The first stage is the change from inorganic to organic, when the earliest vegetable cell, or the living protoplasm out of which it arose, first appeared.... There is in this something quite beyond and apart from chemical changes however complex; and it has been well said that the first vegetable cell was a new thing in the world, possessing altogether new powers....[105]
Such testimonies are sufficient for our present purpose. In face of them it cannot be pretended that Science knows anything of spontaneous generation or gives her verdict in its favour. On the contrary, as Professor Tait declares:[106]
To say that even the very lowest form of life, not to speak of its higher forms, still less of volition and consciousness, can be fully explained on physical principles alone, ... is simply unscientific. There is absolutely nothing known in physical science which can lend the slightest support to such an idea.... To suppose that life, even in its lowest form, is wholly material, involves either a denial of the truth of Newton's laws of motion, or an erroneous use of the term "Matter." Both are alike unscientific.
Yet it is precisely in the name of Science that we have been told to accept the spontaneous origin of life from inorganic matter, as a clearly demonstrated truth, and no riddle at all.
But as Professor Virchow, Evolutionist and Materialist as he was, well said in regard of this very point in the Munich Congress of 1877:
If we would speak frankly, we must admit that naturalists may well have some little sympathy for the generatio aequivoca [spontaneous generation]. If it were capable of proof, it would indeed be beautiful! But, we must acknowledge, it has not yet been proved. The proofs of it are still wanting.... Whoever recalls[{66}] to mind the lamentable failure of all the attempts to discover a decided support for the generatio aequivoca in the lower forms of transition from the inorganic to the organic world, will feel it doubly serious to demand that this theory, so utterly discredited, should be in any way accepted as the basis of all our views of life.