According to the latest scientific views held on the question by such
men as Professor Loeb, the appearance of life on the globe was a purely
accidental circumstance. The proper elements just happened to come
together at the right time in the right proportions and under the right
conditions, and life was the result. It was an accident in the thermal
history of the globe. Professor Loeb has lately published a volume of
essays and addresses called "The Mechanistic Conception of Life,"
enforcing and illustrating this view. He makes war on what he terms the
metaphysical conception of a "life-principle" as the key to the problem,
and urges the scientific conception of the adequacy of
mechanico-chemical forces. In his view, we are only chemical mechanisms;
and all our activities, mental and physical alike, are only automatic
responses to the play of the blind, material forces of external nature.
All forms of life, with all their wonderful adaptations, are only the
chance happenings of the blind gropings and clashings of dead matter:
"We eat, drink, and reproduce [and, of course, think and speculate and
write books on the problems of life], not because mankind has reached an
agreement that this is desirable, but because, machine-like, we are
compelled to do so!"
He reaches the conclusion that all our inner subjective life is
amenable to physico-chemical analysis, because many cases of simple
animal instinct and will can be explained on this basis--the basis of
animal tropism. Certain animals creep or fly to the light, others to the
dark, because they cannot help it. This is tropism. He believes that the
origin of life can be traced to the same physico-chemical activities,
because, in his laboratory experiments, he has been able to dispense
with the male principle, and to fertilize the eggs of certain low forms
of marine life by chemical compounds alone. "The problem of the
beginning and end of individual life is physico-chemically clear"--much
clearer than the first beginnings of life. All individual life begins
with the egg, but where did we get the egg? When chemical synthesis will
give us this, the problem is solved. We can analyze the material
elements of an organism, but we cannot synthesize them and produce the
least spark of living matter. That all forms of life have a mechanical
and chemical basis is beyond question, but when we apply our analysis to
them, life evaporates, vanishes, the vital processes cease. But apply
the same analysis to inert matter, and only the form is changed.
Professor Loeb's artificially fathered embryo and starfish and
sea-urchins soon die. If his chemism could only give him the
mother-principle also! But it will not. The mother-principle is at the
very foundations of the organic world, and defies all attempts of
chemical synthesis to reproduce it.
It would be presumptive in the extreme for me to question Professor
Loeb's scientific conclusions; he is one of the most eminent of living
experimental biologists. I would only dissent from some of his
philosophical conclusions. I dissent from his statement that only the
mechanistic conception of life can throw light on the source of ethics.
Is there any room for the moral law in a world of mechanical
determinism? There is no ethics in the physical order, and if humanity
is entirely in the grip of that order, where do moral obligations come
in? A gun, a steam-engine, knows no ethics, and to the extent that we
are compelled to do things, are we in the same category. Freedom of
choice alone gives any validity to ethical consideration. I dissent from
the idea to which he apparently holds, that biology is only applied
physics and chemistry. Is not geology also applied physics and
chemistry? Is it any more or any less? Yet what a world of difference
between the two--between a rock and a tree, between a man and the soil
he cultivates. Grant that the physical and the chemical forces are the
same in both, yet they work to such different ends in each. In one case
they are tending always to a deadlock, to the slumber of a static
equilibrium; in the other they are ceaselessly striving to reach a state
of dynamic activity--to build up a body that hangs forever between a
state of integration and disintegration. What is it that determines this
new mode and end of their activities?
In all his biological experimentation, Professor Loeb starts with living
matter and, finding its processes capable of physico-chemical analysis,
he hastens to the conclusion that its genesis is to be accounted for by
the action and interaction of these principles alone.
In the inorganic world, everything is in its place through the operation
of blind physical forces; because the place of a dead thing, its
relation to the whole, is a matter of indifference. The rocks, the
hills, the streams are in their place, but any other place would do as
well. But in the organic world we strike another order--an order where
the relation and subordination of parts is everything, and to speak of
human existence as a "matter of chance" in the sense, let us say, that
the forms and positions of inanimate bodies are matters of chance, is to
confuse terms.
Organic evolution upon the earth shows steady and regular progression;
as much so as the growth and development of a tree. If the evolutionary
impulse fails on one line, it picks itself up and tries on another, it
experiments endlessly like an inventor, but always improves on its last
attempts. Chance would have kept things at a standstill; the principle
of chance, give it time enough, must end where it began. Chance is a
man lost in the woods; he never arrives; he wanders aimlessly. If
evolution pursued a course equally fortuitous, would it not still be
wandering in the wilderness of the chaotic nebulæ?