Footnotes
This has been urged often enough even by scientific investigators. In such cases they have frequently been reproached for dragging miracles into nature when they call a halt in face of the “underivable” and the “mysterious.” This is a complete misunderstanding. With miracles and with the supernatural in the historical sense of these words, this mode of regarding nature has nothing whatever to do. It would be much more reasonable to maintain the converse: that there exists between supernatural ideas and the belief in the absolute explicability and rationalisation of nature a peculiar mutual relation and attraction. For, if we think out the relation clearly, we must see that all real and consistent belief in miracles demands as its most effective background the clearest possible explicability of nature. It pictures to itself two natures, so to speak: nature and supernature, and the latter of these interpolates itself into the former in the form of sudden and occasional interruptions; that is to say, as miracles. The purpose of miracles is to be recognised as such, as events absolutely different from the ordinary course of happening. And they are most likely thus to be recognised when nature itself is translucent and mathematical. Thus we find that supernaturalism quite readily accepts, and even insists upon a rationalistic explanation of nature. But this is quite incorrect. Nature is not so thoroughly rationalised and calculable as such a point of view would have us believe.
The really religious element in belief in miracles is that it, too, in its own way, is seeking after mystery, dependence and providence. It fails because it naïvely seeks for these in isolated and exceptional acts, which have no analogy to other phenomena. It regards these as arbitrary acts, and does so because it overlooks or underestimates the fact that they have to be reckoned with throughout the whole of nature.
If we wish to, we can even read the “biogenetic law” in Dante. See “Purgatory,” p. 26, where the embryo attains successively to the plant, animal and human stages:
“Anima fatta la virtute attiva,
Qual d'una pianta....
Come fungo marino ...
Ma come d'animal divenga fante.”
This is, of course, nothing else than Aristotle's theory of evolution, done into terzarima, and corrected by St. Thomas.
For the latest application of these views, even in relation to the “biogenetic fundamental law,” see the finely finished “Morpho-genetic Studies” of T. Garbowski (Jena, 1903): “The greater part of what is usually referred to the so-called fundamental biogenetic law depends on illusion, since all things undeveloped or imperfect must bear a greater or less resemblance one to another.”