“Of course it was.”
“And of the other fact are you equally assured?—that the journey from a whirling lava storm to a solid world of comparatively quiet seas and hills and plains and mountains was a glorious journey and a benign?”
“Yes.”
“Then we will start with matter on the new journey on which it set forth a million million years ago, using for its carriage the first jelly-fish.”
Life Appears
“IT had laboured dimly to form the hills, the plains, and the seas, but that part of it which had laboured to form the seas, now that they were formed, found something more to do, found itself developing in a new and strange direction—that of life.
“The energy of matter that had already constructed the solar system and had evolved the rocks and the sea found itself at last held up, cribbed, cabined and confined, with nothing to do.
“Men ask how did life appear in the world. For myself, I believe that life was created by the explosion, so to speak, of this world energy, which, bound down by the limitations it had reached in the inorganic world, burst the rigid bonds of its prison and found a new field for its labour in the construction of the higher organic world.—And, in parenthesis, let me say that I believe when this same energy reaches rigid limitations in the organic world, it will burst those limits and find its field in a world as yet unknown.
“However that may be, I propose to deal only with known facts, and the surest fact on earth is this, that when the first vague sketches of life appeared in the sea, they existed not by the virtue of chemistry, nor the virtue of the life that was in them, but by the virtue of the steadily working benignity of the world energy that had constructed their home.