Biogen Author:Elliott Coues Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: B I O G E N. Mr. Prefident and Gentlemen of the Society : A NY reafon I might have found for declining your invita- tion to fpeak on this fubjedt could onl... more »y have come from moral cowardice. I mould have had, therefore, no alternative to compliance, even had I had no courage to proceed but that of conviction. But I was given to underftand that you might neither be unwilling to have the general biological problem reopened, nor indifpofed to hear with forbearance at leaft from any one of your number who might have ideas upon the fubjecT:, with a view to difcufs fuch propofitions as he might be willing and able to advance. So far am I from fuppofing that the crux of the life-problem will be folved to-night, I do not hefitate to declare my belief that it has been refolved neither by fcience nor by phi- lofophy, and that it is infoluble in any royal water that can becompounded of to-day's fcience and philofophy. Confronted as I am with fomething I believe to be infcrutable to man's unaided reafon — oppofed as are my convictions to fome of the brave theories which have been advanced in this Society reflecting that fomething — profoundly unknowing as I am of the origin and nature of Life, I mould defift with this hon- eft confeffion of ignorance and feek its afylum, were I not alfo convinced that much truth in the matter of the life- problem is to be had for the afking by any one who makes full ufe of all his faculties; were not my views in the main thofe which, in fubftance, under whatever form of expreffion, have been affirmed by the confenfus of mankind fince when the human creature became pofleffed of a rational foul; and were I not fatisfied that anything I could fay, feeming new and being true, would be no news, but fomething as old as the mind of man. In expreffing one's...« less