Science, matter, and immortality / by Ronald Campbell Macfie.

  • Macfie, Ronald Campbell, 1867-1931.
Date:
1909
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Science, matter, and immortality / by Ronald Campbell Macfie. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    As Tyndall admits : “ The whole process of evolution is the manifestation of a power ab- solutely inscrutable to the intellect of man. As little in our day as in the days of Job can man by searching find this Power out. Considered funda- mentally, then,'it is by the operation of an insoluble mystery that life on earth is evolved, species differ- entiated, and mind unfolded from their prepotent elements in the immeasurable past.” In fine, God made the world ; and all our ex- planations—all our attempts to get behind the first mystery of creation and the continual miracles of birth—are as vain as our attempts to solve the mystery of matter. Ignoramus and Ignorabimus ! But this we know, that form including colour has some special significance and is a mystery—an emotional mystery of its own. We feel that form and colour are more than mere form and colour ; we feel that the shaping of things has some divine significance. We feel that the idea preceded the form and is the Final Cause ; that form is not a matter of mere mechanic variation, that there is “a mysterious architectonic principle, which has not yet been detected,” which we may call, if we will, the Imagination of God. When Tennyson looked into a stream and saw it swarming with strange water-creatures, he wondered at the imagi- nation of the Almighty ; and it is not difficult to