Professor Soddy, in discussing the relation of life to energy, does not
commit himself to the theory of the vitalistic or non-mechanical origin
of life, but makes the significant statement that there is a consensus
of opinion that the life processes are not bound by the second law of
thermo-dynamics, namely, the law of the non-availability of the energy
latent in low temperatures, or in the chaotic movements of molecules
everywhere around us. To get energy, one must have a fall or an incline
of some sort, as of water from a higher to a lower level, or of
temperature from a higher to a lower degree, or of electricity from one
condition of high stress to another less so. But the living machine
seems able to dispense with this break or incline, or else has the
secret of creating one for itself.
In the living body the chemical energy of food is directly transformed
into work, without first being converted into heat. Why a horse can do
more work than a one-horse-power engine is probably because his living
cells can and do draw upon this molecular energy. Molecules of matter
outside the living body all obey the law of probability, or the law of
chance; but inside the living body they at least seem to obey some other
law--the law of design, or of dice that are loaded, as Soddy says. They
are more likely always to act in a particular way. Life supplies a
directing agency. Soddy asks if the physical distinction between living
and dead matter begins in the jostling molecular crowd--begins by the
crowd being directed and governed in a particular way. If so, by what?
Ah! that is the question. Science will have none of it, because science
would have to go outside of matter for such an agent, and that science
cannot do. Such a theory implies intelligence apart from matter, or
working in matter. Is that a hard proposition? Intelligence clearly
works in our bodies and brains, and in those of all the animals--a
controlled and directed activity in matter that seems to be life. The
cell which builds up all living bodies behaves not like a machine, but
like a living being; its activities, so far as we can judge, are
spontaneous, its motions and all its other processes are self-prompted.
But, of course, in it the mechanical, the chemical, and the vital are so
blended, so interdependent, that we may never hope to separate them; but
without the activity called vital, there would be no cell, and hence no
body.
It were unreasonable to expect that scientific analysis should show that
the physics and chemistry of a living body differs from that of the
non-living. What is new and beyond the reach of science to explain is
the _kind of activity_ of these elements. They enter into new compounds;
they build up bodies that have new powers and properties; they people
the seas and the air and the earth with living creatures, they build
the body and brain of man. The secret of the activity in matter that we
call vital is certainly beyond the power of science to tell us. It is
like expecting that the paint and oil used in a great picture must
differ from those in a daub. The great artist mixed his paint with
brains, and the universal elements in a living body are mixed with
something that science cannot disclose. Organic chemistry does not
differ intrinsically from inorganic; the difference between the two lies
in the purposive activity of the elements that build up a living body.
Or is life, as a New England college professor claims, "an _x_-entity,
additional to matter and energy, but of the same cosmic rank as they,"
and "manifesting itself to our senses only through its power to keep a
certain quantity of matter and energy in the continuous orderly ferment
we call life"?
I recall that Huxley said that there was a third reality in this
universe besides matter and energy, and this third reality was
consciousness. But neither the "_x_-entity" of Professor Ganong nor the
"consciousness" of Huxley can be said to be of the same cosmic rank as
matter and energy, because they do not pervade the universe as matter
and energy do. These forces abound throughout all space and endure
throughout all time, but life and consciousness are flitting and
uncertain phenomena of matter. A prick of a pin, or a blow from a
hammer, may destroy both. Unless we consider them as potential in all
matter (and who shall say that they are not?) may we look upon them as
of cosmic rank?
It is often urged that it is not the eye that sees, or the brain that
thinks, but something in them. But it is something in them that never
went into them; it arose in them. It is the living eye and the living
brain that do the seeing and the thinking. When the life activity
ceases, these organs cease to see and to think. Their activity is kept
up by certain physiological processes in the organs of the body, and to
ask what keeps up these is like the puppy trying to overtake its own
tail, or to run a race with its own shadow.
The brain is not merely the organ of the mind in an external and
mechanical sense; it is the mind. When we come to living things, all
such analogies fail us. Life is not a thing; thought is not a thing; but
rather the effect of a certain activity in matter, which mind alone can
recognize. When we try to explain or account for that which we are, it
is as if a man were trying to lift himself.
Life seems like something apart. It does not seem to be amenable to the
law of the correlation and conservation of forces. You cannot transform
it into heat or light or electricity. The force which a man extracts
from the food he eats while he is writing a poem, or doing any other
mental work, seems lost to the universe. The force which the engine, or
any machine, uses up, reappears as work done, or as heat or light or
some other physical manifestation. But the energy of foodstuffs which a
man uses up in a mental effort does not appear again in the circuit of
the law of the conservation of energy. A man uses up more energy in his
waking moments, though his body be passive, than in his sleeping. What
we call mental force cannot be accounted for in terms of physical force.
The sun's energy goes into our bodies through the food we eat, and so
runs our mental faculties, but how does it get back again into the
physical realm? Science does not know.
It must be some sort of energy that lights the lamps of the firefly and
the glow-worm, and it must be some sort or degree of energy that keeps
consciousness going. The brain of a Newton, or of a Plato, must make a
larger draft on the solar energy latent in food-stuffs than the brain of
a day laborer, and his body less. The same amount of food-consumption,
or of oxidation, results in physical force in the one case, and mental
force in the other, but the mental force escapes the great law of the
equivalence of the material forces.
John Fiske solves the problem when he drops his physical science and
takes up his philosophy, declaring that the relation of the mind to the
body is that of a musician to his instrument, and this is practically
the position of Sir Oliver Lodge.
Inheritance and adaptation, says Haeckel, are sufficient to account for
all the variety of animal and vegetable forms on the earth. But is there
not a previous question? Do we not want inheritance and adaptation
accounted for? What mysteries they hold! Does the river-bed account for
the river? How can a body adapt itself to its environment unless it
possess an inherent, plastic, changing, and adaptive principle? A stone
does not adapt itself to its surroundings; its change is external and
not internal. There is mechanical adjustment between inert bodies, but
there is no adaptation without the push of life. A response to new
conditions by change of form implies something actively
responsive--something that profits by the change.