Evolution is creative, whether it works in matter--as Bergson describes,
or whether its path lies up through electrons and atoms and molecules,
as Professor Moore describes. There is something that creates and makes
matter plastic to its will. Whether we call matter "the living garment
of God," as Goethe did, or a reservoir of creative energy, as Tyndall
and his school did, and as Professor Moore still does, we are paying
homage to a power that is super-material. Life came to our earth, says
Professor Moore, through a "well-regulated orderly development," and it
"comes to every mother earth of the universe in the maturity of her
creation when the conditions arrive within suitable limits." That no
intelligent beings appeared upon the earth for millions upon millions of
years, that for whole geologic ages there was no creature with more
brains than a snail possesses, shows the almost infinitely slow progress
of development, and that there has been no arbitrary or high-handed
exercise of creative power. The universe is not run on principles of
modern business efficiency, and man is at the head of living forms, not
by the fiat of some omnipotent power, some superman, but as the result
of the operation of forces that balk at no delay, or waste, or failure,
and that are dependent upon the infinitely slow ripening and
amelioration of both cosmic and terrestrial conditions.
We do not get rid of God by any such dictum, but we get rid of the
anthropomorphic views which we have so long been wont to read into the
processes of nature. We dehumanize the universe, but we do not render it
the less grand and mysterious. Professor Moore points out to us how life
came to a cooling planet as soon as the temperature became low enough
for certain chemical combinations to appear. There must first be oxides
and saline compounds, there must be carbonates of calcium and magnesium,
and the like. As the temperature falls, more and more complex compounds,
such as life requires, appear; till, in due time, carbon dioxide and
water are at hand, and life can make a start. At the white heat of some
of the fixed stars, the primary chemical elements are not yet evolved;
but more and more elements appear, and more and more complex compounds
are formed as the cooling process progresses.
"This note cannot be too strongly sounded, that as matter is allowed
capacity for assuming complex forms, those complex forms appear. As soon
as oxides can be there, oxides appear; when temperature admits of
carbonates, then carbonates are forthwith formed. These are experiments
which any chemist can to-day repeat in a crucible. And on a cooling
planet, as soon as temperature will admit the presence of life, then
life appears, as the evidence of geology shows us." When we speak of the
beginning of life, it is not clear just what we mean. The unit of all
organized bodies is the cell, but the cell is itself an organized body,
and must have organic matter to feed upon. Hence the cell is only a more
complex form of more primitive living matter. As we go down the scale
toward the inorganic, can we find the point where the living and the
non-living meet and become one? "Life had to surge a long way up from
the depths before a green plant cell came into being." When the green
plant cell was found, life was fairly launched. This plant cell, in the
form of chlorophyll, by the aid of water and the trace of carbon dioxide
in the air, began to store up the solar energy in fruit and grain and
woody tissue, and thus furnish power to run all forms of life machinery.
The materialists or naturalists are right in urging that we live in a
much more wonderful universe than we have ever imagined, and that in
matter itself sleep potencies and possibilities not dreamt of in our
philosophy. The world of complex though invisible activities which
science reveals all about us, the solar and stellar energies raining
upon us from above, the terrestrial energies and influences playing
through us from below, the transformations and transmutations taking
place on every hand, the terrible alertness and potency of the world of
inert matter as revealed by a flash of lightning, the mysteries of
chemical affinity, of magnetism, of radio-activity, all point to deep
beneath deep in matter itself. It is little wonder that men who dwell
habitually upon these things and are saturated with the spirit and
traditions of laboratory investigation, should believe that in some way
matter itself holds the mystery of the origin of life. On the other
hand, a different type of mind, the more imaginative, artistic, and
religious type, recoils from the materialistic view.
The sun is the source of all terrestrial energy, but the different forms
that energy takes--in the plant, in the animal, in the brain of
man--this type of mind is bound to ask questions about that. Gravity
pulls matter down; life lifts it up; chemical forces pull it to pieces;
vital forces draw it together and organize it; the winds and the waters
dissolve and scatter it; vegetation recaptures and integrates it and
gives it new qualities. At every turn, minds like that of Sir Oliver
Lodge are compelled to think of life as a principle or force doing
something with matter. The physico-chemical forces will not do in the
hands of man what they do in the hands of Nature. Such minds, therefore,
feel justified in thinking that something which we call "the hands of
Nature," plays a part--some principle or force which the hands of man do
not hold.