● ● ● to the evolution of the species.47 In 1864 Pasteur demonstrated to a brilliant Parisian assembly that there is no such thing as spontaneous generation, that all life comes from germs. And on an icy February night in 1865 Gregor Mendel read to a provincial gathering in Germany the paper which, after long neglect, was to germinate in the modern science of genetics.
As a starting point for her own radical metaphysics, Mrs. Patterson went back to the beginning of all things. “In the beginning God . . .”48 Quimby had started with animal matter; she would start with God, Spirit.
At the beginning of her manuscript she still related her discovery to Quimby’s activities, as she was to do for several more years, but she now referred to the Quimby period as the “twilight of discovery.” This she explicitly identified with the “evening” preceding the “morning” of the first day of creation in the Genesis account.49 As she explained this account, it had nothing to do with the creation of a material universe but described the step-by-step appearing, through revelation, of spiritual reality in all its pre-existent perfection. Ideas might stir murkily in human thought before the moment of revelation, but only when the light of Truth dawned could they begin to be understood in their inherent divine logic.
47 The genesis of Darwinism itself is suggestive in connection with the subject of this book. Loren Eiseley writes in Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), p. 187:
Although Darwin was in the habit of repudiating violently any intimation that he had profited from Lamarck, we have already seen that he was acquainted at an early age with English versions of the latter’s work and in 1845 there is a reference in an unpublished letter to Lyell regarding “my volumes of Lamarck.” His rather cavalier rejection of his distinguished forerunner is tinged with an acerbity whose cause at this late date is difficult to discover. Darwin, although he added a meager and needlessly obscure historical introduction to later editions of the Origin, was essentially indifferent to his precursors.
Since Lamarck, however, failed to glimpse the principle of natural selection, he lacked the insight which was at the heart of Darwin’s contribution to biology, whereas the thing which Darwin did take from him—belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics—is now discredited. There may be an intuitive rightness in Darwin’s description of Lamarck’s as a book “from which . . . I gained nothing” (p. 202).
↑49 [Mary Baker Glover, “The Bible in its Spiritual Meaning,” c. 1866–1869, A09000, pp. 3, 83, MBEL.]
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