Feminism; Women; Women -- Social and moral questions; Women -- Social conditions
But yet, in point of fact, what was it that inspired and energised the
earlier processes, if not this same Divine Influx? The simpler processes
must, from their earliest rudimentary beginnings, have been leading up
to the later and more complex. And the later and more complex were,
surely, continuous with the simpler--since Nature abhors miracles, and
works by slow progressive biological sequences.
Nothing shows as more impersonal than a crystal; cold, hard, senseless,
motionless. And yet in crystals is the element of Life, even the power
of reproduction, showing factors of sex already operative in them. While
living bodies, charged with warmth, mobility, sentience, intelligence,
have Inorganic Matter for their basis of construction. And that
Inorganic elements are very far from being the impersonal things they
seem, but are linked by subtle correspondences to living Mind and vital
powers, is shown by their effects on living processes and consciousness.
Given as medicines, digestion (which is a species of rapid evolution
from lower to higher forms of energy) develops such vital inherences
within them as prove their apparent impersonality to contain a principle
continuous not only with living processes, but with the highest
mentality.
Professor Leduc observes in his illuminating book, "The Mechanism of
Life," "_the ordinary physical forces have, in fact, a power of
organisation infinitely greater than has been hitherto supposed by the
boldest imagination_."
Coralline structures and beautiful shells, fungi, leaves, and plants
bearing coloured, flowerlike blooms spring into growth when a formless
fragment of calcium salt is dropped into a chemical solution. And these
"Osmotic growths," artificially produced, possess far greater complexity
of structure and of function than do the simpler living organisms of
Nature.
The evidences of a Vast Stupendous Plan, which every further scientific
discovery still further emphasises, are slowly forcing from our men of
Science the confession that behind the marvellous phenomena their
findings reveal, and which they are powerless to explain, must lie a
Cause, occult and irresistible, an Impulse, all-pervading,
incomprehensible.
Bergson describes an _élan vital_--a living impetus--determining such
phenomena.
In his Presidential address to the British Association at Dublin, in
1908, Professor J. S. Haldane summed up as follows the position of
Physiological Science: "The point now reached is that the conceptions of
Physics and Chemistry are insufficient to enable us to understand
physiological phenomena."
Weismann says: "Behind the co-operating forces of Nature, we must admit
a Cause ... inconceivable in its nature, of which we can only say one
thing with certainty, that it must be theological."
Drummond says: "Evolution is Advolution,--better, it is Revelation--the
phenomenal expression of the Divine, the progressive realisation of the
Ideal, the Ascent of Love."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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