The great trouble with Professor Bastian, as with Mr. Herbert Spencer, is
that he advances a purely materialistic hypothesis, and then goes to work,
with his quantitative and conditional restrictions, to eliminate all vital
force from the universe. As he has been no more successful in finding
God--the Infinite source of all life--at the point of his
dissecting-knife, than has the speculative chemist at the bottom of his
crucible, or Mr. Spencer at the top of his ladder of synthesis, he
resolutely grapples with logic, as a last resort, and as remorselessly
syllogizes God out of the universe as he would a mythological demon
infecting the atmosphere of his dissecting-room. In the same way, he
successfully syllogizes all life out of existence: although, in the very
act of constructing his syllogism, he demonstrates its existence as
conclusively as that matter and motion are objective realities in the
world of mind and matter which is about him. He fails to see, however,
that the thing which demonstrates must necessarily precede the thing
demonstrated, as life must necessarily precede its manifestation. In
admitting the existence of "vital manifestation," therefore, he virtually
admits an antecedent vital principle, lying back of an effect as a cause,
which must exclude anything like a contradictory judgment, so long as the
laws of the human mind, in respect to logical antecedents and consequents,
remain as they are.

Whatever may be the alleged inaccuracies of the Bible Genesis or the
disputes heretofore indulged in respecting the _Hagiographa_, or "sacred
writings" of the Jews, it will hardly be denied by the Biblical scholar
that some of the most important discoveries in modern science, especially
in the direction of astronomy, as well as in geological research and
inquiry, confirm rather than throw doubt upon their more explicit
utterances. This has been so marked a feature in the controversy, that