Our French biologist is of the opinion that the artificial production of
that marvel of marvels, the living cell, will yet take place in the
laboratory. But the enlightened mind, he says, does not need such proof
to be convinced that there is no essential difference between living and
non-living matter.
Professor Henderson, though an expounder of the mechanistic theory of
the origin of life, admits that he does not know of a biological chemist
to whom the "mechanistic origin of a cell is scientifically imaginable."
Like Professor Loeb, he starts with the vital; how he came by it we get
no inkling; he confesses frankly that the biological chemist cannot even
face the problem of the origin of life. He quotes with approval a remark
of Liebig's, as reported by Lord Kelvin, that he (Liebig) could no more
believe that a leaf or a flower could be formed or could grow by
chemical forces "than a book on chemistry, or on botany, could grow out
of dead matter." Is not this conceding to the vitalists all that they
claim? The cell is the unit of life; all living bodies are but vast
confraternities of cells, some billions or trillions of them in the
human body; the cell builds up the tissues, the tissues build up the
organs, the organs build up the body. Now if it is not thinkable that
chemism could beget a cell, is it any more thinkable that it could build
a living tissue, and then an organ, and then the body as a whole? If
there is an inscrutable something at work at the start, which organizes
that wonderful piece of vital mechanism, the cell, is it any the less
operative ever after, in all life processes, in all living bodies and
their functions,--the vital as distinguished from the mechanical and
chemical? Given the cell, and you have only to multiply it, and organize
these products into industrial communities, and direct them to specific
ends,--certainly a task which we would not assign to chemistry or
physics any more than we would assign to them the production of a work
on chemistry or botany,--and you have all the myriad forms of
terrestrial life.
The cell is the parent of every living thing on the globe; and if it is
unthinkable that the material and irrational forces of inert matter
could produce it, then mechanics and chemistry must play second fiddle
in all that whirl and dance of the atoms that make up life. And that is
all the vitalists claim. The physico-chemical forces do play second
fiddle; that inexplicable something that we call vitality dominates and
leads them. True it is that a living organism yields to scientific
analysis only mechanical and chemical forces--a fact which only limits
the range of scientific analysis, and which by no means exhausts the
possibilities of the living organism. The properties of matter and the
laws of matter are intimately related to life, yea, are inseparable
from it, but they are by no means the whole story. Professor Henderson
repudiates the idea of any extra-physical influence as being involved in
the processes of life, and yet concedes that the very foundation of all
living matter, yea, the whole living universe in embryo--the cell--is
beyond the possibilities of physics and chemistry alone. Mechanism and
chemism are adequate to account for astronomy and geology, and
therefore, he thinks, are sufficient to account for biology, without
calling in the aid of any Bergsonian life impulse. Still these forces
stand impotent before that microscopic world, the cell, the foundation
of all life.
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 preëstablished
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 [the tendency to organize], mechanism is inductively proved
sufficient to account for all phenomena." Biology, then, is only
mechanics and chemistry engaged in a new rôle without any change of
character; but what put them up to this new rôle? "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."
V
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 ("living
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."