HYPOTHESIS AND ANALOGIES CONCERNING LIFE
The view concerning Life which I have endeavoured to express is that it
is neither matter nor energy, nor even a function of matter or of
energy, but is something belonging to a different category; that by
some means at present unknown it is able to interact with the material
world for a time, but that it can also exist in some sense
independently; although in that condition of existence it is by no
means apprehensible by our senses. It is dependent on matter for its
phenomenal appearance—for its manifestation to us here and now, and
for all its terrestrial activities; but otherwise, I conceive that it
is independent, that its essential existence is continuous and
permanent, though its interactions with matter are discontinuous and
temporary; and I conjecture that it is subject to a law of
evolution—that a linear advance is open to it—whether it be in its
phenomenal or in its occult state.
It may be well to indicate what I mean by conceiving of the possibility
that life has an existence apart from its material manifestations as we
know them at present. (Remember note on p. 40.) It is easy to imagine
that such a view is a mere surmise, having no intelligible meaning, and
that it is merely an attempt to clutch at human immortality in an
emotional and unscientific spirit. To this, however, I in no way plead
guilty. My ideas about life may be quite wrong, but they are as
cold-blooded and free from bias as possible; moreover, they apply not
to human life alone, but to all life—to that of all animals, and even
of plants; and they are held by me as a working hypothesis, the only
one which enables me to fit the known facts of ordinary vitality into a
thinkable scheme. Without it, I should be met by all the usual
puzzles:—(1) as to the stage at which existence begins, if it can be
thought of as "beginning" at all;[3] (2) as to the nature of
individuality, in the midst of diversity of particles, and the
determination of form irrespective of variety of food; (3) the
extraordinary rapidity of development, which results in the production
of a fully endowed individual in the course of some fraction of a
century.
[Footnote 3: I doubt whether _existence_ can be "begun" at all,
save as the result of a juxtaposition of elements, or of a
conveyance of otion. We can put things together, and we can set
things in motion,—statics and kinetics,—can we do more? Ether
can be strained, matter can be moved: I doubt whether we see
more than this happening in the whole material universe. This
dictum is elaborated elsewhere.]
With it, I cannot pretend that all these things are thoroughly
intelligible, but the lines on which an explanation may be forthcoming
seem to be laid down:—the notion being that what we see is a temporary
apparition or incarnation of a permanent entity or idea.
It is easiest to explain my meaning by aid of analogues,—by the
construction, as it were, of "models," just as is the custom in Physics
whenever a recondite idea has to be grasped before it can be properly
formulated and before a theory is complete.
I will take two analogies: one from Magnetism and one from Politics.
"Parliament," or "the Army," is a body which consists of individual
members constantly changing, and its existence is not dependent on
their existence: it pre-existed any particular set of them, and it can
survive a dissolution. Even after a complete slaughter, the idea of the
Army would survive, and another would come into being, to carry on the
permanent traditions and life.
Except as an idea in some sentient mind, it could not be said to exist
at all. The mere individuals composing it do not make it: without the
idea they would be only a disorganised mob. Abstractions like the
British Constitution, and other such things, can hardly be said to have
any incarnate existence. These exist _only_ as ideas.
Parliament exists fundamentally as an idea, and it can be called into
existence or re-incarnated again. Whether it is the same Parliament or
not after a general election is a question that may be differently
answered. It is not identical, it may have different characteristics,
but there is certainly a sort of continuity; it is still a British
Parliament, for instance, it has not changed its character to that of
the French Assembly or the American Congress. It is a permanent entity
even when disembodied; it has a past and it has a future; it has a
fundamentally continuous existence though there are breaks or
dislocations in its conspicuous activity, and though each incarnation
has a separate identity or personality of its own. It is larger and
more comprehensive than any individual representation of it; it may be
said to have a "subliminal self," of which any septennial period sees
but a meagre epitome.
Some of those epitomes are more, some less, worthy; sometimes there
appears only a poor deformity or a feeble-minded attempt, sometimes a
strong and vigorous embodiment of the root idea.
As to its technical continuity of existence and actual mode of
reproduction, I suppose it would be merely fanciful to liken the
"Crown" to those germ-cells or nuclei, whose existence continues
without break, which serve the purpose of collecting and composing the
somatic cells in due season.
Other illustrations of the temporary incarnation of a permanent idea
are readily furnished from the domain of Art; but, after all, the best
analogy to life that I can at present think of is to be found in the
subject of Magnetism.
At one time it was possible to say that magnetism could not be produced
except by antecedent magnetism; that there was no known way of
generating it spontaneously; yet that, since it undoubtedly occurs in
certain rocks of the earth, it must have come into existence somehow,
at date unknown. It could also be said, and it can be said still, that,
given an initial magnet, any number of others can be made, without loss
to the generating magnet. By influence or induction exerted by
proximity on other pieces of steel, the properties of one magnet can be
excited in any number of such pieces,—the amount of magnetism thus
producible being infinite; that is, being strictly without limit, and
not dependent at all on the very finite strength of the original
magnet, which indeed continues unabated. It is just as if magnetism
were not really manufactured at all, but were a thing called out of
some infinite reservoir: as if something were brought into active and
prominent existence from a previously dormant state.
And that indeed is the fact. The process of magnetisation, as conducted
with a steel magnet on other pieces of previously inert steel, in no
case really generates new lines of magnetic force, though it appears to
generate them. We now know that the lines which thus spring into
corporeal existence, as it were, are essentially closed curves or
loops, which cannot be generated; they can be expanded or enlarged to
cover a wide field, and they can be contracted or shrunk up into
insignificance, but they cannot be created, they must be pre-existent;
they were in the non-magnetised steel all the time, though they were so
small and ill-arranged that they had no perceptible effect whatever;
they constituted a potentiality for magnetism; they existed as
molecular closed curves or loops, which, by the operation called
magnetisation, could, some of them, be opened out into loops of finite
area and spread out into space, where they are called "lines of force."
They then constitute the region called a magnetic field, which remains
a seat of so-called "permanent" magnetic activity, until by lapse of
time, excessive heat, or other circumstance, they close up again; and
so the magnet, as a magnet, dies. The magnetism itself, however, has
not really died, it has a perpetual existence; and a fresh act of
magnetisation can recall it, or something indistinguishable from it,
into manifest activity again; so that it, or its equivalent, can once
more interact with the rest of material energies, and be dealt with by
physicists, or subserve the uses of humanity. Until that time of
re-appearance its existence can only be inferred by the thought of the
mathematician: it is indeed a matter of theory, not necessarily
recognised as true by the practical man.
Our present view is that the act of magnetisation consists in a
re-arrangement and co-ordination of previously existing magnetic
elements, lying dormant, so to speak, in iron and other magnetic
materials; only a very small fraction of the whole number being usually
brought into activity at any one time, and not necessarily always the
same actual set. Only a small and indiscriminate selection is made from
all the molecular loops; and it can be a different group each time, or
some elements may be different and some the same, whenever a fresh
individual or magnet is brought into being.
All this can be said concerning the old process of magnetisation—the
process as it was doubtless familiar to the unknown discoverer of the
lodestone, to the ancient users of the mariner's compass, and to Dr
Gilbert of Colchester, the discoverer of the magnetised condition of
the Earth.
But within the nineteenth century a fresh process of magnetisation has
been discovered, and this new or electrical process is no longer
obviously dependent on the existence of antecedent magnetism, but seems
at first sight to be a property freshly or spontaneously generated, as
it were. The process was discovered as the result of setting
electricity into motion. So long as electricity was studied in its
condition at rest on charged conductors, as in the old science of
electrostatics or frictional electricity, it possessed no magnetic
properties whatever, nor did it encroach on the magnetic domain: only
vague similarities in the phenomena of attraction and repulsion aroused
attention. But directly electricity was set in motion, constituting
what is called an electric current, magnetic lines of force instantly
sprang into being, without the presence of any steel or iron; and in
twenty years they were recognised. These electrically generated lines
of force are similar to those previously known, but they need no matter
to sustain them. They need matter to display them, but they themselves
exist equally well in perfect vacuum.
How did they manage to spring into being? Can it be said that they too
had existed previously in some dormant condition in the ether of space?
That they too were closed loops opened out, and their existence thus
displayed, by the electric current?
That is an assertion which might reasonably be made: it is not the only
way of regarding the matter, however, and the mode in which a magnetic
field originates round the path of a moving charge—being generated
during the acceleration-period by a pulse of radiation which travels
with the speed of light, being maintained during the steady-motion
period by a sort of inertia as if in accordance with the first law of
motion, and being destroyed only by a return pulse of re-radiation
during a retardation-period when the moving charge is stopped or
diverted or reversed—all this can hardly be fully explained until the
intimate nature of an electric charge has been more fully worked out;
and the subject now trenches too nearly on the more advanced parts of
Physics to be useful any longer as an analogue for general readers.
Indeed it must be recollected that no analogy will bear pressing too
far. All that we are concerned to show is that known magnetic behaviour
exhibits a very fair analogy to some aspects of that still more
mysterious entity which we call "life"; and if anyone should assert
that all magnetism was pre-existent in some ethereal condition, that it
would never go out of essential existence, but that it could be brought
into relation with the world of matter by certain acts,—that while
there it could operate in a certain way, controlling the motion of
bodies, interacting with forms of energy, producing sundry effects for
a time, and then disappearing from our ken to the immaterial region
whence it came,—he would be saying what no physicist would think it
worth while to object to, what many indeed might agree with.
Well, that is the kind of assertion which I want to make, as a working
hypothesis, concerning life.
An acorn has in itself the potentiality not of one oak-tree alone, but
of a forest of oak-trees, to the thousandth generation, and indeed of
oak-trees without end. There is no sort of law of "conservation" here.
It is not as if something were passed on from one thing to another. It
is not analogous to energy at all, it is analogous to the magnetism
which can be excited by any given magnet: the required energy, in both
cases, being extraneously supplied, and only transmuted into the
appropriate form by the guiding principle which controls the operation.
We do not know how to generate life without the action of antecedent
life at present, though that may be a discovery lying ready for us in
the future; but even if we did, it would still be true (as I think)
that the life was in some sense pre-existent, that it was not really
created _de novo_, that it was brought into actual practical every-day
existence doubtless, but that it had pre-existed in some sense too:
being called out, as it were, from some great reservoir or storehouse
of vitality, to which, when its earthly career is ended, it will
return.
Indeed, it cannot in any proper sense be said ever to have left that
storehouse, though it has been made to interact with the world for a
time; and, if we might so express it, it may be thought of as carrying
back with it, into the general reservoir, any individuality, and any
experience and training or development, which it can be thought of as
having acquired here. Such a statement as this last cannot be made of
magnetism, to which no known law of evolution and progress can be
supposed to apply; but of life, of anything subject to continuous
evolution or linear progress embodied in the race, of any condition not
cyclically determinate and returning into itself, but progressing and
advancing—acquiring fresh potentialities, fresh powers, fresh
beauties, new characteristics such as perhaps may never in the whole
universe have been displayed before—of everything which possesses such
powers as these, a statement akin to the above may certainly be made.
To all such things, when they reach a high enough stage, the ideas of
continued personality, of memory, of persistent individual existence,
not only may, but I think must, apply; notwithstanding the admitted
return of the individual after each incarnation to the central store
from which it was differentiated and individualised.
Even so a villager, picked out as a recruit and sent to the seat of
war, may serve his country, may gain experience, acquire a soul and a
width of horizon such as he had not dreamt of; and when he returns,
after the war is over, may be merged as before in his native village.
But the village is the richer for his presence, and his individuality
or personality is not really lost; though to the eye of the world,
which has no further need for it, it has practically ceased to be.