Little by little I became familiar with the principles of embryonic evolution,ontogeny,and of biological evolution,phylogeny;realized,for the first time,my own history and that of the ancestors from whom Ihad developed and descended.I,this marvellously complicated being,torn by desires and despairs,was the result of the union of two microscopic cells."All living things come from the egg,"such had been Harvey's dictum.The result was like the tonic of a cold douche.Ibegan to feel cleansed and purified,as though something sticky-sweet which all my life had clung to me had been washed away.Yet a question arose,an insistent question that forever presses itself on the mind of man;how could these apparently chemical and mechanical processes,which the author of the book contented himself with recording,account for me?
The spermia darts for the egg,and pierces it;personal history begins.
But what mysterious shaping force is it that repeats in the individual the history of the race,supervises the orderly division of the cells,by degrees directs the symmetry,sets aside the skeleton and digestive tract and supervises the structure?
I took up the second book,that on the philosophy of the organism,to read in its preface that a much-to-be-honoured British nobleman had established a foundation of lectures in a Scotch University for forwarding the study of a Natural Theology.The term possessed me.Unlike the old theology woven of myths and a fanciful philosophy of the decadent period of Greece,natural theology was founded on science itself,and scientists were among those who sought to develop it.Here was a synthesis that made a powerful appeal,one of the many signs and portents of a new era of which I was dimly becoming cognizant;and now that I looked for signs,I found them everywhere,in my young Doctor,in Krebs,in references in the texts;indications of a new order beginning to make itself felt in a muddled,chaotic human world,which might--which must have a parallel with the order that revealed itself in the egg!Might not both,physical and social,be due to the influence of the same invisible,experimenting,creating Hand?