But, they protest, “To deny spontaneous generation is to proclaim a miracle” (Nägeli), and natural science cannot have recourse to “miracles” in explaining natural phenomena. For the “scientist,” miracles are always absurd as contradicting the uniformity of nature, and to recur to them for the solution of a scientific problem is, to put it mildly, distinctly out of the question. Hence Haeckel regards spontaneous generation as more than demonstrated by the bare consideration that no alternative remains except the unspeakable scientific blasphemy implied in superstitious terms like “miracle,” “creation,” and “supernatural.” For a “thinking man,” the mere mention of these abhorrent words is, or ought to be, argument enough. “If we do not accept the hypothesis of spontaneous generation,” Haeckel expostulates, “we must have recourse to the miracle of a _supernatural creation_.” (Italics his—“History of Creation,” I, p. 348, Lankester’s Transl.) It would be a difficult matter, indeed, to cram more blunders into one short sentence! We will not, and need not, undertake to defend the supernatural here. Suffice it to say, that the initiation of life in inorganic matter by the Author of Life would not be a creation, nor a miracle, nor a phenomenon pertaining to the supernatural order. The principle of the minimum forbids us to postulate the superfluous, and a creative act would be superfluous in the production of the first organisms. Inorganic nature contains all the material elements found in living organisms, and all organisms, in fact, derive their matter from the inorganic world. If, therefore, they are thus dependent _in their continuance_ upon a supply of matter administered by the inorganic world, it is to be presumed that they were likewise dependent on that source of matter _in their first origin_. In other words, the material substrata of the first organisms were not produced anew, but derived from the elements of the inorganic world. Hence they were not created, but formed out of preëxistent matter. A _creative_ act would involve _total_ production, and exclude the preëxistence of the constituent material under a different form. A _formative_ act, on the contrary, is a _partial_ production, which presupposes the material _out of which_ a given thing is to be made. Hence the Divine act, whereby organic life was first educed from the passive potentiality of inorganic matter, was formative and not creative. Elements preëxistent in the inorganic world were combined and intrinsically modified by impressing upon them a new specification, which raised them in the entitive and dynamic scale, and integrated them into units capable of self-regulation and reflexive action. This modification, however, was intrinsic to the matter involved and nothing was injected into matter from without. Obviously, therefore, the production of the first organisms was not a creation, but a formation.