Let us first place vividly in our imagination the picture of the two
great Kingdoms of Nature, the inorganic and organic, as these now stand
in the light of the Law of Biogenesis. What essentially is involved in
saying that there is no Spontaneous Generation of Life? It is meant that
the passage from the mineral world to the plant or animal world is
hermetically sealed on the mineral side. This inorganic world is staked
off from the living world by barriers which have never yet been crossed
from within. No change of substance, no modification of environment, no
chemistry, no electricity, nor any form of energy, nor any evolution can
endow any single atom of the mineral world with the attribute of Life.
Only by the bending down into this dead world of some living form can
these dead atoms be gifted with the properties of vitality, without this
preliminary contact with Life they remain fixed in the inorganic sphere
forever. It is a very mysterious Law which guards in this way the
portals of the living world. And if there is one thing in Nature more
worth pondering for its strangeness it is the spectacle of this vast
helpless world of the dead cut off from the living by the Law of
Biogenesis and denied forever the possibility of resurrection within
itself. So very strange a thing, indeed, is this broad line in Nature,
that Science has long and urgently sought to obliterate it. Biogenesis
stands in the way of some forms of Evolution with such stern persistency
that the assaults upon this Law for number and thoroughness have been
unparalleled. But, as we have seen, it has stood the test. Nature, to
the modern eye, stands broken in two. The physical Laws may explain the
inorganic world; the biological Laws may account for the development of
the organic. But of the point where they meet, of that strange
borderland between the dead and the living, Science is silent. It is as
if God had placed everything in earth and heaven in the hands of Nature,
but reserved a point at the genesis of Life for His direct appearing.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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