Bergson says the intellect is characterized by a natural inability to
understand life. Certain it is, I think, that science alone cannot grasp
its mystery. We must finally appeal to philosophy; we must have recourse
to ideal values--to a non-scientific or super-scientific principle. We
cannot live intellectually or emotionally upon science alone. Science
reveals to us the relations and inter-dependence of things in the
physical world and their relations to our physical well-being;
philosophy reveals their relations to our mental and spiritual life,
their meanings and their ideal values. Poor, indeed, is the man who has
no philosophy, no commanding outlook over the tangles and contradictions
of the world of sense. There is probably some unknown and unknowable
factor involved in the genesis of life, but that that factor or
principle does not belong to the natural, universal order is
unthinkable. Yet to fail to see that what we must call intelligence
pervades and is active in all organic nature is to be spiritually blind.
But to see it as something foreign to or separable from nature is to do
violence to our faith in the constancy and sufficiency of the natural
order. One star differeth from another in glory. There are degrees of
mystery in the universe. The most mystifying thing in inorganic nature
is electricity,--that disembodied energy that slumbers in the ultimate
particles of matter, unseen, unfelt, unknown, till it suddenly leaps
forth with such terrible vividness and power on the face of the storm,
or till we summon it through the transformation of some other form of
energy. A still higher and more inscrutable mystery is life, that
something which clothes itself in each infinitely varied and beautiful
as well as unbeautiful form of matter. We can evoke electricity at will
from many different sources, but we can evoke life only from other life;
the biogenetic law is inviolable.
Professor Soddy says, "Natural philosophy may explain a rainbow but not
a rabbit." There is no secret about a rainbow; we can produce it at will
out of perfectly colorless beginnings. "But nothing but rabbits will or
can produce a rabbit, a proof again that we cannot say what a rabbit is,
though we may have a perfect knowledge of every anatomical and
microscopic detail."
To regard life as of non-natural origin puts it beyond the sphere of
legitimate inquiry; to look upon it as of natural origin, or as bound in
a chain of chemical sequences, as so many late biochemists do, is still
to put it where our science cannot unlock the mystery. If we should ever
succeed in producing living matter in our laboratories, it would not
lessen the mystery any more than the birth of a baby in the household
lessens the mystery of generation. It only brings it nearer home.
V
What is peculiar to organic nature is the living cell. Inside the cell,
doubtless, the same old chemistry and physics go on--the same universal
law of the transformation of energy is operative. In its minute compass
the transmutation of the inorganic into the organic, which constitutes
what Tyndall called "the miracle and the mystery of vitality," is
perpetually enacted. But what is the secret of the cell itself? Science
is powerless to tell us. You may point out to your heart's content that
only chemical and physical forces are discoverable in living matter;
that there is no element or force in a plant that is not in the stone
beside which it grew, or in the soil in which it takes root; and yet,
until your chemistry and your physics will enable you to produce the
living cell, or account for its mysterious self-directed activities,
your science avails not. "Living cells," says a late European authority,
"possess most effective means to accelerate reactions and to cause
surprising chemical results."
Behold the four principal elements forming stones and soils and water
and air for whole geologic or astronomic ages, and then behold them
forming plants and animals, and finally forming the brains that give us
art and literature and philosophy and modern civilization. What prompted
the elements to this new and extraordinary behavior? Science is dumb
before such a question.
Living bodies are immersed in physical conditions as in a sea. External
agencies--light, moisture, air, gravity, mechanical and chemical
influences--cause great changes in them; but their power to adapt
themselves to these changes, and profit by them, remains unexplained.
Are morphological processes identical with chemical ones?
In the inorganic world we everywhere see mechanical adjustment, repose,
stability, equilibrium, through the action and interaction of outward
physical forces; a natural bridge is a striking example of the action of
blind mechanical forces among the rocks. In the organic world we see
living adaptation which involves a non-mechanical principle. An
adjustment is an outward fitting together of parts; an adaptation
implies something flowing, unstable, plastic, compromising; it is a
moulding process; passivity on one side, and activity on the other.
Living things struggle; they struggle up as well as down; they struggle
all round the circle, while the pull of dead matter is down only.
Behold what a good chemist a plant is! With what skill it analyzes the
carbonic acid in the air, retaining the carbon and returning the oxygen
to the atmosphere! Then the plant can do what no chemist has yet been
able to do; it can manufacture chlorophyll, a substance which is the
basis of all life on the globe. Without chlorophyll (the green substance
in plants) the solar energy could not be stored up in the vegetable
world. Chlorophyll makes the plant, and the plant makes chlorophyll. To
ask which is first is to call up the old puzzle, Which is first, the
egg, or the hen that laid it?
According to Professor Soddy, the engineer's unit of power, that of the
British cart-horse, has to be multiplied many times in a machine before
it can do the work of a horse. He says that a car which two horses used
to pull, it now takes twelve or fifteen engine-horse to pull. The
machine horse belongs to a different order. He does not respond to the
whip; he has no nervous system; he has none of the mysterious reserve
power which a machine built up of living cells seems to possess; he is
inelastic, non-creative, non-adaptive; he cannot take advantage of the
ground; his pull is a dead, unvarying pull. Living energy is elastic,
adaptive, self-directive, and suffers little loss through friction, or
through imperfect adjustment of the parts. A live body converts its fuel
into energy at a low temperature. One of the great problems of the
mechanics of the future is to develop electricity or power directly from
fuel and thus cut out the enormous loss of eighty or ninety per cent
which we now suffer. The growing body does this all the time; life
possesses this secret; the solar energy stored up in fuel suffers no
loss in being transformed into work by the animal mechanism.
Soddy asks whether or not the minute cells of the body may not have the
power of taking advantage of the difference in temperature of the
molecules bombarding them, and thus of utilizing energy that is beyond
the capacity of the machinery of the motor-car. Man can make no machine
that can avail itself of the stores of energy in the uniform temperature
of the earth or air or water, or that can draw upon the potential energy
of the atoms, but it may be that the living cell can do this, and thus a
horse can pull more than a one-horse-power engine. Soddy makes the
suggestive inquiry: "If life begins in a single cell, does intelligence?
does the physical distinction between living and dead matter begin in
the jostling molecular crowd? Inanimate molecules, in all their
movements, obey the law of probability, the law which governs the
successive falls of a true die. In the presence of a rudimentary
intelligence, do they still follow that law, or do they now obey another
law--the law of a die that is loaded?" In a machine the energy of fuel
has first to be converted into heat before it is available, but in a
living machine the chemical energy of food undergoes direct
transformation into work, and the wasteful heat-process is cut off.