I fancy that the difficulty which an increasing number of persons find
in accepting the mechanistic view of life, or evolution,--the view which
Herbert Spencer built into such a ponderous system of philosophy, and
which such men as Huxley, Tyndall, Gifford, Haeckel, Verworn, and
others, have upheld and illustrated,--is temperamental rather than
logical. The view is distasteful to a certain type of mind--the
flexible, imaginative, artistic, and literary type--the type that loves
to see itself reflected in nature or that reads its own thoughts and
emotions into nature. In a few eminent examples the two types of mind to
which I refer seem more or less blended. Sir Oliver Lodge is a case in
point. Sir Oliver is an eminent physicist who in his conception of the
totality of things is yet a thoroughgoing idealist and mystic. His
solution of the problem of living things is extra-scientific. He sees in
life a distinct transcendental principle, not involved in the
constitution of matter, but independent of it, entering into it and
using it for its own purposes.
Tyndall was another great scientist with an inborn idealistic strain in
him. His famous, and to many minds disquieting, declaration, made in his
Belfast address over thirty years ago, that in matter itself he saw the
promise and the potency of all terrestrial life, stamps him as a
scientific materialist. But his conception of matter, as "at bottom
essentially mystical and transcendental," stamps him as also an
idealist. The idealist in him speaks very eloquently in the passage
which, in the same address, he puts into the mouth of Bishop Butler, in
the latter's imaginary debate with Lucretius: "Your atoms," says the
Bishop, "are individually without sensation, much more are they without
intelligence. May I ask you, then, to try your hand upon this problem.
Take your dead hydrogen atoms, your dead oxygen atoms, your dead carbon
atoms, your dead nitrogen atoms, your dead phosphorus atoms, and all
the other atoms, dead as grains of shot, of which the brain is formed.
Imagine them separate and sensationless, observe them running together
and forming all imaginable combinations. This, as a purely mechanical
process, is _seeable_ by the mind. But can you see or dream, or in any
way imagine, how out of that mechanical art, and from these individually
dead atoms, sensation, thought, and emotion are to arise? Are you likely
to extract Homer out of the rattling of dice, or the Differential
Calculus out of the clash of billiard balls?" Could any vitalist, or
Bergsonian idealist have stated his case better?
Now the Bishop Butler type of mind--the visualizing, idealizing,
analogy-loving, literary, and philosophical mind--is shared by a good
many people; it is shared by or is characteristic of all the great
poets, artists, seers, idealists of the world; it is the humanistic type
that sees man everywhere reflected in nature; and is radically different
from the strictly scientific type which dehumanizes nature and reduces
it to impersonal laws and forces, which distrusts analogy and sentiment
and poetry, and clings to a rigid logical method.
This type of mind is bound to have trouble in accepting the
physico-chemical theory of the nature and origin of life. It visualizes
life, sees it as a distinct force or principle working in and through
matter but not of it, super-physical in its origin and psychological in
its nature. This is the view Henri Bergson exploits in his "Creative
Evolution." This is the view Kant took when he said, "It is quite
certain that we cannot even satisfactorily understand, much less
explain, the nature of an organism and its internal forces on purely
mechanical principles." It is the view Goethe took when he said, "Matter
can never exist without spirit, nor spirit without matter."
Tyndall says Goethe was helped by his poetic training in the field of
natural history, but hindered as regards the physical and mechanical
sciences. "He could not formulate distinct mechanical conceptions; he
could not see the force of mechanical reasoning." His literary culture
helped him to a literary interpretation of living nature, but not to a
scientific explanation of it; it helped put him in sympathy with living
things, and just to that extent barred him from the mechanistic
conception of those of pure science. Goethe, like every great poet, saw
the universe through the colored medium of his imagination, his
emotional and æsthetic nature; in short, through his humanism, and not
in the white light of the scientific reason. His contributions to
literature were of the first order, but his contributions to science
have not taken high rank. He was a "prophet of the soul," and not a
disciple of the scientific understanding.
If we look upon life as inherent or potential in the constitution of
matter, dependent upon outward physical and chemical conditions for its
development, we are accounting for life in terms of matter and motion,
and are in the ranks of the materialists. But if we find ourselves
unable to set the ultimate particles of matter in action, or so working
as to produce the reaction which results in life, without conceiving of
some new force or principle operating upon them, then we are in the
ranks of the vitalists or idealists. The idealists see the original
atoms slumbering there in rock and sea and soil for untold ages, till,
moved upon by some unknown factor, they draw together in certain fixed
order and numbers, and life is the result. Something seems to put a
spell upon them and cause them to behave so differently from the way
they behaved before they were drawn into the life circuit.
When we think of life, as the materialists do, as of mechanico-chemical
origin, or explicable in terms of the natural universal order, we think
of the play of material forces amid which we live, we think of their
subtle action and interaction all about us--of osmosis, capillarity,
radio-activity, electricity, thermism, and the like; we think of the
four states of matter,--solid, fluid, gaseous, and ethereal,--of how
little our senses take in of their total activities, and we do not feel
the need of invoking a transcendental principle to account for it.
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 star in glory. There are degrees of mystery
in the universe. The most mysterious 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 such infinitely varied and beautiful
as well as unbeautiful forms 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.