The average Christian materialist would stoutly deny, no doubt, that his belief in the reality of matter and his acceptance of the philosophy of material evolution rules God out of the universe. He would insist that God uses matter simply as a means of expression, of effectiveness upon the plane of present human sense; that God is ever in and working through material substance and natural law to will and to do of His good pleasure.
The incongruity of this association and interaction of Spirit and matter, life and death, has, however, always impressed itself upon candid thought, and, consciously or unconsciously, the identification of all the potentialities of life with the material factor has practically been consented to by the many. Indeed the glamor of the evolutionary idea of a definitely articulated series of life impulses and manifestations, from inert and formless stuff up to the most highly differentained expressions of intelligence, has seemed to make an irresistible appeal to the so-called scientific temperament. It is a point of view which not only accepts the possibility of "spontaneous generation," but it insists, as a recent writer (Percival Lowell, in The Century) has affirmed, "that whenever conditions for the existence of life occur, the lower forms of life inveitably come into existence." No less a person than John Burroughs recently said, in the columns of the Atlantic Monthly,—
I like to think of the old weather-worn globe as the mother of us all ... If the beginning of life on the globe was the introduction of no new principle, but only the result of a vastly more complex and intimate play and interaction of the old physico-chemical forces of the inorganic world, then the gulf that is supposed to separate the two worlds of living and non-living matter virtually disappears; the two worlds meet and fuse. We shall probably in time have to come to accept this view. It is in a line with the whole revelation of science, so far—the getting rid of the miraculous, the unknowable, the transcendental, and the enhancing of the potency and the mystery of things near at hand that we have always known in other forms. It is at first an unpalatable truth, like the discovery of the animal origin of man, or that consciousness and all our fine thoughts and aspirations are the result of the molecular action in the brain; ... Science is constantly bringing us back to earth and to the ground underfoot. Our dream of something far-off, supernatural, vanishes. ... We shall probably be brought, sooner or later, to accept another unpalatable theory, that of the physical origin of the soul, that it is not of celestial birth except as the celestial and terrestrial are one.
