"Never mind the term then: you admit the fact?" said Faber.
"What fact?" asked Wingfold.
"That in a certain liquid, where all life has been destroyed, and where no contact with life is admitted, life of itself appears," defined the doctor.
"No, no; I admit nothing of the sort," cried Wingfold. "I only admit that the evidence seems in favor of believing that in some liquids that have been heated to a high point, and kept from the air, life has yet appeared. How can I tell whether all life already there was first destroyed? whether a yet higher temperature would not have destroyed yet more life? What if the heat, presumed to destroy all known germs of life in them, should be the means of developing other germs, further removed? Then as to spontaneity, as to life appearing of itself, that question involves something beyond physics. Absolute life can exist only of and by itself, else were it no perfect thing; but will you say that a mass of protoplasm—that proto by the way is a begged question—exists by its own power, appears by its own will? Is it not rather there because it can not help it?"
"It is there in virtue of the life that is in it," said Faber.
"Of course; that is a mere truism," returned Wingfold, "equivalent to, It lives in virtue of life. There is nothing spontaneous in that. Its life must in some way spring from the true, the original, the self-existent life."
"There you are begging the whole question," objected the doctor.
"No; not the whole," persisted the curate; "for I fancy you will yourself admit there is some blind driving law behind the phenomenon. But now I will beg the whole question, if you like to say so, for the sake of a bit of purely metaphysical argument: the law of life behind, if it be spontaneously existent, can not be a blind, deaf, unconscious law; if it be unconscious of itself, it can not be spontaneous; whatever is of itself must be God, and the source of all non-spontaneous, that is, all other existence."
"Then it has been only a dispute about a word?" said Faber.
"Yes, but a word involving a tremendous question," answered Wingfold.