It is a curious method, this, which traces the great back to the small, thus making the small greater than the great. The man in a silk hat proceeded from the man without a silk hat, and he from the ape, and the ape from the duck-billed platypus, and so on back to Haeckel's "moneron," and back again to this primordial mushroom.
So we may trace the scale of numbers back to prime factors and to unity; but between the unit and the zero, infinitude stretches. Is not unity, though in one sense the smallest of numbers, in all other senses the greatest? From whatever source we derive life, that source must be greater than life itself. So let us set up an image of the Mycoplasm and worship it. Jehovah himself could not have done more than it has done.
Is it not clear that material evolution is but one aspect, and that a small one, of the process? Growth and evolution mean nothing if not a coming into visibility from invisibility, into actuality from potentiality. A seed grows; and, seen from the material point of view, it seems to grow from nothing. But all the time the material plant is unfolding, something unseen is expanding into it. Evolution is a twofold process. A mycoplasm would lie forever wrapped in its complacent hardihood in the primordial fiery atmosphere, unless some Impulse gave it the word to unfold and turn itself into protoplasm. The view of the world as a great machine without any motive power, and running by the power of its own motion, may be interesting, but it is not convincing.
If ever our globe were in such a primitive condition as that imagined, it is equally certain that the life-impulse which it received came from somewhere; and all analogy would lead us to surmise that that life-impulse came from another globe. But obviously the matter is too vast for little theories. The important point is that some theorists, in spite of good intentions, appear to have got things wrong way up.
Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept.
THE SURF AT CORONADO, SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
THIS VIEW SHOWS THE SOUTHERN END OF POINT LOMA
Photograph by Slocum, San Diego
