In the beginning?—Slowly grope we back
Along the narrowing track,
Back to the deserts of the world's pale prime,
The mire, the clay, the slime;
And then ... what then? Surely to something less;
Back, back, to Nothingness!
Will you have courage, then, to bow the head,
And say, when all is said—
"Out of this Nothingness arose our thought!
This blank abysmal Nought
Woke, and brought forth that lighted city street,
Those towers, that armoured fleet"?
Will you have courage, then, to front that law
(From which your sophists draw
Their only right to flout one human creed)
That nothing can proceed—
Not even thought, not even love—from less
Than its own nothingness?
The law is yours! But dare you waive your pride,
And kneel where you denied?
The law is yours! Dare you rekindle, then,
One faith for faithless men,
And say you found, on that dark road you trod,
In the beginning—God?
The principle of continuity urges the evolutionist to extend his theory downward into the inorganic world and upward into the sphere of the moral and the spiritual. At the crucial points of the origin of life and of the human race, the advocate of preformation has greater difficulty than the supporter of epigenesis or creative evolution, which is a sort of rapprochement between evolutionism and creationism. Let us see how the case stands at present as regards the origin of life and the origin of man.
Life may be generated any day in the laboratory, but as yet this has not been done.[76] In fact so great are the difficulties that Arrhenius thinks that there was no beginning of life, life being eternal and persisting, in spite of acknowledged scientific difficulties in the conception, amid the vicissitudes of cosmic changes and flights through interstellar space.[77] Weismann does not think that a living germ could be conveyed in the crevices of meteorites to our planet, because "it could neither endure the excessive cold nor the absolute desiccation to which it would be exposed in cosmic space, which contains absolutely no water. This could not be endured even for a few days, much less for immeasurable periods of time."[78]
Lord Kelvin will not go as far as Arrhenius, but believes that a meteorite brought the first living germs to this planet. K. Pearson thinks that under favourable conditions in the remote past life arose, but arose only once, out of the non-living.[79] The bridge was so slender that it was crossed but once under imaginary conditions not controllable by experiment; and as a unique event even in imaginary history it cannot be said to be subject to any general law. It is questionable, in fact, whether in scientific merit the hypothesis is superior to that of special creation.
Dr. Schäfer sees this and points it out very clearly in his Presidential Address.[80] A scientific account of the origin of life must refer it to causes operating to-day; so, instead of Arrhenius' eternity of life, or of Pearson's spontaneous production of life but once under inaccessible conditions, or Lord Kelvin's meteoric conveyance of life, he believes that life is constantly being produced, and has always been produced, from certain colloidal substances which he describes. But what has become of all this life, constantly generated? He admits there is trace of only one paleontological series. While assuming that it is the nature of life to evolve, he admits that there is no evidence accessible to the senses or discerned as yet by the most delicate instruments for the existence of these countless beginnings of life. The real question then concerns not this kind of life, which eye hath not seen, but the origin of the life which we know, and whose marvellous development evolution traces. Ostwald thinks that "it is undecided whether originally there were one or several forms from which the present forms sprang, nor is it known how life first made its appearance on earth. So long as the various assumptions with regard to this question have not led to decisive, actually demonstrable differences in the results, a discussion of it is fruitless, and therefore unscientific."[81]
A comparison has often been drawn between the birth of the individual and that of the race. Theologians have discussed the question whether the child in his spiritual nature is to be referred to a special act of creative power, or whether all of his endowments are derived from his parents.