I take it," he says, "to be demonstrable
that it is utterly impossible to prove that anything whatever may not be
the effect of a material and necessary cause, and that human logic is
equally incompetent to prove that any act is really spontaneous. A
really spontaneous act is one, which, by the assumption, has no cause;
and the attempt to prove such a negative as this, is on the face of the
matter absurd. And while it is thus a philosophical impossibility to
demonstrate that any given phenomenon is not the effect of a material
cause, any one who is acquainted with the history of science will admit
that its progress has, in all ages, meant, and now more than ever means,
the extension of what we call matter and causation, and the concomitant
gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call
spirit and spontaneity."
[20] It cannot escape the attention of any one that Mr. Darwin, Mr.
Wallace, Professor Huxley, and all the other advocates or defenders of
Darwinism, do not pretend to prove anything more than that species _may_
be originated by selection, not that there is no other satisfactory
account of their origin. Mr. Darwin admits that referring them to the
intention and efficiency of God, accounts for everything, but, he says,
that is not science.
[21] _Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews_. By Thomas Henry Huxley, LL.
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