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.
What can science see or find in the brain of man that answers to the
soul? Only certain movements of matter in the brain cortex. What
difference does it find between inert matter and a living organism? Only
a vastly more complex mechanics and chemistry in the latter. A wide
difference, not of kind, but of degree. The something we call vitality,
that a child recognizes, science does not find; vitality is something
_sui generis_. Scientific analysis cannot show us the difference between
the germ cell of a starfish and the germ cell of a man; and yet think of
what a world of difference is hidden in those microscopic germs! What
force is there in inert matter that can build a machine by the
adjustment of parts to each other? We can explain the most complex
chemical compounds by the action of chemical forces and chemical
affinity, but they cannot explain that adjustment of parts to each
other, the coördination of their activities that makes a living machine.
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, coördinating 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.
A Western university professor in a recent essay sounds quite a
different note on this subject from the one that comes to us from
Harvard. Says Professor Otto C. Glaser, of the University of Michigan,
in a recent issue of the "Popular Science Monthly": "Does not the
fitness of living things; the fact that they perform acts useful to
themselves in an environment which is constantly shifting, and often
very harsh; the fact that in general everything during development,
during digestion, during any of the complicated chains of processes
which we find, happens at the right time, in the right place, and to the
proper extent; does not all this force us to believe that there is
involved something more than mere chemistry and physics?--something, not
consciousness necessarily, yet its analogue--a vital _x_?"
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?
If the vital principle, or vital force, is a fiction, invented to give
the mind something to take hold of, we are in no worse case than we are
in some other matters. Science tells us that there is no such _thing_ as
heat, or light; these are only modes of activity in matter.
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 coördinates 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.