“The theory of evolution in its complete form involves the assumption that at some period or other of the earth’s history there occurred what would be now called ‘spontaneous generation.’” [217] And so Professor Huxley—
“It is argued that a belief in abiogenesis is a necessary corollary from the doctrine of Evolution. This may be” [which I submit is equivalent here to “is”] “true of the occurrence of abiogenesis at some time.” [218]
Professor Huxley goes on to say that however this may be, abiogenesis (or spontaneous generation) is not respectable and will not do at all now. There may have been one case once; this may be winked at, but it must not occur again. “It is enough,” he writes, “that a single particle of living protoplasm should once have appeared on the globe as the result of no matter what agency. In the eyes of a consistent [!] evolutionist any further [!] independent formation of protoplasm would be sheer waste”—and the sooner the Almighty gets to understand that He must not make that single act of special creation into a precedent the better for Him.
Professor Huxley, in fact, excuses the single case of spontaneous generation which he appears to admit, because however illegitimate, it was still “only a very little one,” and came off a long time ago in a foreign country. For my own part I think it will prove in the end more convenient if we say that there is a low kind of livingness in every atom of matter, and adopt Life eternal as no less inevitable a conclusion than matter eternal.
It should not be doubted that wherever there is vibration or motion there is life and memory, and that there is vibration and motion at all times in all things. The reader who takes the above position will find that he can explain the entry of what he calls death among what he calls the living, whereas he could by
no means introduce life into his system if he started without it. Death is deducible; life is not deducible. Death is a change of memories; it is not the destruction of all memory. It is as the liquidation of one company each member of which will presently join a new one, and retain a trifle even of the old cancelled memory, by way of greater aptitude for working in concert with other molecules. This is why animals feed on grass and on each other, and cannot proselytise or convert the rude ground before it has been tutored in the first principles of the higher kinds of association.
Again, I would recommend the reader to beware of believing anything in this book unless he either likes it, or feels angry at being told it. If required belief in this or that makes a man angry, I suppose he should, as a general rule, swallow it whole then and there upon the spot, otherwise he may take it or leave it as he likes.
I have not gone far for my facts, nor yet far from them; all on which I rest are as open to the reader as to me. If I have sometimes used hard terms, the probability is that I have not understood them, but have done so by a slip, as one who has caught a bad habit from the company he has been lately keeping. They should be skipped.
Do not let the reader be too much cast down by the bad language with which professional scientists obscure the issue, nor by their seeming to make it their business to fog us under the pretext of removing our difficulties. It is not the ratcatcher’s interest to catch all the rats; and, as Handel observed so sensibly, “Every professional gentleman must do his best for to live.” The art of some of our philosophers, however, is sufficiently
transparent, and consists too often in saying “organism which . . . must be classified among fishes,” [220a] instead of “fish” and then proclaiming that they have “an ineradicable tendency to try to make things clear.” [220b]