What he requires of his friends is pure, open-eyed truth." "But how," said the doctor, "can you grant spontaneous generation, and believe in a Creator ?" "I said the term was an absurd one," rejoined the curate.
"Never mind the term then: you admit the fact ?" said Faber.
"What fact ?" asked Wingfold.
"That in a certain liquid, where all life has been destroyed, and where no contact with life is admitted, life of itself appears," defined the doctor.
"No, no; I admit nothing of the sort," cried Wingfold.

"I only admit that the evidence seems in favor of believing that in some liquids that have been heated to a high point, and kept from the air, life has yet appeared.

How can I tell whether _all_ life already there was first destroyed?
whether a yet higher temperature would not have destroyed yet more life?
What if the heat, presumed to destroy all known germs of life in them, should be the means of developing other germs, further removed?
Then as to _spontaneity_, as to life appearing of itself, that question involves something beyond physics.

Absolute life can exist only of and by itself, else were it no perfect thing; but will you say that a mass of protoplasm--that _proto_ by the way is a begged question--exists by its own power, appears by its own will?
Is it not rather there because it can not help it ?" "It is there in virtue of the life that is in it," said Faber.
"Of course; that is a mere truism," returned Wingfold, "equivalent to, It lives in virtue of life.

There is nothing _spontaneous_ in that.