Natural law in the spiritual world / by Henry Drummond.

  • Henry Drummond
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Natural law in the spiritual world / by Henry Drummond. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    432/456 (page 400)
    There is, in this conception of a high and spiritual organism rising out of the highest point of the Organic Kingdom, in the hypothesis of the Spiritual Kingdom itself, a Third Kingdom following the Second in sequence as orderly as the Second follows the First, a Kingdom utilising the materials of both the Kingdoms beneath it, continuing their laws, and, above all, accounting for these lower Kingdoms in a legitimate way and complementing them in the only known way—there is in all this a suggestion of the greatest of modern scientific doctrines, the Evolution hypothesis, too impressive to pass unnoticed. The strength of the doctrine of Evolution, at least in its broader outlines, is now such that its verdict on any biological question is a consideration of moment. And if any further defence is needed for the idea of of the facts of Biogenesis can never satisfy the biologist—any more than the above will wholly satisfy the philosopher. Both are needed. Rothe, in his “Aphorisms” strikingly notes one point: “ Es ist beachtensvvcrth, wie in der Schopfung immer aus der Auflosung der niichst niederen Stufe die nachst hohere hervorgeht, so dass jene immer das Substrat zur Erzeugung dieser Kraft der schopferischen Einwirkung bildet. (Wie es denn nicht anders sein kann bei einer Entwicklung der Kreatur aus sich selbst.) Aus den zersetzten Elementen erheben sich das Mineral, aus dem verwitterten Material die Pflanze, aus der venvesten Pflanze das Thier. So erhebt sich auch aus dem in die Elemente zuriicksinkenden Materiellen Menschen der Geist, das geistige Geschopf.”—“ Stille Stunden,” p. 64.