Take the twittering swallows under the brown eaves, or your eagle on the cliff, or your lion in his lair: the egg, in each case, is the source of life; and, when the quickening begins, there is nothing to be seen at the centre of the egg but this structureless, colorless, viscid bioplasm. Nevertheless, it divides and subdivides, and weaves, in the one case a lion, and in the other a swallow, and in the other an eagle; and I affirm, in the name of all reason, that, from the very first, the plan of the whole organism must be in view somewhere. [Applause.] You know that when a temple is built, the plan of it is in the corner-stone. You know that when the weaver strikes his shuttle for the first time in the finest product of his art, the whole plan of the figures of the web is before him. We see here the bioplasts weaving their threads: we then see them co-ordinating threads and co-ordinating them so as, in the one case, to make your swallow, in another case to make your eagle, in another case to make your lion, and in another case to make your man; and why shall we not say, following the law, that every change must have an adequate cause, that somewhere and somehow there is here what all this mechanism needs, - FORECAST? [Applause.] What are men talking about when they attribute all this to merely "molecular machinery"? Gentletlemen, it is out of date to say that "molecular arrangement" accounts for nerve and bone and tissue and artery and vein. It is getting too late to say that merely molecular arrangement accounts for the weaving of organic threads and the interweaving of thread with thread. Will you consider what a complicated process is required to produce that hand of yours, or this eye, or this ear? No doubt strange powers come into existence with the bioplast. Every bioplast is derived from a bioplast: there is your structureless machine, there a little glue-like, colorless matter; and that is all there is. All life begins in the bioplast; and every bioplast known to man has been derived from a preceding bioplast. Out of what, then, came the first one? [Applause.] Professor Huxley writes for "The Encyclopædia Britannica" an elaborate article on biology; and in the opening page of it he says, "The chasm between the not-living and the living the present state of knowledge cannot bridge." Bring materialism to the edge of that chasm. Häckel calls the bioplasts plastids, but confesses that they are mysteries. You find in them complicated processes going forward in apparently structureless matter. You see chemical law apparently set at defiance. The action of material forces appears to be reversed. Häckel, over and over, admits that we cannot produce life, and that we know of nothing but bioplasm that ever has produced it; but somewhere and somehow in the turmoil of a cooling planet, he thinks, forsooth, that there must have been a cell originated by fortuitous concourse of atoms, or spontaneous generation. Precisely there is the rock, gentlemen, on which both materialism and the radical form of the evolution theory wreck themselves. There is, I willingly admit, a use, as well as an abuse, of the theory of evolution. Perhaps Häckel and Huxley illustrate its abuse Dana illustrates its use. : But when I stand at the side of the chasm between the not-living and the living, I, for one, all theory put aside, that Ineffable Holy. Almighty God. face to face with facts, and feel as I felt at Dresden before I am in the presence of Every change must have an adequate cause; and the organic living cell must have outside of it a God, and inside of it an immaterial principle, to be accounted for under the law of causation. Huxley, more cautious than Häckel, says that life is the cause of organization, and not organization the cause of life. He has printed that opinion over and over (HUXLEY, Introduction to the Classification of Animals), and never taken it back. Well, if life is the cause of organization, probably it is safe to say the cause must exist before the effect. At least, that is Nature's logic. But, if life may exist before organization, why not after it? I affirm that the microscope begins to have visions of man's immortality. [Applause.] Some force forms the parts of an embryo. That which forms the parts is the cause of the form of the parts. The cause must exist before the effect. The force which forms the parts of an embryo, or of any living organism, exists, therefore, before the parts. Life is thus the cause of organization, and not organization the cause of life. Life, therefore, exists before organization. If it exists before, it may after. Summarizing, then, the latest science analytically, we see in living matter, 17. That the bioplasts are a colorless, viscid, and apparently structureless substance, and the same in all animals. 18. That they throw off the formed material, so that it constitutes nerve, brain, muscle, artery, vein, bone, and all the mechanism of the organism. 19. That, although of the same chemical composition in the eggs of the different animals, they weave tissues such as to produce the different plans of these animals. 20. That their action involves, therefore, both the formation of tissues and their growth according to the needs of the animal. 21. That it involves the production of all those structures, which, in animal and vegetable organisms, exhibit an adaptation of means to ends. 22. That it involves the co-ordination of tissues, secretions, and deposits in the organism. 23. That the plan of the whole organism is necessarily taken into view from the first stroke of the shuttles of the bioplasts that weave it. Tennyson sings with an emphasis of far-reaching thought: "Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies; What you are, roots and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is." |