In his Presidential address to the British Association at Dublin, in 1908, Professor J. S. Haldane summed up as follows the position of Physiological Science: "The point now reached is that the conceptions of Physics and Chemistry are insufficient to enable us to understand physiological phenomena."
Weismann says: "Behind the co-operating forces of Nature, we must admit a Cause ... inconceivable in its nature, of which we can only say one thing with certainty, that it must be theological."
Drummond says: "Evolution is Advolution,—better, it is Revelation—the phenomenal expression of the Divine, the progressive realisation of the Ideal, the Ascent of Love."
If, then, we admit Life to be the product of a Divine Influx, whereby Inorganic Matter has been, by way of evolutionary processes, increasingly empowered to fructify in living form and faculty, Human Attributes are seen to be the flower of Spiritual seed, which, sown in Life, has germinated; has struck roots of biological function into living flesh and put forth leaves in living traits; has developed in physiological processes and blossomed in powers of Mind and of body. And as the stronger and deeper the grip of its roots in the earth, the taller and nobler the oak towers heavenward, so it must be with human characteristics. The deeper and more firmly the seedling faculties strike roots in living function, the fuller and more potent springs the impulse toward that evolutionary perfection which is the goal of Human Being.
If, however, living processes are the resultant of a Divine Influx, they are Spiritual processes. Life is then a manifestation in Matter, of Spirit. All the developments of Life are Spiritual phenomena, therefore. The imperfection and evil found in living creatures are not attributes of Life. They are crudities of rudimentary organisation, or are failures in or aberrations from the normal development of Life.
V
In the Evolution of Faculty, living traits are seen to have been all the while attaining to higher power by the differentiation and development of special organs to subserve their fuller function, their finer conscious apprehension, and their more complex manifestation on the material plane.
The brain has been specialised thus to serve as the organ of Consciousness; the eye, of Vision; the ear, of Hearing; the hand, of Touch and of manipulation. The lowest organisms possess no such specialised organs of sense or of consciousness. Nor are they equipped with special reproductive organs. They reproduce by cleavage; by budding a small portion of themselves, which, when separated, grows to a mature organism.
With other differentiations and specialisations of Function and Faculty, there has developed—for the all-important racial purpose of creating ever higher and more potent living species—the highly-complex human reproductive system, which, by its close and subtle nervous alliance with the brain, has become the medium and the instrument of a new and irresistible emotion. So that it serves not only for the perpetuation of a complex species, but, moreover, for the attraction, by natural affinity, of the mates best suited to one another.
And in course of evolutionary progress, the emotion of Love has been all the while more and more so leavening and inspiring sex-attraction with its purer and more tender attributes, that human passion has come to combine—in those of higher nature—the flame and energy of physical attraction with the tenderness and devotion of altruistic affection. With the result that human parenthood, thus quickened and spiritualised, has become ever further empowered to evolve more highly intelligised, more beautiful and more efficient types of offspring.