ONE INCREASING PURPOSE

Otago Witness, Issue 3743, 8 December 1925, Page 34

ONE INCREASING PURPOSE

EVOLUTION AND CREATION. VIEWS OF SIR OLIVER LODGE LONDON, December 4. Sir Oliver Lodge, delivering his Huxley lecture, made a remarkable pronouncement upon the subject of creation. He urged tnafc there was no essential opposi tion between creation and evolution. It was a mistake to put evolution forward in opposition to creation. This led to the exclusion of mind from the universe and replaced mind by the mechanism of creation and evolution. “Were not the two processes but a single and gradual one which could revei ently be followed by the human mind?” he asked. “The ether of space is the undifferentiated, all-extensive substance which is the raw material of which everything is composed,” he Baid. Ether must be imagined to be knotted up here and there into minute specks of two kinds—protons and electrons, with positive and negative electric charges.” “I have,” lie said, “attempted to produce this knotting in the laboratory, but the experiment was an abject failure.” Continuing, Sir Oliver Lodge said: “Tlie sun is losing its substance at the rate of 4,000,000 tons per second, but it will take one hundred and fifty thou-

sand million years to expend 1 per cent, of its substance. Compared with this, all human history is a mere flash. Man is still most imperfect, but it iB consoling to know that humanity has done so much in its short history. The story of man, however, really began when the sun’s nublee were formed 2,000,000 years ago. The end will apparently be the disappearance of matter and the reappearance of an infinite ether field. As man started with ether he may be getting back to ether. Nevertheless there is a recuperative process as well as a destructive one. I urge that creation is a continuous process, going on and never stopping. Spiritual things can advance through higher stages towards perfection. This is the real aim and purpose of the ultimate and infinite term God,” he concluded.