or as if He did not, hour by hour, produce from germ of plant and fish, of bird and beast, all the living creatures after their kind. What process is there that, long continued, would not be accounted natural? But who knows that anything is natural, or of itself? To call a thing "natural" is to pronounce it Divine, or to make the word a cloak for ignorance. Scales, feathers, hair, fin, wing, limb, claw, paw, hand, are formed in successive processes of fœtal life, and by series of modifications, so small, that only the microscope can reveal the secret transformation. Changes into hoof or hand, into gill or lung, specialities of structure variously adapted, and passage of lowest forms into highest and furthest differentiation within a few months, not by confusion of parts but by variety of design, are that natural process whose initiation and continuance no one can explain.

Union of Mind with Matter.

III

Pass from the phenomena of life to those of mind, a region still more profoundly mysterious.

By union with matter, mind takes possession of a new world, doubling its powers of action and extending its sphere of existence. Corporeal existence may indeed be the basis of intellectual activity, of moral agency, of sociality among all created intelligent beings. When we consider the exquisite sensations of organised existence, the alliance with various properties of solidity and extension, the mechanical and animal indices of motion, the new consciousness of duration by collation of mental history with the equable motion and symphony of time in that vast register of duration, the material universe, we may conceive that body is to mind a means of existence serving such important ends, and carrying such consequences, as make it the general, if not universal, law of finite existence in all worlds: first, the natural, then the spiritual body (1 Cor. xv. 44, 45). We are conscious that energy and activity are infused into the most exalted of our moral sentiments by their alliance with animal sensations. If we were only animals, we should neither need nor possess an imaginative faculty. If intellectual only, or moral only, we should disregard as degrading or illusory whatever presented less than absolute truth, reason, rectitude. Imagination and its sensibilities do now, however, abate or stimulate every function of life; mingle with and yet further ennoble the highest and purest of our intellectual and moral feelings; so that we possess the germ and instinctive expectation of another and a higher mode of existence. This future and unseen world, brought thus into definite alliance with us, is as simply natural and true as the present nature. Our consciousness, our religious conceptions, our instinctive yearnings, take away the dim remoteness from the world to come, and connect our own homely land of trees and water with the momentous transactions of the future. The Bible, telling us of our three stages of life—in the body, out of the body, clothed with spiritual body-brings the visible and invisible worlds into that conjunction which the wisest and best of men accept as obvious and natural.

Concerning our own intelligence, it is certain that coming

into contact with a corporeal state is not a degradation; and doubtless reveals a new sphere and mysterious power of influence, various sentiments and modes of action, that would otherwise be wholly foreign to incorporeal existence. This means of quickening peculiar knowledge and varied action, bringing imaginative sentiments into alliance with animal sensations, their intermixture with ideas of beauty and order, not only form part of our own training and transformation, but may have formed part of that discipline under which some angels fell, and by means of which some were exalted. We are not to apply this to those superior intelligences as if they, by any incorporation with gross matter, could attain a higher nature; but, without discussing the nature of their "spiritual body," or contemplating the possibility of spirits having come from a pre-existent state into the new order of things on earth; it is not inconceivable that even archangels round the throne of God may be connected with the energy, motion, heat, and light of the universe, providential arrangements and occurrences (Ps. civ. 4; Heb. i. 7). The material universe may be the clock by which spirits become conscious of the lapse of duration; while the creative, sustentative, renewing processes, make known other depths of the manifold wisdom of God (Eph. iii. 9-11).

Great minds, discoverers of universal laws-Copernicus, who marked out the true path of our sun and earth amongst celestial worlds; Kepler, who defined the curve described by the planets around their central luminary; Newton, who was able to fix the condition, unique and supreme, whence results the equilibrium of worlds-did not study the universe as subject in all its movements to blind necessity, as were there no law, nor wisdom, nor beauty, nor harmony. Their investigation was a search for simplicity with comprehensiveness; and when the discovery of admirable symmetry and universal harmony established the all-pervading sway of power and wisdom, they bowed before the eternal throne, and worshipped Him who sat thereon.

Their knowledge is now our own, and illumines the way to Him by whom our imperfections are to have remedy, our spiritual hopes to be satisfied, our yearnings after immortality

« EelmineJätka »