I
The limited and peculiar activity which arises in matter and which we
call vital; which comes and goes; which will not stay to be analyzed;
which we in vain try to reproduce in our laboratories; which is
inseparable from chemistry and physics, but which is not summed up by
them; which seems to use them and direct them to new ends,--an entity
which seems to have invaded the kingdom of inert matter at some definite
time in the earth's history, and to have set up an insurgent movement
there; cutting across the circuits of the mechanical and chemical
forces; turning them about, pitting one against the other; availing
itself of gravity, of chemical affinity, of fluids and gases, of osmosis
and exosmosis, of colloids, of oxidation and hydration, and yet
explicable by none of these things; clothing itself with garments of
warmth and color and perfume woven from the cold, insensate elements;
setting up new activities in matter; building up myriads of new unstable
compounds; struggling against the tendency of the physical forces to a
dead equilibrium; indeterminate, intermittent, fugitive; limited in
time, limited in space; present in some worlds, absent from others;
breaking up the old routine of the material forces, and instituting new
currents, new tendencies; departing from the linear activities of the
inorganic, and setting up the circular activities of living currents;
replacing change by metamorphosis, revolution by evolution, accretion by
secretion, crystallization by cell-formation, aggregation by growth;
and, finally, introducing a new power into the world--the mind and soul
of man--this wonderful, and apparently transcendental something which we
call life--how baffling and yet how fascinating is the inquiry into its
nature and origin! Are we to regard it as Tyndall did, and as others
before and since his time did and do, as potential in the constitution
of matter, and self-evolved, like the chemical compounds that are
involved in its processes?
As mechanical energy is latent in coal, and in all combustible bodies,
is vital energy latent in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so forth,
needing only the right conditions to bring it out? Mechanical energy is
convertible into electrical energy, and _vice versa_. Indeed, the circle
of the physical forces is easily traced, easily broken into, but when or
how these forces merge into the vital and psychic forces, or support
them, or become them--there is the puzzle. If we limit the natural to
the inorganic order, then are living bodies supernatural?
Super-mechanical and super-chemical certainly, and chemics and
mechanics and electro-statics include all the material forces. Is life
outside this circle? It is certain that this circle does not always
include life, but can life exist outside this circle? When it appears it
is always inside it.
Science can only deal with life as a physical phenomenon; as a psychic
phenomenon it is beyond its scope, except so far as the psychic is
manifested through the physical. Not till it has produced living matter
from dead can it speak with authority upon the question of the origin of
life. Its province is limited to the description and analysis of life
processes, but when it essays to name what institutes the processes, or
to disclose the secret of organization, it becomes philosophy or
theology. When Haeckel says that life originated spontaneously, he does
not speak with the authority of science, because he cannot prove his
assertion; it is his opinion, and that is all. When Helmholtz says that
life had no beginning, he is in the same case. When our later
biophysicists say that life is of physico-chemical origin, they are in
the same case; when Tyndall says that there is no energy in the universe
but solar energy, he is in the same case; when Sir Oliver Lodge says
that life is an entity outside of and independent of matter, he is in
the same case. Philosophy and theology can take leaps in the dark, but
science must have solid ground to go upon. When it speculates or
theorizes, it must make its speculations good. Scientific prophecy is
amenable to the same tests as other prophecy. In the absence of proof by
experiment--scientific proof--to get the living out of the non-living we
have either got to conceive of matter itself as fundamentally creative,
as the new materialism assumes, or else we have got to have an external
Creator, as the old theology assumes. And the difference is more
apparent than real. Tyndall is "baffled and bewildered" by the fact that
out of its molecular vibrations and activities "things so utterly
incongruous with them as sensation, thought, and emotion can be
derived." His science is baffled and bewildered because it cannot, bound
as it is by the iron law of the conservation and correlation of energy,
trace the connection between them. But his philosophy or his theology
would experience little difficulty. Henri Bergson shows no hesitation in
declaring that the fate of consciousness is not involved in the fate of
the brain through which it is manifested, but it is his philosophy and
not his science that inspires this faith. Tyndall deifies matter to get
life out of it--makes the creative energy potential in it. Bergson
deifies or spiritualizes life as a psychic, creative principle, and
makes matter its instrument or vehicle.
Science is supreme in its own sphere, the sphere, or hemisphere, of the
objective world, but it does not embrace the whole of human life,
because human life is made up of two spheres, or hemispheres, one of
which is the subjective world. There is a world within us also, the
world of our memories, thoughts, emotions, aspirations, imaginings,
which overarches the world of our practical lives and material
experience, as the sky overarches the earth. It is in the spirit of
science that we conquer and use the material world in which we live; it
is in the spirit of art and literature, philosophy and religion, that we
explore and draw upon the immaterial world of our own hearts and souls.
Of course the man of science is also a philosopher--may I not even say
he is also a prophet and poet? Not otherwise could he organize his
scientific facts and see their due relations, see their drift and the
sequence of forces that bind the universe into a whole. As a man of
science he traces out the causes of the tides and the seasons, the
nature and origin of disease, and a thousand and one other things; but
only as a philosopher can he see the body as a whole and speculate about
the mystery of its organization; only as a philosopher can he frame
theories and compare values and interpret the phenomena he sees about
him.