There is another way out of the difficulty that besets our rational
faculties in their efforts to solve this question, and that is the
audacious way of Henri Bergson in his "Creative Evolution." It is to
deny any validity to the conclusion of our logical faculties upon this
subject. Our intellect, Bergson says, cannot grasp the true nature of
life, nor the meaning of the evolutionary movement. With the emphasis of
italics he repeats that "_the intellect is characterized by a natural
inability to comprehend life_." He says this in a good many pages and in
a good many different ways; the idea is one of the main conclusions of
his book. Our intuitions, our spiritual nature, according to this
philosopher, are more _en rapport_ with the secrets of the creative
energy than are our intellectual faculties; the key to the problem is to
be found here, rather than in the mechanics and chemistry of the latter.
Our intellectual faculties can grasp the physical order because they are
formed by a world of solids and fluids and give us the power to deal
with them and act upon them. But they cannot grasp the nature and the
meaning of the vital order.
"We treat the living like the lifeless, and think all reality, however
fluid, under the form of the sharply defined solid. We are at ease only
in the discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. Perceiving in an
organism only parts external to parts, the understanding has the choice
between two systems of explanation only: either to regard the infinitely
complex (and thereby infinitely well contrived) organization as a
fortuitous concatenation of atoms, or to relate it to the
incomprehensible influence of an external force that has grouped its
elements together."
"Everything is obscure in the idea of creation, if we think of things
which are created and a thing which creates." If we follow the lead of
our logical, scientific faculties, then, we shall all be mechanists and
materialists. Science can make no other solution of the problem because
it sees from the outside. But if we look from the inside, with the
spirit or "with that faculty of seeing which is immanent in the faculty
of acting," we shall escape from the bondage of the mechanistic view
into the freedom of the larger truth of the ceaseless creative view; we
shall see the unity of the creative impulse which is immanent in life
and which, "passing through generations, links individuals with
individuals, species with species, and makes of the whole series of the
living one single immense wave flowing over matter."
I recall that Tyndall, who was as much poet as scientist, speaks of
life as a wave "which at no two consecutive moments of its existence is
composed of the same particles." In his more sober scientific mood
Tyndall would doubtless have rejected M. Bergson's view of life, yet his
image of the wave is very Bergsonian. But what different meanings the
two writers aim to convey: Tyndall is thinking of the fact that a living
body is constantly taking up new material on the one side and dropping
dead or outworn material on the other. M. Bergson's mind is occupied
with the thought of the primal push or impulsion of matter which travels
through it as the force in the wave traverses the water. The wave
embodies a force which lifts the water up in opposition to its tendency
to seek and keep a level, and travels on, leaving the water behind. So
does this something we call life break the deadlock of inert matter and
lift it into a thousand curious and beautiful forms, and then, passing
on, lets it fall back again into a state of dead equilibrium.
Tyndall was one of the most eloquent exponents of the materialistic
theory of the origin of life, and were he living now would probably feel
little or no sympathy with the Bergsonian view of a primordial life
impulse. He found the key to all life phenomena in the hidden world of
molecular attraction and repulsion. He says: "Molecular forces determine
the form which the solar energy will assume. [What a world of mystery
lies in that determinism of the hidden molecular forces!] In the
separation of the carbon and oxygen this energy may be so conditioned as
to result in one case in the formation of a cabbage and in another case
in the formation of an oak. So also as regards the reunion of the carbon
and the oxygen [in the animal organism] the molecular machinery through
which the combining energy acts may in one case weave the texture of a
frog, while in another it may weave the texture of a man."
But is not this molecular force itself a form of solar energy, and can
it differ in kind from any other form of physical force? If molecular
forces determine whether the solar energy shall weave a head of a
cabbage or a head of a Plato or a Shakespeare, does it not meet all the
requirements of our conception of creative will?
Tyndall thinks that a living man--Socrates, Aristotle, Goethe, Darwin, I
suppose--could be produced directly from inorganic nature in the
laboratory if (and note what a momentous "if" this is) we could put
together the elements of such a man in the same relative positions as
those which they occupy in his body, "with the selfsame forces and
distribution of forces, the selfsame motions and distribution of
motions." Do this and you have a St. Paul or a Luther or a Lincoln. Dr.
Verworn said essentially the same thing in a lecture before one of our
colleges while in this country a few years ago--easy enough to
manufacture a living being of any order of intellect if you can
reproduce in the laboratory his "internal and external _vital
conditions_." (The italics are mine.) To produce those vital conditions
is where the rub comes. Those vital conditions, as regards the minutest
bit of protoplasm, science, with all her tremendous resources, has not
yet been able to produce. The raising of Lazarus from the dead seems no
more a miracle than evoking vital conditions in dead matter. External
and internal vital conditions are no doubt inseparably correlated, and
when we can produce them we shall have life. Life, says Verworn, is like
fire, and "is a phenomenon of nature which appears as soon as the
complex of its conditions is fulfilled." We can easily produce fire by
mechanical and chemical means, but not life. Fire is a chemical process,
it is rapid oxidation, and oxidation is a disintegrating process, while
life is an integrating process, or a balance maintained between the two
by what we call the vital force. Life is evidently a much higher form of
molecular activity than combustion. The old Greek Heraclitus saw, and
the modern scientist sees, very superficially in comparing the two.
I have no doubt that Huxley was right in his inference "that if the
properties of matter result from the nature and disposition of its
component molecules, then there is no intelligible ground for refusing
to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature and
disposition of its molecules." It is undoubtedly in that nature and
disposition of the biological molecules that Tyndall's whole "mystery
and miracle of vitality" is wrapped up. If we could only grasp what it
is that transforms the molecule of dead matter into the living molecule!
Pasteur called it "dissymmetric force," which is only a new name for the
mystery. He believed there was an "irrefragable physical barrier between
organic and inorganic nature"--that the molecules of an organism
differed from those of a mineral, and for this difference he found a
name.