The principle of continuity urges the evolutionist to extend his theory downward into the inorganic world and upward into the sphere of the moral and the spiritual. At the crucial points of the origin of life and of the human race, the advocate of preformation has greater difficulty than the supporter of epigenesis or creative evolution, which is a sort of _rapprochement_ between evolutionism and creationism. Let us see how the case stands at present as regards the origin of life and the origin of man. Life may be generated any day in the laboratory, but as yet this has not been done.[76] In fact so great are the difficulties that Arrhenius thinks that there was no beginning of life, life being eternal and persisting, in spite of acknowledged scientific difficulties in the conception, amid the vicissitudes of cosmic changes and flights through interstellar space.[77] Weismann does not think that a living germ could be conveyed in the crevices of meteorites to our planet, because "it could neither endure the excessive cold nor the absolute desiccation to which it would be exposed in cosmic space, which contains absolutely no water. This could not be endured even for a few days, much less for immeasurable periods of time."[78] 76: Jacques Loeb says that "whoever claims to have succeeded in making living matter from inanimate will have to prove that he has succeeded in producing nuclein material which acts as a ferment for its own synthesis and thus reproduces itself. Nobody has thus far succeeded in this, although nothing warrants us in taking it for granted that this task is beyond the power of science."--"Darwin and Modern Science," p. 270. 77: "Worlds in the Making," 1908, Chapter VIII. 78: "The Evolution Theory," II, p. 365. Lord Kelvin will not go as far as Arrhenius, but believes that a meteorite brought the first living germs to this planet. K. Pearson thinks that under favourable conditions in the remote past life arose, but arose only once, out of the non-living.[79] The bridge was so slender that it was crossed but once under imaginary conditions not controllable by experiment; and as a unique event even in imaginary history it cannot be said to be subject to any general law. It is questionable, in fact, whether in scientific merit the hypothesis is superior to that of special creation. 79: "Grammar of Science," one volume edition, pp. 410 ff.