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I don't seem to be getting a citation for the Darwin quote. It's not just pedantry. It's not consistent with the way Darwin thought.

Take it up with Yockey:

All speculation on the origin of life on Earth by chance cannot survive the first criterion of life: proteins are left-handed, sugars in DNA and RNA are right-handed. Omne vivum ex vivo [which I translated as "life comes only from life" -- this being my translation from Yockey's book; and so I put it in quotes]....

Of Darwin's view of the matter, Yockey writes: "[Darwin] believed that life appeared by some wholly unknown process, and therefore [its origin] is undecideable."

Yockey writes: "Niels Bohr (1933) proposed that life is consistent with but undecideable or unknowable by human reasoning from physics or chemistry.... Darwin did not believe that life emerged in a 'warm little pond.' Darwin believed that the origin of life is unknowable or undecideable."

Yockey devotes most of chapter 8 of his book Information Theory, Evolution, and the Origin of Life to show how Darwin did not hold with Haeckel's Urschlein of a prebiotic Earth, "where chemical evolution and its putative consequence, life, arose spontaneously in flagrante delicto from this non-living matter...."

As Darwin wrote,

I have long regretted that I truckled to public opinion, and used the Pentateuchal ... term of creation, by which I merely meant "appeared" by some wholly unknown process. It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter.... [Darwin, 1898, Yockey's emphasis]
...It is no valid objection that science as yet throws no light on the far higher problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction.... [Origin of Species; Yockey does not give the page reference, but does add the italics.]

Darwin essentially takes the "origin" or "essence" of life for granted. He is saying his scientific theory is independent of it; which is a very good thing, because it is "undecideable" or "unknowable" anyway.

Neils Bohr gets the last word here [from his "Light and Life" lecture of 1933]:

The recognition of the essential importance of fundamentally atomistic features in the function of living organisms is by no means sufficient, however, for a comprehensive explanation of biological phenomena, before we can reach an understanding of life on the basis of physical experience. Thus, we should doubtness kill an animal if we tried to carry the investigation of its organs so far that we could describe the role played by single atoms in vital functions. In every experiment on living organisms, there must remain an uncertainty as regards the physical conditions to which they are subjected, and the idea suggests itself that the minimal freedom we must allow the organism in this respect is just large enough to permit it, so to say, to hide its ultimate secrets from us.

The most "ultimate" secret being its life "principle" (for lack of a better word) -- which cannot under any experimental conditions be revealed to direct observation, for the reasons Bohr gives in the immediately above (i.e., if you go looking, sooner or later you kill the specimen; and the dead cannot speak of the living).

So, life being something that is not directly investigatable, arising from that which is unknowable, our default position must seem to be: Omne vivum ex vivo.

Darwin didn't seem to have a problem with this; nor Bohr, nor Yockey.

Thanks for your kind inquiries, dears!