The lay mind can hardly appreciate the necessity under which the man of
science feels to account for all the phenomena of life in terms of the
natural order. To the scientist the universe is complete in itself. He
can admit of no break or discontinuity anywhere. Threads of relation,
visible and invisible,--chemical, mechanical, electric, magnetic, solar,
lunar, stellar, geologic, biologic,--forming an intricate web of subtle
forces and influences, bind all things, living and dead, into a cosmic
unity. Creation is one, and that one is symbolized by the sphere which
rests forever on itself, which is whole at every point, which holds all
forms, which reconciles all contradictions, which has no beginning and
no ending, which has no upper and no under, and all of whose lines are
fluid and continuous. The disruptions and antagonisms which we fancy we
see are only the result of our limited vision; nature is not at war with
itself; there is no room or need for miracle; there is no outside to the
universe, because there are no bounds to matter or spirit; all is
inside; deep beneath deep, height above height, and this mystery and
miracle that we call life must arise out of the natural order in the
course of time as inevitably as the dew forms and the rain falls. When
the rains and the dews and the snows cease to fall,--a time which
science predicts,--then life, as we know it, must inevitably vanish from
the earth. Human life is a physical phenomenon, and though it involves,
as we believe, a psychic or non-physical principle, it is still not
exempt from the operation of the universal physical laws. It came by
them or through them, and it must go by them or through them.
The rigidly scientific mind, impressed with all these things as the lay
mind cannot be, used to the searching laboratory methods, and familiar
with the phenomenon of life in its very roots, as it were, dealing with
the wonders of chemical compounds, and the forces that lurk in molecules
and atoms, seeing in the cosmic universe, and in the evolution of the
earth, only the operation of mechanical and chemical principles; seeing
the irrefragable law of the correlation and the conservation of forces;
tracing consciousness and all our changes in mental states to changes in
the brain substance; drilled in methods of proof by experimentation;
knowing that the same number of ultimate atoms may be so combined or
married as to produce compounds that differ as radically as alcohol and
ether,--conversant with all these things, and more, I say,--the strictly
scientific mind falls naturally and inevitably into the mechanistic
conception of all life phenomena.
Science traces the chain of cause and effect everywhere and finds no
break. It follows down animal life till it merges in the vegetable,
though it cannot put its finger or its microscope on the point where one
ends and the other begins. It finds forms that partake of the
characteristics of both. It is reasonable to expect that the vegetable
merges into the mineral by the same insensible degrees, and that the one
becomes the other without any real discontinuity. The change, if we may
call it such, probably takes place in the interior world of matter among
the primordial atoms, where only the imagination can penetrate. In that
sleep of the ultimate corpuscle, what dreams may come, what miracles may
be wrought, what transformations take place! When I try to think of life
as a mode of motion in matter, I seem to see the particles in a mystic
dance, a whirling maze of motions, the infinitely little people taking
hold of hands, changing partners, facing this way and that, doing all
sorts of impossible things, like jumping down one another's throats, or
occupying one another's bodies, thrilled and vibrating at an
inconceivable rate.
The theological solution of this problem of life fails more and more to
satisfy thinking men of to-day. Living things are natural phenomena, and
we feel that they must in some way be an outcome of the natural order.
Science is more and more familiarizing our minds with the idea that the
universe is a universe, a oneness; that its laws are continuous. We
follow the chemistry of it to the farthest stars and there is no serious
break or exception; it is all of one stuff. We follow the mechanics of
it into the same abysmal depths, and there are no breaks or exceptions.
The biology of it we cannot follow beyond our own little corner of the
universe; indeed, we have no proof that there is any biology anywhere
else. But if there is, it must be similar to our own. There is only one
kind of electricity (though two phases of it), only one kind of light
and heat, one kind of chemical affinity, in the universe; and hence only
one kind of life. Looked at in its relation to the whole, life appears
like a transient phenomenon of matter. I will not say accidental; it
seems inseparably bound up with the cosmic processes, but, I may say,
fugitive, superficial, circumscribed. Life comes and goes; it penetrates
but a little way into the earth; it is confined to a certain range of
temperature. Beyond a certain degree of cold, on the one hand, it does
not appear; and beyond a certain degree of heat, on the other, it is cut
off. Without water or moisture, it ceases; and without air, it is not.
It has evidently disappeared from the moon, and probably from the
inferior planets, and it is doubtful if it has yet appeared on any of
the superior planets, save Mars.
Life comes to matter as the flowers come in the spring,--when the time
is ripe for it,--and it disappears when the time is over-ripe. Man
appears in due course and has his little day upon the earth, but that
day must as surely come to an end. Yet can we conceive of the end of the
physical order? the end of gravity? or of cohesion? The air may
disappear, the water may disappear, combustion may cease; but oxygen,
hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon will continue somewhere.
V
Science is the redeemer of the physical world. It opens our eyes to its
true inwardness, and purges it of the coarse and brutal qualities with
which, in our practical lives, it is associated. It has its inner world
of activities and possibilities of which our senses give us no hint.
This inner world of molecules and atoms and electrons, thrilled and
vibrating with energy, the infinitely little, the almost infinitely
rapid, in the bosom of the infinitely vast and distant and
automatic--what a revelation it all is! what a glimpse into "Nature's
infinite book of secrecy"!
Our senses reveal to us but one kind of motion--mass motion--the change
of place of visible bodies. But there is another motion in all matter
which our senses do not reveal to us as motion--molecular vibration, or
the thrill of the atoms. At the heart of the most massive rock this
whirl of the atoms or corpuscles is going on. If our ears were fine
enough to hear it, probably every rock and granite monument would sing,
as did Memnon, when the sun shone upon it. This molecular vibration is
revealed to us as heat, light, sound, electricity. Heat is only a mode
of this invisible motion of the particles of matter. Mass motion is
quickly converted into this molecular motion when two bodies strike each
other. May not life itself be the outcome of a peculiar whirl of the
ultimate atoms of matter?
Says Professor Gotch, as quoted by J. Arthur Thomson in his
"Introduction to Science": "To the thought of a scientific mind the
universe with all its suns and worlds is throughout one seething welter
of modes of motion, playing in space, playing in ether, playing in all
existing matter, playing in all living things, playing, therefore, in
ourselves." Physical science, as Professor Thomson says, leads us from
our static way of looking at things to the dynamic way. It teaches us to
regard the atom, not as a fixed and motionless structure, like the
bricks in a wall, but as a centre of ever-moving energy; it sees the
whole universe is in a state of perpetual flux, a flowing stream of
creative energy out of which life arises as one of the manifestations of
this energy.
When we have learned all that science can tell us about the earth, is it
not more rather than less wonderful? When we know all it can tell us
about the heavens above, or about the sea, or about our own bodies, or
about a flower, or a bird, or a tree, or a cloud, are they less
beautiful and wonderful? The mysteries of generation, of inheritance, of
cell life, are rather enhanced by science.