The question of the nature and origin of life is a kind of perpetual
motion question in biology. Life without antecedent life, so far as
human experience goes, is an impossibility, and motion without previous
motion, is equally impossible. Yet, while science shows us that this
last is true among ponderable bodies where friction occurs, it is not
true among the finer particles of matter, where friction does not exist.
Here perpetual or spontaneous motion is the rule. The motions of the
molecules of gases and liquids, and their vibrations in solids, are
beyond the reach of our unaided senses, yet they are unceasing. By
analogy we may infer that while living bodies, as we know them, do not
and cannot originate spontaneously, yet the movement that we call life
may and probably does take place spontaneously in the ultimate particles
of matter. But can atomic energy be translated into the motion of
ponderable bodies, or mass energy? In like manner can, or does, this
potential life of the world of atoms and electrons give rise to
organized living beings?
This distrust of the physical forces, or our disbelief in their ability
to give rise to life, is like a survival in us of the Calvinistic creed
of our fathers. The world of inert matter is dead in trespasses and sin
and must be born again before it can enter the kingdom of the organic.
We must supplement the natural forces with the spiritual, or the
supernatural, to get life. The common or carnal nature, like the natural
man, must be converted, breathed upon by the non-natural or divine,
before it can rise to the plane of life--the doctrine of Paul carried
into the processes of nature.
The scientific mind sees in nature an infinitely complex mechanism
directed to no special human ends, but working towards universal ends.
It sees in the human body an infinite number of cell units building up
tissues and organs,--muscles, nerves, bones, cartilage,--a living
machine of infinite complexity; but what shapes and coördinates the
parts, how the cells arose, how consciousness arose, how the mind is
related to the body, how or why the body acts as a unit--on these
questions science can throw no light. With all its mastery of the laws
of heredity, of cytology, and of embryology, it cannot tell why a man is
a man, and a dog is a dog. No cell-analysis will give the secret; no
chemical conjuring with the elements will reveal why in the one case
they build up a head of cabbage, and in the other a head of Plato.
It must be admitted that the scientific conception of the universe robs
us of something--it is hard to say just what--that we do not willingly
part with; yet who can divest himself of this conception? And the
scientific conception of the nature of life, hard and unfamiliar as it
may seem in its mere terms, is difficult to get away from. Life must
arise through the play and transformations of matter and energy that are
taking place all around us; though it seems a long and impossible road
from mere chemistry to the body and soul of man. But if life, with all
that has come out of it, did not come by way of matter and energy, by
what way did it come? Must we have recourse to the so-called
supernatural?--as Emerson's line puts it,--
"When half-gods go, the gods arrive."
When our traditional conception of matter as essentially vulgar and
obstructive and the enemy of the spirit gives place to the new
scientific conception of it as at bottom electrical and all-potent, we
may find the poet's great line come true, and that for a thing to be
natural, is to be divine. For my own part, I do not see how we can get
intelligence out of matter unless we postulate intelligence in matter.
Any system of philosophy that sees in the organic world only a
fortuitous concourse of chemical atoms, repels me, though the
contradiction here implied is not easily cleared up. The theory of life
as a chemical reaction and nothing more does not interest me, but I am
attracted by that conception of life which, while binding it to the
material order, sees in the organic more than the physics and chemistry
of the inorganic--call it whatever name you will--vitalism, idealism, or
dualism.
In our religious moods, we may speak, as Theodore Parker did, of the
universe as a "handful of dust which God enchants," or we may speak of
it, as Goethe did, as "the living garment of God"; but as men of
science we can see it only as a vast complex of forces, out of which man
has arisen, and of which he forms a part. We are not to forget that we
are a part of it, and that the more we magnify ourselves, the more we
magnify it; that its glory is our glory, and our glory its glory,
because we are its children. In some way utterly beyond the reach of
science to explain, or of philosophy to confirm, we have come out of it,
and all we are or can be, is, or has been, potential in it.