Without metaphysics we can do nothing; without mental concepts, where
are we? Natural selection is as much a metaphysical phrase as is
consciousness, or the subjective and the objective. Natural selection is
not an entity, it is a name for what we conceive of as a process. It is
natural rejection as well. The vital principle is a metaphysical
concept; so is instinct; so is reason; so is the soul; so is God.
Many of our concepts have been wrong. The concept of witches, of disease
as the work of evil spirits, of famine and pestilence as the visitation
of the wrath of God, and the like, were unfounded. Science sets us right
about all such matters. It corrects our philosophy, but it cannot
dispense with the philosophical attitude of mind. The philosophical must
supplement the experimental.
In fact, in considering this question of life, it is about as difficult
for the unscientific mind to get along without postulating a vital
principle or force--which, Huxley says, is analogous to the idea of a
principle of aquosity in water--as it is to walk upon the air, or to
hang one's coat upon a sunbeam. It seems as if something must breathe
upon the dead matter, as at the first, to make it live. Yet if there is
a distinct vital force it must be correlated with physical force, it
must be related causally to the rest. The idea of a vital force as
something new and distinct and injected into matter from without at a
given time and place in the earth's history, must undoubtedly be given
up. Instead of escaping from mechanism, this notion surrenders one into
the hands of mechanism, since to supplement or reinforce a principle
with some other principle from without, is strictly a mechanical
procedure. But the conception of vitality as potential in matter, or of
the whole universe as permeated with spirit, which to me is the same
thing, is a conception that takes life out of the categories of the
fortuitous and the automatic.
No doubt but that all things in the material world are causally related,
no doubt of the constancy of matter and force, no doubt but that all
phenomena are the result of natural principles, no doubt that the living
arose from the non-living, no doubt that the evolution process was
inherent in the constitution of the world; and yet there is a mystery
about it all that is insoluble. The miracle of vitality takes place
behind a veil that we cannot penetrate, in the inmost sanctuary of the
molecules of matter, in that invisible, imaginary world on the
borderland between the material and the immaterial. We may fancy that it
is here that the psychical effects its entrance into the physical--that
spirit weds matter--that the creative energy kindles the spark we call
vitality. At any rate, vitality evidently begins in that inner world of
atoms and molecules; but whether as the result of their peculiar and
very complex compounding or as the cause of the compounding--how are we
ever to know? Is it not just as scientific to postulate a new principle,
the principle of vitality, as to postulate a new process, or a new
behavior of an old principle? In either case, we are in the world of the
unverifiable; we take a step in the dark. Most of us, I fancy, will
sympathize with George Eliot, who says in one of her letters: "To me the
Development Theory, and all other explanations of processes by which
things came to be, produce a feeble impression compared with the mystery
that lies under the processes."
V