The inorganic seems dreaming of the organic. Behold its dreams in the
fern and tree forms upon the window pane and upon the stone flagging of
a winter morning! In the Brunonian movement of matter in solution, in
crystallization, in chemical affinity, in polarity, in osmosis, in the
growth of flint or chert nodules, in limestone formations--like seeking
like--in these and in other activities, inert matter seems dreaming of
life.
The chemists have played upon this tendency in the inorganic to parody
or simulate some of the forms of living matter. A noted European
chemist, Dr. Leduc, has produced what he calls "osmotic growths," from
purely unorganized mineral matter--growths in form like seaweed and
polyps and corals and trees. His seeds are fragments of calcium
chloride, and his soil is a solution of the alkaline carbonates,
phosphates, or silicates. When his seeds are sown in these solutions, we
see inert matter germinating, "putting forth bud and stem and root and
branch and leaf and fruit," precisely as in the living vegetable
kingdom. It is not a growth by accretion, as in crystallization, but by
intussusception, as in life. These ghostly things exhibit the phenomena
of circulation and respiration and nutrition, and a crude sort of
reproduction by budding; they repair their injuries, and are able to
perform periodic movements, just as does an animal or a plant; they have
a period of vigorous youthful growth, of old age, of decay, and of
death. In form, in color, in texture, and in cell structure, they
imitate so closely the cell structures of organic growth as to suggest
something uncanny or diabolical. And yet the author of them does not
claim that they are alive. They are not edible, they contain no
protoplasm--no starch or sugar or peptone or fats or carbohydrates.
These chemical creations by Dr. Leduc are still dead matter--dead
colloids--only one remove from crystallization; on the road to life,
fore-runners of life, but not life. If he could set up the
chlorophyllian process in his chemical reactions among inorganic
compounds, the secret of life would be in his hands. But only the green
leaf can produce chlorophyll; and yet, which was first, the leaf or the
chlorophyll?
Professor Czapek is convinced that "some substances must exist in
protoplasm which are directly responsible for the life processes," and
yet the chemists cannot isolate and identify those substances.
How utterly unmechanical a living body is, at least how far it
transcends mere mechanics is shown by what the chemists call
"autolysis." Pulverize your watch, and you have completely destroyed
everything that made it a watch except the dead matter; but pulverize or
reduce to a pulp a living plant, and though you have destroyed all cell
structure, you have not yet destroyed the living substance; you have
annihilated the mechanism, but you have not killed the something that
keeps up the life process. Protoplasm takes time to die, but your
machine stops instantly, and its elements are no more potent in a new
machine than they were at first. "In the pulp prepared by grinding down
living organisms in a mortar, some vital phenomena continue for a long
time." The life processes cease, and the substances or elements of the
dead body remain as before. Their chemical reactions are the same. There
is no new chemistry, no new mechanics, no new substance in a live body,
but there is a new tendency or force or impulse acting in matter,
inspiring it, so to speak, to new ends. It is here that idealism parts
company with exact science. It is here that the philosophers go one
way, and the rigid scientists the other. It is from this point of view
that the philosophy of Henri Bergson, based so largely as it is upon
scientific material, has been so bitterly assailed from the scientific
camp.
The living cell is a wonderful machine, but if we ask which is first,
life or the cell, where are we? There is the synthetical reaction in the
cell, and the analytical or splitting reaction--the organizing, and the
disorganizing processes--what keeps up this seesaw and preserves the
equilibrium? A life force, said the older scientists; only chemical
laws, say the new. A prodigious change in the behavior of matter is
wrought by life, and whether we say it is by chemical laws, or by a life
force, the mystery remains.
The whole secret of life centres in the cell, in the plant cell; and
this cell does not exceed .005 millimetres in diameter. An enormous
number of chemical reactions take place in this minute space. It is a
world in little. Here are bodies of different shapes whose service is to
absorb carbon dioxide, and form sugar and carbohydrates. Must we go
outside of matter itself, and of chemical reactions, to account for it?
Call this unknown factor "vital force," as has so long been done, or
name it "biotic energy," as Professor Moore has lately done, and the
mystery remains the same. It is a new behavior in matter, call it by
what name we will.
Inanimate nature seems governed by definite laws; that is, given the
same conditions, the same results always follow. The reactions between
two chemical elements under the same conditions are always the same. The
physical forces go their unchanging ways, and are variable only as the
conditions vary. In dealing with them we know exactly what to expect. We
know at what degree of temperature, under the same conditions, water
will boil, and at what degree of temperature it will freeze. Chance and
probability play no part in such matters. But when we reach the world of
animate nature, what a contrast we behold! Here, within certain limits,
all is in perpetual flux and change. Living bodies are never two moments
the same. Variability is the rule. We never know just how a living body
will behave, under given conditions, till we try it. A late spring frost
may kill nearly every bean stalk or potato plant or hill of corn in your
garden, or nearly every shoot upon your grapevine. The survivors have
greater powers of resistance--a larger measure of that mysterious
something we call vitality. One horse will endure hardships and
exposures that will kill scores of others. What will agitate one
community will not in the same measure agitate another. What will break
or discourage one human heart will sit much more lightly upon another.
Life introduces an element of uncertainty or indeterminateness that we
do not find in the inorganic world. Bodies still have their laws or
conditions of activity, but they are elastic and variable. Among living
things we have in a measure escaped from the iron necessity that holds
the world of dead matter in its grip. Dead matter ever tends to a static
equilibrium; living matter to a dynamic poise, or a balance between the
intake and the output of energy. Life is a peculiar activity in matter.
If the bicyclist stops, his wheel falls down; no mechanical contrivance
could be devised that could take his place on the wheel, and no
combination of purely chemical and physical forces can alone do with
matter what life does with it. The analogy here hinted at is only
tentative. I would not imply that the relation of life to matter is
merely mechanical and external, like that of the rider to his wheel. In
life, the rider and his wheel are one, but when life vanishes, the wheel
falls down. The chemical and physical activity of matter is perpetual;
with a high-power microscope we may see the Brunonian movement in
liquids and gases any time and at all times, but the movement we call
vitality dominates these and turns them to new ends. I suppose the
nature of the activity of the bombarding molecules of gases and liquids
is the same in our bodies as out; that turmoil of the particles goes on
forever; it is, in itself, blind, fateful, purposeless; but life
furnishes, or _is_, an organizing principle that brings order and
purpose out of this chaos. It does not annul any of the mechanical or
chemical principles, but under its tutelage or inspiration they produce
a host of new substances, and a world of new and beautiful and wonderful
forms.