But then there arose Darwin, who, in establishing the doctrine of organic evolution already supported by his own grandfather, by Lamarck, and Goethe, and Herbert Spencer, gave an entirely new importance to the question. He demonstrated how we could conceive the evolution of all organisms, including man, from a “few simple forms,” under the continuous influence of natural law; and thus such forms ceased to be insignificant, and the manner of their genesis came to be a vital problem in more senses than one. Such organisms--the mite, the maggot, and even the mould--could no longer be regarded as insignificant, for they were revealed as not unlike the ancestors of man himself. [Sidenote: Evolution a Continuous Process] The question of the beginning of life upon the earth had only to be satisfactorily answered for the establishment of the belief in a continuous process of evolution by natural law, even from the very beginning of the earth itself “without form and void,” until the production of the highest living organisms which it displays in our own time. And all ages, even by the mouths of their great thinkers and closest observers, had agreed in giving an apparently satisfactory answer to this question. It might well have been thought that Darwin was quite entitled to ignore altogether, as he did, the question of the origin of life. Everyone knew, so to say, that simple living organisms were every day evolved in organic refuse and elsewhere. Darwin himself, if we may judge from a casual remark in a letter, regarded the question apparently as purely speculative, and of small real moment. It is all rubbish, he says, thinking about the origin of life; we might as well argue about the origin of matter. We must beware of illegitimately attributing opinions to the immortal dead, but this remark, though a casual one, does seem to suggest that Darwin regarded these two questions as on all-fours, if not, indeed, as different forms of the same question, and that, if he had actually formulated his views, they would have taken the shape of the doctrine which asserts that life is implicit and potential in matter; in other words, that when suitable conditions arose--such, for instance, as the presence of liquid water--matter would display the properties of life. [Sidenote: An Abyss that could not be Bridged]