Read Ebook: The Breath of Life by Burroughs John

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 322 lines and 62573 words, and 7 pages

Our professor makes the provisional statement, not in obedience to his science, but in obedience to his philosophy, that something more than mechanics and chemistry may have had a hand in shaping the universe, some primordial tendency impressed upon or working in matter "just before mechanism begins to act"--"a necessary and pre?stablished associate of mechanism." So that if we start with the universe, with life, and with this tendency, mechanism will do all the rest. But this is not science, of course, because it is not verifiable; it is practically the philosophy of Bergson.

The cast-iron conclusions of physical science do pinch the Harvard professor a bit, and he pads them with a little of the Bergsonian philosophy. Bergson himself is not pinched at all by the conclusions of positive science. He sees that we, as human beings, cannot live in this universe without supplementing our science with some sort of philosophy that will help us to escape from the fatalism of matter and force into the freedom of the spiritual life. If we are merely mechanical and chemical accidents, all the glory of life, all the meaning of our moral and spiritual natures, go by the board.

Professor Henderson shows us how well this planet, with its oceans and continents, and its mechanical and chemical forces and elements, is suited to sustain life, but he brings us no nearer the solution of the mystery than we were before. His title, to begin with, is rather bewildering. Has the "fitness of the environment" ever been questioned? The environment is fit, of course, else living bodies would not be here. We are used to taking hold of the other end of the problem. In living nature the foot is made to fit the shoe, and not the shoe the foot. The environment is the mould in which the living organism is cast. Hence, it seems to me, that seeking to prove the fitness of the environment is very much like seeking to prove the fitness of water for fish to swim in, or the fitness of the air for birds to fly in. The implication seems to be made that the environment anticipates the organism, or meets it half way. But the environment is rather uncompromising. Man alone modifies his environment by the weapon of science; but not radically; in the end he has to fit himself to it. Life has been able to adjust itself to the universal forces and so go along with them; otherwise we should not be here. We may say, humanly speaking, that the water is friendly to the swimmer, if he knows how to use it; if not, it is his deadly enemy. The same is true of all the elements and forces of nature. Whether they be for or against us, depends upon ourselves. The wind is never tempered to the shorn lamb, the shorn lamb must clothe itself against the wind. Life is adaptive, and this faculty of adaptation to the environment, of itself takes it out of the category of the physico-chemical. The rivers and seas favor navigation, if we have gumption enough to use and master their forces. The air is good to breathe, and food to eat, for those creatures that are adapted to them. Bergson thinks, not without reason, that life on other planets may be quite different from what it is on our own, owing to a difference in chemical and physical conditions. Change the chemical constituents of sea water, and you radically change the lower organisms. With an atmosphere entirely of oxygen, the processes of life would go on more rapidly and perhaps reach a higher form of development. Life on this planet is limited to a certain rather narrow range of temperature; the span may be the same in other worlds, but farther up or farther down the scale. Had the air been differently constituted, would not our lungs have been different? The lungs of the fish are in his gills: he has to filter his air from a much heavier medium. The nose of the pig is fitted for rooting; shall we say, then, that the soil was made friable that pigs might root in it? The webbed foot is fitted to the water; shall we say, then, that water is liquid in order that geese and ducks may swim in it? One more atom of oxygen united to the two atoms that go to make the molecule of air, and we should have had ozone instead of the air we now breathe. How unsuited this would have made the air for life as we know it! Oxidation would have consumed us rapidly. Life would have met this extra atom by some new device.

One wishes Professor Henderson had told us more about how life fits itself to the environment--how matter, moved and moulded only by mechanical and chemical forces, yet has some power of choice that a machine does not have, and can and does select the environment best suited to its well-being. In fact, that it should have, or be capable of, any condition of well-being, if it is only a complex of physical and chemical forces, is a problem to wrestle with. The ground we walk on is such a complex, but only the living bodies it supports have conditions of well-being.

Professor Henderson concedes very little to the vitalists or the teleologists. He is a thorough mechanist. "Matter and energy," he says, "have an original property, assuredly not by chance, which organizes the universe in space and time." Where or how matter got this organizing property, he offers no opinion. "Given the universe, life, and the tendency , mechanism is inductively proved sufficient to account for all phenomena." Biology, then, is only mechanics and chemistry engaged in a new r?le without any change of character; but what put them up to this new r?le? "The whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric."

Another Harvard voice is less pronounced in favor of the mechanistic conception of life. Professor Rand thinks that in a mechanically determined universe, "our conscious life becomes a meaningless replica of an inexorable physical concatenation"--the soul the result of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Hence all the science and art and literature and religion of the world are merely the result of a molecular accident.

Dr. Rand himself, in wrestling with the problem of organization in a late number of "Science," seems to hesitate whether or not to regard man as a molecular accident, an appearance presented to us by the results of the curious accidents of molecules--which is essentially Professor Loeb's view; or whether to look upon the living body as the result of a "specific something" that organizes, that is, of "dominating organic agencies," be they psychic or super-mundane, which dominate and determine the organization of the different parts of the body into a whole. Yet he is troubled with the idea that this specific something may be "nothing more than accidental chemical peculiarities of cells." But would these accidental peculiarities be constant? Do accidents happen millions of times in the same way? The cell is without variableness or shadow of turning. The cells are the minute people that build up all living forms, and what prompts them to build a man in the one case, and the man's dog in another, is the mystery that puzzles Professor Rand. "Tissue cells," he says, "are not structures like stone blocks laboriously carved and immovably cemented in place. They are rather like the local eddies in an ever-flowing and ever-changing stream of fluids. Substance which was at one moment a part of a cell, passes out and a new substance enters. What is it that prevents the local whirl in this unstable stream from changing its form? How is it that a million muscle cells remain alike, collectively ready to respond to a nerve impulse?" According to one view, expressed by Professor Rand, "Organization is something that we read into natural phenomena. It is in itself nothing." The alternative view holds that there is a specific organizing agent that brings about the harmonious operation of all the organs and parts of the system--a superior dynamic force controlling and guiding all the individual parts.

A most determined and thorough-going attempt to hunt down the secret of vitality, and to determine how far its phenomena can be interpreted in terms of mechanics and chemistry, is to be found in Professor H. W. Conn's volume entitled "The Living Machine." Professor Conn justifies his title by defining a machine as "a piece of apparatus so designed that it can change one kind of energy into another for a definite purpose." Of course the adjective "living" takes it out of the category of all mere mechanical devices and makes it super-mechanical, just as Haeckel's application of the word "living" to his inorganics , takes them out of the category of the inorganic. In every machine, properly so called, all the factors are known; but do we know all the factors in a living body? Professor Conn applies his searching analysis to most of the functions of the human body, to digestion, to assimilation, to circulation, to respiration, to metabolism, and so on, and he finds in every function something that does not fall within his category--some force not mechanical nor chemical, which he names vital.

In following the processes of digestion, all goes well with his chemistry and his mechanics till he comes to the absorption of food-particles, or their passage through the walls of the intestines into the blood. Here, the ordinary physical forces fail him, and living matter comes to his aid. The inner wall of the intestine is not a lifeless membrane, and osmosis will not solve the mystery. There is something there that seizes hold of the droplets of oil by means of little extruded processes, and then passes them through its own body to excrete them on an inner surface into the blood-vessels. "This fat absorption thus appears to be a vital process and not one simply controlled by physical forces like osmosis. Here our explanation runs against what we call 'vital power' of the ultimate elements of the body." Professor Conn next analyzes the processes of circulation, and his ready-made mechanical concepts carry him along swimmingly, till he tries to explain by them the beating of the heart, and the contraction of the small blood-vessels which regulate the blood-supply. Here comes in play the mysterious vital power again. He comes upon the same power when he tries to determine what it is that enables the muscle-fibre to take from the lymph the material needed for its use, and to discard the rest. The fibre acts as if it knew what it wanted--a very unmechanical attribute.

Then Professor Conn applies his mechanics and chemistry to the respiratory process and, of course, makes out a very clear case till he comes to the removal of the waste, or ash. The steam-engine cannot remove its own ash; the "living machine" can. Much of this ash takes the form of urea, and "the seizing upon the urea by the kidney cells is a vital phenomenon." Is not the peristaltic movement of the bowels, by which the solid matter is removed, also a vital phenomenon? Is not the conception of a pipe or a tube that forces semi-fluid matter along its hollow interior, by the contraction of its walls, quite beyond the reach of mechanics? The force is as mechanical as the squeezing of the bulb of a syringe by the hand, but in the case of the intestines, what does the squeezing? The vital force?

When the mechanical and chemical concepts are applied to the phenomena of the nervous system, they work very well till we come to mental phenomena. When we try to correlate physical energy with thought or consciousness, we are at the end of our tether. Here is a gulf we cannot span. The theory of the machine breaks down. Some other force than material force is demanded here, namely, psychical,--a force or principle quite beyond the sphere of the analytic method.

Hence Professor Conn concludes that there are vital factors and that they are the primal factors in the organism. The mechanical and chemical forces are the secondary factors. It is the primal factors that elude scientific analysis. Why a muscle contracts, or why a gland secretes, or "why the oxidation of starch in the living machine gives rise to motion, growth, and reproduction, while if the oxidation occurs in the chemist's laboratory ... it simply gives rise to heat," are questions he cannot answer. In all his inquiries into the parts played by mechanical and chemical laws in the organism, he is compelled to "assume as their foundation the simple vital properties of living phenomena."

It should not surprise nor disturb us that the scientific interpretation of life leads to materialism, or to the conviction of the all-sufficiency of the mechanical and chemical forces of dead matter to account for all living phenomena. It need not surprise us because positive science, as such, can deal only with physical and chemical forces. If there is anything in this universe besides physical and chemical force, science does not know it. It does not know it because it is absolutely beyond the reach of its analysis. When we go beyond the sphere of the concrete, the experimental, the verifiable, only our philosophy can help us. The world within us, the world of psychic forces, is beyond the ken of science. It can analyze the living body, trace all its vital processes, resolve them into their mechanical and chemical equivalents, show us the parts played by the primary elements, the part played by the enzymes, or ferments, and the like, and yet it cannot tell us the secret of life--of that which makes organic chemistry so vastly different from inorganic. It discloses to us the wonders of the cell--a world of mystery by itself; it analyzes the animal body into organs, and the organs into tissues, and the tissues into cells, but the secret of organization utterly baffles it. After Professor Wilson had concluded his masterly work on the cell, he was forced to admit that the final mystery of the cell eluded him, and that his investigation "on the whole seemed to widen rather than to narrow the enormous gap that separates even the lowest forms of life from the inorganic world."

All there is outside the sphere of physical science belongs to religion, to philosophy, to art, to literature. Huxley spoke strictly and honestly as a man of science, when he related consciousness to the body, as the sound of a clock when it strikes is related to the machinery of the clock. The scientific analysis of a living body reveals nothing but the action of the mechanical and chemical principles. If you analyze it by fire or by cremation, you get gases and vapors and mineral ash, that is all; the main thing about the live body--its organization, its life--you do not get. Of course science knows this; and to account for this missing something, it philosophizes, and relegates it to the interior world of molecular physics--it is all in the way the ultimate particles of matter were joined or compounded, were held together in the bonds of molecular matrimony. What factor or agent or intelligence is active or directive in this molecular marriage of the atoms, science does not inquire. Only philosophy can deal with that problem.

In organized matter there is something that organizes. "The cell itself is an organization of smaller units," and to drive or follow the organizing principle into the last hiding-place is past the power of biological chemistry. What constitutes the guiding force or principle of a living body, adjusting all its parts, making them pull together, making of the circulation one system in which the heart, the veins, the arteries, the lungs, all work to one common end, co?rdinating several different organs into a digestive system, and other parts into the nervous system, is a mystery that no objective analysis of the body can disclose.

To refer vitality to complexity alone, is to dodge the question. Multiplying the complexity of a machine, say of a watch, any conceivable number of times would not make it any the less a machine, or change it from the automatic order to the vital order. A motor-car is a vastly more complex mechanism than a wheelbarrow, and yet it is not the less a machine. On the other hand, an amoeba is a far simpler animal than a man, and yet it is just as truly living. To refer life to complexity does not help us; we want to know what lies back of the complexity--what makes it a new species of complexity.

We cannot explain the origin of living matter by the properties which living matter possesses. There are three things that mechanics and chemistry cannot explain: the relation of the psychical to the physical through the law of the conservation and correlation of forces; the agent or principle that guides the blind chemical and physical forces so as to produce the living body; and the kind of forces that have contributed to the origin of that morphological unit--the cell.

There is this suggestive fact about these recent biological experiments of Dr. Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute: they seem to prove that the life of a man is not merely the sum of the life of the myriad cells of his body. Stab the man to death, and the cells of his body still live and will continue to live if grafted upon another live man. Probably every part of the body would continue to live and grow indefinitely, in the proper medium. That the cell life should continue after the soul life has ceased is very significant. It seems a legitimate inference from this fact that the human body is the organ or instrument of some agent that is not of the body. The functional or physiological life of the body as a whole, also seems quite independent of our conscious volitional or psychic life. That which repairs and renews the body, heals its wounds, controls and coordinates its parts, adapts it to its environment, carries on its processes during sleep, in fact in all our involuntary life, seems quite independent of the man himself. Is the spirit of a race or a nation, or of the times in which we live, another illustration of the same mysterious entity?

In the same way we seem forced to think of life, vitality, as an entity--a fact as real as electricity or light, though it may be only a mode of motion. It may be of physico-chemical origin, as much so as heat, or light; and yet it is something as distinctive as they are among material things, and is involved in the same mystery. Is magnetism or gravitation a real thing? or, in the moral world, is love, charity, or consciousness itself? The world seems to be run by nonentities. Heat, light, life, seem nonentities. That which organizes the different parts or organs of the human body into a unit, and makes of the many organs one organism, is a nonentity. That which makes an oak an oak, and a pine a pine, is a nonentity. That which makes a sheep a sheep, and an ox an ox, is to science a nonentity. To physical science the soul is a nonentity.

There is something in the cells of the muscles that makes them contract, and in the cells of the heart that makes it beat; that something is not active in the other cells of the body. But it is a nonentity. The body is a machine and a laboratory combined, but that which co?rdinates them and makes them work together--what is that? Another nonentity. That which distinguishes a living machine from a dead machine, science has no name for, except molecular attraction and repulsion, and these are names merely; they are nonentities. Is there not molecular attraction and repulsion in a steam-engine also? And yet it is not alive. What has to supplement the mechanical and the chemical to make matter alive? We have no name for it but the vital, be it an entity or a nonentity. We have no name for a flash of lightning but electricity, be it an entity or a nonentity. We have no name for that which distinguishes a man from a brute, but mind, soul, be it an entity or a nonentity. We have no name for that which distinguishes the organic from the inorganic but vitality, be it an entity or a nonentity.

Without metaphysics we can do nothing; without mental concepts, where are we? Natural selection is as much a metaphysical phrase as is consciousness, or the subjective and the objective. Natural selection is not an entity, it is a name for what we conceive of as a process. It is natural rejection as well. The vital principle is a metaphysical concept; so is instinct; so is reason; so is the soul; so is God.

Many of our concepts have been wrong. The concept of witches, of disease as the work of evil spirits, of famine and pestilence as the visitation of the wrath of God, and the like, were unfounded. Science sets us right about all such matters. It corrects our philosophy, but it cannot dispense with the philosophical attitude of mind. The philosophical must supplement the experimental.

In fact, in considering this question of life, it is about as difficult for the unscientific mind to get along without postulating a vital principle or force--which, Huxley says, is analogous to the idea of a principle of aquosity in water--as it is to walk upon the air, or to hang one's coat upon a sunbeam. It seems as if something must breathe upon the dead matter, as at the first, to make it live. Yet if there is a distinct vital force it must be correlated with physical force, it must be related causally to the rest. The idea of a vital force as something new and distinct and injected into matter from without at a given time and place in the earth's history, must undoubtedly be given up. Instead of escaping from mechanism, this notion surrenders one into the hands of mechanism, since to supplement or reinforce a principle with some other principle from without, is strictly a mechanical procedure. But the conception of vitality as potential in matter, or of the whole universe as permeated with spirit, which to me is the same thing, is a conception that takes life out of the categories of the fortuitous and the automatic.

No doubt but that all things in the material world are causally related, no doubt of the constancy of matter and force, no doubt but that all phenomena are the result of natural principles, no doubt that the living arose from the non-living, no doubt that the evolution process was inherent in the constitution of the world; and yet there is a mystery about it all that is insoluble. The miracle of vitality takes place behind a veil that we cannot penetrate, in the inmost sanctuary of the molecules of matter, in that invisible, imaginary world on the borderland between the material and the immaterial. We may fancy that it is here that the psychical effects its entrance into the physical--that spirit weds matter--that the creative energy kindles the spark we call vitality. At any rate, vitality evidently begins in that inner world of atoms and molecules; but whether as the result of their peculiar and very complex compounding or as the cause of the compounding--how are we ever to know? Is it not just as scientific to postulate a new principle, the principle of vitality, as to postulate a new process, or a new behavior of an old principle? In either case, we are in the world of the unverifiable; we take a step in the dark. Most of us, I fancy, will sympathize with George Eliot, who says in one of her letters: "To me the Development Theory, and all other explanations of processes by which things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery that lies under the processes."

SCIENTIFIC VITALISM

All living bodies, when life leaves them, go back to the earth from whence they came. What was it in the first instance that gathered their elements from the earth and built them up into such wonderful mechanisms? If we say it was nature, do we mean by nature a physical force or an immaterial principle? Did the earth itself bring forth a man, or did something breathe upon the inert clay till it became a living spirit?

As life is a physical phenomenon, appearing in a concrete physical world, it is, to that extent, within the domain of physical science, and appeals to the scientific mind. Physical science is at home only in the experimental, the verifiable. Its domain ends where that of philosophy begins.

The question of how life arose in a universe of dead matter is just as baffling a question to the ordinary mind, as how the universe itself arose. If we assume that the germs of life drifted to us from other spheres, propelled by the rays of the sun, or some other celestial agency, as certain modern scientific philosophers have assumed, we have only removed the mystery farther away from us. If we assume that it came by spontaneous generation, as Haeckel and others assume, then we are only cutting a knot which we cannot untie. The god of spontaneous generation is as miraculous as any other god. We cannot break the causal sequence without a miracle. If something came from nothing, then there is not only the end of the problem, but also the end of our boasted science.

Science is at home in discussing all the material manifestations of life--the parts played by colloids and ferments, by fluids and gases, and all the organic compounds, and by mechanical and chemical principles; it may analyze and tabulate all life processes, and show the living body as a most wonderful and complex piece of mechanism, but before the question of the origin of life itself it stands dumb, and, when speaking through such a man as Tyndall, it also stands humble and reverent. After Tyndall had, to his own satisfaction, reduced all like phenomena to mechanical attraction and repulsion, he stood with uncovered head before what he called the "mystery and miracle of vitality." The mystery and miracle lie in the fact that in the organic world the same elements combine with results so different from those of the inorganic world. Something seems to have inspired them with a new purpose. In the inorganic world, the primary elements go their ceaseless round from compound to compound, from solid to fluid or gaseous, and back again, forming the world of inert matter as we know it, but in the organic world the same elements form thousands of new combinations unknown to them before, and thus give rise to the myriad forms of life that inhabit the earth.

The much-debated life question has lately found an interesting exponent in Professor Benjamin Moore, of the University of Liverpool. His volume on the subject in the "Home University Library" is very readable, and, in many respects, convincing. At least, so far as it is the word of exact science on the subject it is convincing; so far as it is speculative, or philosophical, it is or is not convincing, according to the type of mind of the reader. Professor Moore is not a bald mechanist or materialist like Professor Loeb, or Ernst Haeckel, nor is he an idealist or spiritualist, like Henri Bergson or Sir Oliver Lodge. He may be called a scientific vitalist. He keeps close to lines of scientific research as these lines lead him through the maze of the primordial elements of matter, from electron to atom, from atom to molecule, from molecule to colloid, and so up to the border of the living world. His analysis of the processes of molecular physics as they appear in the organism leads him to recognize and to name a new force, or a new manifestation of force, which he hesitates to call vital, because of the associations of this term with a prescientific age, but which he calls "biotic energy."

Biotic energy is peculiar to living bodies, and "there are precisely the same criteria for its existence," says Professor Moore, "as for the existence of any one of the inorganic energy types, viz., a set of discrete phenomena; and its nature is as mysterious to us as the cause of any one of these inorganic forms about which also we know so little. It is biotic energy which guides the development of the ovum, which regulates the exchanges of the cell, and causes such phenomena as nerve impulse, muscular contraction, and gland secretion, and it is a form of energy which arises in colloidal structures, just as magnetism appears in iron, or radio-activity in uranium or radium, and in its manifestations it undergoes exchanges with other forms of energy, in the same manner as these do among one another."

The secret of this life force, or biotic energy, according to Professor Moore, is in the keeping of matter itself. The steps or stages from the depths of matter by which life arose, lead up from that imaginary something, the electron, to the inorganic colloids, or to the crystallo-colloids, which are the threshold of life, each stage showing some new transformation of energy. There must be an all-potent energy transformation before we can get chemical energy out of physical energy, and then biotic energy out of chemical energy. This transformation of inorganic energy into life energy cannot be traced or repeated in the laboratory, yet science believes the secret will sometime be in its hands. It is here that the materialistic philosophers, such as Professors Moore and Loeb, differ from the spiritualistic philosophers, such as Bergson, Sir Oliver Lodge, Professor Thompson, and others.

Professor Moore has no sympathy with those narrow mechanistic views that see in the life processes "no problems save those of chemistry and physics." "Each link in the living chain may be physico-chemical, but the chain as a whole, and its purpose, is something else." He draws an analogy from the production of music in which purely physical factors are concerned; the laws of harmonics account for all; but back of all is something that is not mechanical and chemical--there is the mind of the composer, and the performers, and the auditors, and something that takes cognizance of the whole effect. A complete human philosophy cannot be built upon physical science alone. He thinks the evolution of life from inert matter is of the same type as the evolution of one form of matter from another, or the evolution of one form of energy from another--a mystery, to be sure, but little more startling in the one case than in the other. "The fundamental mystery lies in the existence of those entities, or things, which we call matter and energy," out of the play and interaction of which all life phenomena have arisen. Organic evolution is a series of energy exchanges and transformations from lower to higher, but science is powerless to go behind the phenomena presented and name or verify the underlying mystery. Only philosophy can do this. And Professor Moore turns philosopher when he says there is beauty and design in it all, "and an eternal purpose which is ever progressing."

Bergson sets forth his views of evolution in terms of literature and philosophy. Professor Moore embodies similar views in his volume, set forth in terms of molecular science. Both make evolution a creative and a continuous process. Bergson lays the emphasis upon the cosmic spirit interacting with matter. Professor Moore lays the emphasis upon the indwelling potencies of matter itself . Professor Moore philosophizes as truly as does Bergson when he says "there must exist a whole world of living creatures which the microscope has never shown us, leading up to the bacteria and the protozoa. The brink of life lies not at the production of protozoa and bacteria, which are highly developed inhabitants of our world, but away down among the colloids; and the beginning of life was not a fortuitous event occurring millions of years ago and never again repeated, but one which in its primordial stages keeps on repeating itself all the time in our generation. So that if all intelligent creatures were by some holocaust destroyed, up out of the depths in process of millions of years, intelligent beings would once more emerge." This passage shows what a speculative leap or flight the scientific mind is at times compelled to take when it ventures beyond the bounds of positive methods. It is good philosophy, I hope, but we cannot call it science. Thrilled with cosmic emotion, Walt Whitman made a similar daring assertion:--

"There is no stoppage, and never can be stoppage, If I, you, and the worlds, and all beneath or upon their surfaces, were this moment reduced back to a pallid float, it would not avail in the long run, We should surely bring up again where we now stand, And surely go as much farther, and then farther and farther."

Evolution is creative, whether it works in matter--as Bergson describes, or whether its path lies up through electrons and atoms and molecules, as Professor Moore describes. There is something that creates and makes matter plastic to its will. Whether we call matter "the living garment of God," as Goethe did, or a reservoir of creative energy, as Tyndall and his school did, and as Professor Moore still does, we are paying homage to a power that is super-material. Life came to our earth, says Professor Moore, through a "well-regulated orderly development," and it "comes to every mother earth of the universe in the maturity of her creation when the conditions arrive within suitable limits." That no intelligent beings appeared upon the earth for millions upon millions of years, that for whole geologic ages there was no creature with more brains than a snail possesses, shows the almost infinitely slow progress of development, and that there has been no arbitrary or high-handed exercise of creative power. The universe is not run on principles of modern business efficiency, and man is at the head of living forms, not by the fiat of some omnipotent power, some superman, but as the result of the operation of forces that balk at no delay, or waste, or failure, and that are dependent upon the infinitely slow ripening and amelioration of both cosmic and terrestrial conditions.

We do not get rid of God by any such dictum, but we get rid of the anthropomorphic views which we have so long been wont to read into the processes of nature. We dehumanize the universe, but we do not render it the less grand and mysterious. Professor Moore points out to us how life came to a cooling planet as soon as the temperature became low enough for certain chemical combinations to appear. There must first be oxides and saline compounds, there must be carbonates of calcium and magnesium, and the like. As the temperature falls, more and more complex compounds, such as life requires, appear; till, in due time, carbon dioxide and water are at hand, and life can make a start. At the white heat of some of the fixed stars, the primary chemical elements are not yet evolved; but more and more elements appear, and more and more complex compounds are formed as the cooling process progresses.

"This note cannot be too strongly sounded, that as matter is allowed capacity for assuming complex forms, those complex forms appear. As soon as oxides can be there, oxides appear; when temperature admits of carbonates, then carbonates are forthwith formed. These are experiments which any chemist can to-day repeat in a crucible. And on a cooling planet, as soon as temperature will admit the presence of life, then life appears, as the evidence of geology shows us." When we speak of the beginning of life, it is not clear just what we mean. The unit of all organized bodies is the cell, but the cell is itself an organized body, and must have organic matter to feed upon. Hence the cell is only a more complex form of more primitive living matter. As we go down the scale toward the inorganic, can we find the point where the living and the non-living meet and become one? "Life had to surge a long way up from the depths before a green plant cell came into being." When the green plant cell was found, life was fairly launched. This plant cell, in the form of chlorophyll, by the aid of water and the trace of carbon dioxide in the air, began to store up the solar energy in fruit and grain and woody tissue, and thus furnish power to run all forms of life machinery.

The materialists or naturalists are right in urging that we live in a much more wonderful universe than we have ever imagined, and that in matter itself sleep potencies and possibilities not dreamt of in our philosophy. The world of complex though invisible activities which science reveals all about us, the solar and stellar energies raining upon us from above, the terrestrial energies and influences playing through us from below, the transformations and transmutations taking place on every hand, the terrible alertness and potency of the world of inert matter as revealed by a flash of lightning, the mysteries of chemical affinity, of magnetism, of radio-activity, all point to deep beneath deep in matter itself. It is little wonder that men who dwell habitually upon these things and are saturated with the spirit and traditions of laboratory investigation, should believe that in some way matter itself holds the mystery of the origin of life. On the other hand, a different type of mind, the more imaginative, artistic, and religious type, recoils from the materialistic view.

The sun is the source of all terrestrial energy, but the different forms that energy takes--in the plant, in the animal, in the brain of man--this type of mind is bound to ask questions about that. Gravity pulls matter down; life lifts it up; chemical forces pull it to pieces; vital forces draw it together and organize it; the winds and the waters dissolve and scatter it; vegetation recaptures and integrates it and gives it new qualities. At every turn, minds like that of Sir Oliver Lodge are compelled to think of life as a principle or force doing something with matter. The physico-chemical forces will not do in the hands of man what they do in the hands of Nature. Such minds, therefore, feel justified in thinking that something which we call "the hands of Nature," plays a part--some principle or force which the hands of man do not hold.

A BIRD OF PASSAGE

There is one phase of the much-discussed question of the nature and origin of life which, so far as I know, has not been considered either by those who hold a brief for the physico-chemical view or by those who stand for some form of vitalism or idealism. I refer to the small part that life plays in the total scheme of things. The great cosmic machine would go on just as well without it. Its relation to the whole appears to be little different from that of a man to the train in which he journeys. Life rides on the mechanical and chemical forces, but it does not seem to be a part of them, nor identical with them, because they were before it, and will continue after it is gone.

The everlasting, all-inclusive thing in this universe seems to be inert matter with the energy it holds; while the slight, flitting, casual thing seems to be living matter. The inorganic is from all eternity to all eternity; it is distributed throughout all space and endures through all time, while the organic is, in comparison, only of the here and the now; it was not here yesterday, and it may not be here to-morrow; it comes and goes. Life is like a bird of passage which alights and tarries for a time and is gone, and the places where it perched and nested and led forth its brood know it no more. Apparently it flits from world to world as the great cosmic spring comes to each, and departs as the cosmic winter returns to each. It is a visitor, a migrant, a frail, timid thing, which waits upon the seasons and flees from the coming tempests and vicissitudes.

How casual, uncertain, and inconsequential the vital order seems in our own solar system--a mere incident or by-product in its cosmic evolution! Astronomy sounds the depths of space, and sees only mechanical and chemical forces at work there. It is almost certain that only a small fraction of the planetary surfaces is the abode of life. On the earth alone, of all the great family of planets and satellites, is the vital order in full career. It may yet linger upon Mars, but it is evidently waning. On the inferior planets it probably had its day long ago, while it must be millions of years before it comes to the superior planets, if it ever comes to them. What a vast, inconceivable outlay of time and energy for such small returns! Evidently the vital order is only an episode, a transient or secondary phase of matter in the process of sidereal evolution. Astronomic space is strewn with dead worlds, as a New England field is with drift boulders. That life has touched and tarried here and there upon them can hardly be doubted, but if it is anything more than a passing incident, an infant crying in the night, a flush of color upon the cheek, a flower blooming by the wayside, appearances are against it.

We read our astronomy and geology in the light of our enormous egotism, and appropriate all to ourselves; but science sees in our appearance here a no more significant event than in the foam and bubbles that whirl and dance for a moment upon the river's current. The bubbles have their reason for being; all the mysteries of molecular attraction and repulsion may be involved in their production; without the solar energy, and the revolution of the earth upon its axis, they would not appear; and yet they are only bubbles upon the river's current, as we are bubbles upon the stream of energy that flows through the universe. Apparently the cosmic game is played for us no more than for the parasites that infest our bodies, or for the frost ferns that form upon our window-panes in winter. The making of suns and systems goes on in the depths of space, and doubtless will go on to all eternity, without any more reference to the vital order than to the chemical compounds.

The amount of living matter in the universe, so far as we can penetrate it, compared with the non-living, is, in amount, like a flurry of snow that whitens the fields and hills of a spring morning compared to the miles of rock and soil beneath it; and with reference to geologic time it is about as fleeting. In the vast welter of suns and systems in the heavens above us, we see only dead matter, and most of it is in a condition of glowing metallic vapor. There are doubtless living organisms upon some of the invisible planetary bodies, but they are probably as fugitive and temporary as upon our own world. Much of the surface of the earth is clothed in a light vestment of life, which, back in geologic time, seems to have more completely enveloped it than at present, as both the arctic and the antarctic regions bear evidence in their coal-beds and other fossil remains of luxuriant vegetable growths.

Strip the earth of its thin pellicle of soil, thinner with reference to the mass than is the peel to the apple, and you have stripped it of its life. Or, rob it of its watery vapor and the carbon dioxide in the air, both stages in its evolution, and you have a dead world. The huge globe swings through space only as a mass of insensate rock. So limited and evanescent is the world of living matter, so vast and enduring is the world of the non-living. Looked at in this way, in the light of physical science, life, I repeat, seems like a mere passing phase of the cosmic evolution, a flitting and temporary stage of matter which it passes through in the procession of changes on the surface of a cooling planet. Between the fiery mist of the nebula, and the frigid and consolidated globe, there is a brief span, ranging over about one hundred and twenty degrees of temperature, where life appears and organic evolution takes place. Compared with the whole scale of temperature, from absolute zero to the white heat of the hottest stars, it is about a hand's-breadth compared to a mile.

Life processes cease, but chemical and mechanical processes go on forever. Life is as fugitive and uncertain as the bow in the clouds, and, like the bow in the clouds, is confined to a limited range of conditions. Like the bow, also, it is a perpetual creation, a constant becoming, and its source is not in the matter through which it is manifested, though inseparable from it. The material substance of life, like the rain-drops, is in perpetual flux and change; it hangs always on the verge of dissolution and vanishes when the material conditions fail, to be renewed again when they return. We know, do we not? that life is as literally dependent upon the sun as is the rainbow, and equally dependent upon the material elements; but whether the physical conditions sum up the whole truth about it, as they do with the bow, is the insoluble question. Science says "Yes," but our philosophy and our religion say "No." The poets and the prophets say "No," and our hopes and aspirations say "No."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet