Protoplasm, or, matter and life : with some remarks upon the "confession" of Strauss / by Lionel S. Beale.

  • Lionel Smith Beale
Date:
1874
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Protoplasm, or, matter and life : with some remarks upon the "confession" of Strauss / by Lionel S. Beale. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

    432/450 page 378
    37S DARWIN AND EVOLUTION. far from new knowledge and new facts enabling us to bridge the chasm which separates the lifeless from the living, we can at this time only boast of being a little better able to form a conception of the tremendous width and impass- able nature of the gulf which intervenes between all living and all non-living, than was possible for our ancestors. So far from Darwin having exterminated miracle, miracle in some sort, as I have remarked, constitutes a necessary part of his system. He may have attempted to change some- what the seat and mode of its operation; but what miracle has in these last days lost, so to say, in the extent of the area of its application, it has gained or more than gained in the intensity and far-reaching character of its influence. Every living thing is to be regarded as to some extent an inheritor of the results of that one stupendous primaeval miracle when the non-living, for the first time, lived. So far from excluding miraculous or supernatural influence, the evolution of Mr. Darwin, as I have said, actually starts from miracle. Other forms of the evolutional idea start from what is scientifically impossible and unconceivable in thought. Nay, notwithstanding all that has been urged to the contrary, no one has succeeded, even by the aid of any working hypothesis, in removing those early life changes of which all subsequent variations in form, structure, com- position, character are but a consequence, out of the origin of mystery. Mr. Darwin has not ventured to suggest when and where the first preliminary change which he conceives to occur in the matter of the body commences, which is supposed by his hypothesis to usher in the stupendous modifications, which increase and accumulate until a new species of being results. Neither does he say one word
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3