Vitality is only a word, but it marks a class of phenomena in nature
that stands apart from all merely mechanical manifestations in the
universe. The cosmos is a vast machine, but in this machine--this
tremendous complex of physical forces--there appears, at least on this
earth, in the course of its evolution, this something, or this peculiar
manifestation of energy, that we call vital. Apparently it is a
transient phase of activity in matter, which, unlike other chemical and
physical activities, has its beginning and its ending, and out of which
have arisen all the myriad forms of terrestrial life. The merely
material forces, blind and haphazard from the first, did not arise in
matter; they are inseparable from it; they are as eternal as matter
itself; but the activities called vital arose in time and place, and
must eventually disappear as they arose, while the career of the
inorganic elements goes on as if life had never visited the sphere. Was
it, or is it, a visitation--something _ab extra_ that implies
super-mundane, or supernatural, powers?
Added to this wonder is the fact that the vital order has gone on
unfolding through the geologic ages, mounting from form to form, or from
order to order, becoming more and more complex, passing from the
emphasis of size of body, to the emphasis of size of brain, and finally
from instinct and reflex activities to free volition, and the reason and
consciousness of man; while the purely physical and chemical forces
remain where they began. There has been endless change among them,
endless shifting of the balance of power, but always the tendency to a
dead equilibrium, while the genius of the organic forces has been in the
power to disturb the equilibrium and to ride into port on the crest of
the wave it has created, or to hang forever between the stable and the
unstable.
So there we are, confronted by two apparently contrary truths. It is to
me unthinkable that the vital order is not as truly rooted in the
constitution of things as are the mechanical and chemical orders; and
yet, here we are face to face with its limited, fugitive, or
transitional character. It comes and goes like the dews of the morning;
it has all the features of an exceptional, unexpected, extraordinary
occurrence--of miracle, if you will; but if the light which physical
science turns on the universe is not a delusion, if the habit of mind
which it begets is not a false one, then life belongs to the same
category of things as do day and night, rain and sun, rest and motion.
Who shall reconcile these contradictions?
Huxley spoke for physical science when he said that he did not know what
it was that constituted life--what it was that made the "wonderful
difference between the dead particles and the living particles of matter
appearing in other respects identical." He thought there might be some
bond between physico-chemical phenomena, on the one hand, and vital
phenomena, on the other, which philosophers will some day find out.
Living matter is characterized by "spontaneity of action," which is
entirely absent from inert matter. Huxley cannot or does not think of a
vital force distinct from all other forces, as the cause of life
phenomena, as so many philosophers have done, from Aristotle down to our
day. He finds protoplasm to be the physical basis of life; it is one in
both the vegetable and animal worlds; the animal takes it from the
vegetable, and the vegetable, by the aid of sunlight, takes or
manufactures it from the inorganic elements. But protoplasm is living
matter. Before there was any protoplasm, what brought about the
stupendous change of the dead into the living? Protoplasm makes more
protoplasm, as fire makes more fire, but what kindled the first spark of
this living flame? Here we corner the mystery, but it is still a
mystery that defies us. Cause and effect meet and are lost in each
other. Science cannot admit a miracle, or a break in the continuity of
life, yet here it reaches a point where no step can be taken. Huxley's
illustrations do not help his argument. "Protoplasm," he says, "is the
clay of the potter; which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains
clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick
or sun-dried clod." Clay is certainly the physical basis of the potter's
art, but would there be any pottery in the world if it contained only
clay? Do we not have to think of the potter? In the same way, do we not
have to think of something that fashions these myriad forms of life out
of protoplasm?--and back of that, of something that begat protoplasm out
of non-protoplasmic matter, and started the flame of life going? Life
accounts for protoplasm, but what accounts for life? We have to think of
the living clay as separated by Nature from the inert "sun-dried clod."
There is something in the one that is not in the other. There is really
no authentic analogy between the potter's art and Nature's art of life.
The force of the analogy, if it has any, drives us to the conclusion
that life is an entity, or an agent, working upon matter and independent
of it.
There is more wit than science in Huxley's question, "What better
philosophical status has vitality than aquosity?" There is at least this
difference: When vitality is gone, you cannot recall it, or reproduce
it by your chemistry; but you can recombine the two gases in which you
have decomposed water, any number of times, and get your aquosity back
again; it never fails; it is a power of chemistry. But vitality will not
come at your beck; it is not a chemical product, at least in the same
sense that water is; it is not in the same category as the wetness or
liquidity of water. It is a name for a phenomenon--the most remarkable
phenomenon in nature. It is one that the art of man is powerless to
reproduce, while water may be made to go through its cycle of
change--solid, fluid, vapor, gas--and always come back to water. Well
does the late Professor Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, say that "living
things do, in some way and in some degree, control or condition
inorganic nature; that they hold their own by setting the mechanical
properties of matter in opposition to each other, and that this is their
most notable and distinctive characteristic." Does not Ray Lankester,
the irate champion of the mechanistic view of life, say essentially the
same thing when he calls man the great Insurgent in Nature's
camp--"crossing her courses, reversing her processes, and defeating her
ends?"
Life appears like the introduction of a new element or force or tendency
into the cosmos. Henceforth the elements go new ways, form new
compounds, build up new forms, and change the face of nature. Rivers
flow where they never would have flowed without it, mountains fall in a
space of time during which they never would have fallen; barriers arise,
rough ways are made smooth, a new world appears--the world of man's
physical and mental activities.
If the gods of the inorganic elements are neither for nor against us,
but utterly indifferent to us, how came we here? Nature's method is
always from the inside, while ours is from the outside; hers is circular
while ours is direct. We think, as Bergson says, of things created, and
of a thing that creates, but things in nature are not created, they are
evolved; they grow, and the thing that grows is not separable from the
force that causes it to grow. The water turns the wheel, and can be shut
off or let on. This is the way of the mechanical world. But the wheels
in organic nature go around from something inside them, a kind of
perpetual motion, or self-supplying power. They are not turned, they
turn; they are not repaired, they repair. The nature of living things
cannot be interpreted by the laws of mechanical and chemical things,
though mechanics and chemistry play the visible, tangible part in them.
If we must discard the notion of a vital force, we may, as Professor
Hartog suggests, make use of the term "vital behavior."
Of course man tries everything by himself and his own standards. He
knows no intelligence but his own, no prudence, no love, no mercy, no
justice, no economy, but his own, no god but such a one as fits his
conception.
In view of all these things, how man got here is a problem. Why the
slender thread of his line of descent was not broken in the warrings and
upheavals of the terrible geologic ages, what power or agent took a hand
in furthering his development, is beyond the reach of our biologic
science.
Man's is the only intelligence, as we understand the word, in the
universe, and his intelligence demands something akin to intelligence in
the nature from which he sprang.