Behold a man with his wonderful body, and still more wonderful mind; try
to think of him as being fathered and mothered by the mere mechanical
and chemical forces that we see at work in the rocks and soil underfoot,
begotten by chemical affinity or the solar energy working as molecular
physic, and mothered by the warmth and moisture, by osmosis and the
colloid state--and all through the chance clashings and groupings of the
irrational physical forces. Nothing is added to them, nothing guides or
inspires them, nothing moves upon the face of the waters, nothing
breathes upon the insensate clay. The molecules or corpuscles of the
four principal elements--carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen--just
happened to come together in certain definite numbers, and in a certain
definite order, and invented or built up that most marvelous thing in
the universe, the cell. The cells put their heads, or bodies, together,
and built the tissues, the tissues formed the organs, the organs in
convention assembled organized themselves into the body, and behold! a
man, a bird, or a tree!--as chance a happening as the juxtaposition of
the grains of sand upon the shore, or the shape of the summer clouds in
the sky.
Aristotle dwells upon the internal necessity. The teeth of an animal
arise from necessity, he says; the animal must have them in order to
live. Yet it must have lived before it had them, else how would the
necessity arise? If the horns of an animal arise from the same
necessity, the changing conditions of its life begat the necessity; its
life problem became more and more complicated, till new tools arose to
meet new wants. But without some indwelling principle of development and
progress, how could the new wants arise? Spencer says this progress is
the result of the action and reaction between organisms and their
changing environment. But you must first get your organism before the
environment can work its effects, and you must have something in the
organism that organizes and reacts from the environment. We see the
agents he names astronomic, geologic, meteorologic, having their effects
upon inanimate objects as well, but they do not start the process of
development in them; they change a stone, but do not transform it into
an organism. The chemist can take the living body apart as surely as the
watchmaker can take a watch apart, but he cannot put the parts together
again so that life will reappear, as the watchmaker can restore the
time-keeping power of the watch. The watch is a mere mechanical
contrivance with parts fitted to parts externally, while the living body
is a mechanical and chemical contrivance, with parts blended with parts
internally, so to speak, and acting together through sympathy, and not
merely by mechanical adjustment. Do we not have to think of some
organizing agent embracing and controlling all the parts, and integral
in each of them, making a vital bond instead of a mechanical one?
There are degrees of vitality in living things, whereas there are only
degrees of complexity and delicacy and efficiency in mechanical
contrivances. One watch differs from another in the perfection of its
works, but not as two living bodies with precisely similar structure
differ from each other in their hold upon life, or in their measure of
vitality. No analysis possible to science could show any difference in
the chemistry and physics of two persons of whom one would withstand
hardships and diseases that would kill the other, or with whom one would
have the gift of long life and the other not. Machines differ from one
another quantitatively--more or less efficiency; a living body differs
from a machine qualitatively--its efficiency is of a different order;
its unity is of a different order; its complexity is of a different
order; the interdependence of its parts is of a different order. Yet
what a parallel there is between a machine and a living body! Both are
run by external forces or agents, solar energy in one applied
mechanically from without; in the other applied vitally from within;
both suffer from the wear and tear of time and from abuse, but one is
self-repaired and the other powerless in this respect--two machines with
the same treatment running the same number of years, but two men with
the same treatment running a very unequal number of years. Machines of
the same kind differ in durability, men differ in powers of endurance; a
man can "screw up his courage," but a machine has no courage to screw
up. Science may be unable to see any difference between vital mechanics,
vital chemistry, and the chemics and mechanics of inorganic bodies--its
analysis reveals no difference; but that there is a difference as
between two different orders, all men see and feel.
Science cannot deal with fundamental questions. Only philosophy can do
this. Science is only a tool or a key, and it can unlock only certain
material problems. It cannot appraise itself. It is not a judge but a
witness. Problems of mind, of character, moral, æsthetic, literary,
artistic problems, are not its sphere. It counts and weighs and measures
and analyzes, it traces relations, but it cannot appraise its own
results. Science and religion come in conflict only when the latter
seeks to deal with objective facts, and the former seeks to deal with
subjective ideas and emotions. On the question of miracle they clash,
because religion is then dealing with natural phenomena and challenges
science. Philosophy offends science when it puts its own interpretation
upon scientific facts. Science displeases literature when it dehumanizes
nature and shows us irrefragable laws when we had looked for humanistic
divinities.