Part 3

Surely an outside influence must be caused? If it involved no more energy than is wielded by a may-fly’s wing, how came it there? It is as easy to admit the _self-origination_ of a divinity of power, as the _self-creation_ of power to lift a grain. It is not in the philosophy; ‘outside influence’ has no credentials, and the admission of inability to evolve the universe without it, is an admission that the mechanical philosophy fails at the outset. Nor can it serve the emergency to invoke ‘force.’

A Divine origin of the universe is usually rejected, because the Divinity eludes the methods of science. But we cannot supplant the Deity by enthroning force. Science can tell us what force _does_, but it can no more find what force _is_, than what an infinite mind is. Force is an irresistible mental inference from matter in motion, but its ultimate nature is defiantly beyond the reach of science.

It appears, then, that to obtain even the ‘elements’ of our modern chemistry, the philosophy of mechanical evolution must, at the beginning, call in uncovenanted aid. Let us remember this, while for the purposes of argument we allow it. There may have been secured, added, and perhaps altered, motion by the surreptitious ‘outside influence;’ but it can be nothing more. The atoms are still without property, and are only affected by motion. Have we any _experience_ to induce us to believe that atoms without property, even affected by thermal vibrations and pushed by gravity, will build themselves up into the seventy ‘elements’ of chemistry with their specific and inalienable qualities? That, through vibrations of heat and pushings of gravity, they could become hydrogen and mercury, carbon and gold, chlorine and phosphorus! And these properties being thus acquired, by their sheer interactions that all the chemistry, the physics, and the _order_ of all the area of space within the galaxy arose? This is what the formula of the most brilliant philosophy of any age would lead us to infer.

In this relation I do not forget the recent and splendid service done by Mr. Crooks to the philosophical side of chemistry in the record of his researches on ‘The Genesis of the Elements.’ It is a most subtile and exquisite means of endeavouring to deduce the _method_, the ‘_law_’ according to which what we know as the ‘chemical elements’ were built up. He obtains indications of a primitive element—a something out of which the elements were evolved. He calls it _protyle_ or first stuff, and from its presence he concludes that the elements, as we know them, ‘are not simple and primordial, that they have not arisen by chance, or been created in a desultory and mechanical manner, but have been evolved from simpler matter—or perhaps indeed from one sole kind of matter.’[14]

[Footnote 14: Reprint of a Lecture at the Royal Institution by Mr. Crooks, p. 2.]

But this reduction of matter, as we know it, to a simpler but still highly differentiated condition, only causes reason the more earnestly to demand how the rhythmic and complex method, which we express by the word ‘law,’ came into operation, and was established for ever.

The ‘protyle’ is infinitely more complex than the atoms of the homogeneous nebula. It makes no philosophical difference whether the ultimate atoms of the bodies known as elementary are all alike, or in each instance special. In either case there is infinitely more in the matter they severally make, than can be deduced from motion affecting the primitive atoms.

But not only have we by the formula and constructive method of this philosophy to obtain protyle from the mere effects of motion on primitive atoms; but, by the same means alone, we have to change protyle into the seventy ‘elements;’ above all, without an added factor or a change in the method, we have to rise to life!

Let us reflect. By life in this relation is meant that which lives, an organism endowed with life’s properties. Are these properties unique? Or is there some point of fluxion where the properties of life at their minima arise in the activities of not-life at some undiscovered maxima? A point at which some occult molecular complexities arise, changing matter dead into matter living?

The answer must come, not through our abstract logic, but from our laboratories.

Life, it is well known, has its phenomena inherent in, and strictly confined to, a highly complex compound, with fixed chemical constituents. This compound, in its living state, is known as protoplasm. It is clear, colourless, and, to our finest optical resources, devoid of discoverable structure. There is not a living thing on earth but possesses its life in protoplasm, from a microscopic fungus to man.

To depict the properties of life in irreducible simplicity, take one of the lowliest instances within the present range of science. Let it be one of the exquisitely minute, almost infinitely prolific, and universally diffused living forms that set up and carry on putrefaction. The lesser of them may, when considered as solid specks, vary from the fifty thousand millionth of a cubic inch to the twenty billionth of a cubic inch. I select one that is oval in shape. It moves with the agility of the grayling and the grace of a swallow, the motion resulting from the rhythmic action of two motile fibres.

This free and self-originating action is its first vital quality.

Its mission as an organism, is to break up and set free the chemical elements that had been locked up in dead organic compounds. Its own substance wears out by this and other means; and it has the power to renovate the waste from the dead decomposition in which it lives; constructing, in the laboratory of its protoplasm, new living matter.

This is the second characteristic of that alone which lives. By it, living matter is _sui generis_. Every instant, and at the same temperature, this inconceivably minute speck, without discoverable structure, effects analyses and complicated syntheses which either baffle all the synthetic chemistry of man, or else, where he is able to accomplish the simplest of the organic syntheses, it is by processes and at temperatures that make all life impossible.

But more, this vital and inconceivably minute speck multiplies with astounding rapidity in two ways; by the first and common process, in the course of a minute and a half the entire body is divided into two precisely similar bodies, each one being perfect; almost immediately these again divide, and so on in geometric ratio through all the populated fluid; the rapidity of this intense and wonderful vital action transcending all thought. By this process alone a single form may in three hours give rise to a population of organisms as great as the human population of the globe.

But this is not all; at certain stages of the organism self-division ceases. The final divisions result in strikingly modified forms of the organism; these approach each other and melt together. They are then shining globules without action, but at the end of a given time they open, and pour out a continuous cloud of minutest spore or ova, which are as countless as the sands; and from these arise again another host of the organisms, which pass again through all the mystery and marvel of this vital cycle.

And this is the third of the qualities that make what lives absolutely unique amidst the things of earth.

This is life—whether vegetable or animal none can determine—in the simplest form in which it can be known; life that is possessed only of the irreducible properties which are inalienable, and which distinguish it for ever and everywhere from what is not-life.

It is true that the philosopher, by the common consent of mind, occupies the throne of intellect; but it is not, for all that, to the esoteric philosopher, not to the deep mental seer, who girdles all space, all duration, all phenomena with his thought, that nature reveals her latest, her subtlest, her profoundest secrets. It is to the patient student—nature’s loving learner, whose eye and ear are trained to read her faintest writing and catch her lowest whisper—that her deepest truths in all their strength and immediate bearing are disclosed. Yet the fates of philosophies are determined by these.

Then what is the testimony of students and searchers as to the mode in which life takes its origin to-day? Does life originate _in_ life? or do we find that in our laboratories, and in the observed processes of nature _now_, the not-living can be, without the intervention of living things, changed into that which lives?

Biology, as a science, answers ‘no.’ Says the greatest master of all the facts, Professor Huxley: ‘The properties of living matter distinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things, and,’ he continues, ‘the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living.’[15]

Then what lives is, in its qualities, utterly unlike—sharply marked off from—what is not living. Yet the elements that make up the living stuff are the most common on the earth. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen: we know them each and all; we know their properties and reactions on each other, and on all the minor elements of the living matter; but that knowledge only complicates the nature of the problem. The mystery of life is, not that any occult elements compose the matter in which it dwells; the mystery of life consists solely in the question, _how_ the elements that make up protoplasm can be so combined, as, by their combination, to acquire the splendid and solitary properties of that which lives.

Manifestly, then, there was a time in the past history of the globe, when its matter was without life, and therefore there must have been a time, perhaps at a point of intense activity in the not-living matter of the globe, when it became endowed with the properties of life.

[Footnote 15: _Ency. Brit._ art. ‘Biology,’ vol. iii. p. 679.]

By what agency that transcendent upward movement was wrought, science claims no vocation to inquire. But let the earth, and air, and sea, with all their teeming denizens, attest,—that power was competent.

Now let us ask, can we as rational beings account for all the properties of living things in terms of matter and motion? Will vibrating atoms, with millenniums of ages to work in, but no power to direct them, explain the wonder? Was the transmutation of not-living matter into living brought about merely by what we can reduce to solid geometry and transcendental numbers? atoms, which we can approximately measure, dancing to the rhythm of complex motion?

All that mechanical evolution has to work with, is atoms and motions. Pile the atoms into complexities too large for clear thought, cluster molecule round molecule, and let them beat in multitudinous harmonies defiant of conception, yet all you have is matter in motion. It is not life with its sentiency; it is not life with its self-chosen movement; it is not life with its power to construct its own substance out of matter that is dead, and to multiply its kind _ad libitum_.

And yet Mr. Spencer begins by taking what no mental manipulation of the naked formula of his philosophy could provide, the ‘elements’ of our present chemistry; and by imagining higher and higher complexities of atomic structure a complicated molecule is reached; and then, by a change in name, which is justified by no change in the facts, he calls the complex substance organic matter; and by simply continuing this process, thinks he sees it become living.[16]

[Footnote 16: _Principles of Biology_, vol. i. p. 481.]

The justification of all this is the affirmation ‘that organic matter was not produced all at once,’ and that there is in the laboratory of the chemist ‘what we may literally call artificial evolution.’ Mr. Spencer instances a laboratory product of what is counted a sufficiently typical organic compound.[17] But to obtain it the chemist has to employ no less than twenty distinct chemical and physical processes, involving many varying temperatures, from a red heat to the intensity of the electric arc, and between thirty and forty reagents and their products, are employed in the process. Compare this with the silent and impenetrable simplicity of the chemistry of life, and vivid and striking is the contrast. And yet when this product of the chemist lies before you, produced by the tremendous relative labours of the laboratory, it is as far off from dead white of egg, to say nothing of living protoplasm, as the qualities of a flint pebble are from the qualities of the diamond.

[Footnote 17: The Butyrate of dimethylamin.]

The _facts_ of nature—surely our safest guide—declare that the transition from not-life to life is abrupt. The break is absolute and clear. A ‘complex molecule’ is a molecule of atoms in motion,—nothing more. More atoms and more motion cannot, by themselves, as Mr. Spencer would teach, make it ‘organic;’ much less can any further addition of atoms and tremors make it live. It is in vain for Haeckel to call the simplest moneron that lives ‘primeval slime,’ or to call numbers of them ‘individualized lumps of albumen.’ It is a travesty. Under the same lens place ‘a lump of albumen’ and the lowest _living_ infusorian, and a voiceless contradiction of Haeckel’s phrase which none can ever question is indubitably given. The infusorian lives; the albumen is dead. The infusorian constructs the vital matter of its own body from the heterogeneous matter in which it lives; the albumen decomposes as it lies there. The infusorian has soon multiplied by millions, while the albumen disappears by decadence. To write of living monera as ‘albumen,’ or of ‘complex molecules’ with nothing more than their complexity, as _living_, is to contradict, in the name, the essential and distinguishing qualities of both.

This impropriety may be yet more manifest by another quotation from Haeckel. His aim is to endeavour by the use of vague language to reduce the impassable gulf between the living and the not-living, and he writes of the animal _ovum_, as ‘a little lump of albumen in which another albuminous body is enclosed—the nucleus.’ What profound trifling is this! Think of, say a human ovum, an invisible particle less than the hundredth of an inch in diameter; it _lives_; and there lies coiled up in the mystery of its minuteness all the potentiality of the highest manhood; all the possible power of Socrates, or Homer, or Goethe. Is that simply ‘a lump of albumen’? Not unless a man can be justly described as such, by the bottles of chemical substances to which his body can be reduced.

Even Mr. Spencer pleads that ‘the lowest living things are not, properly speaking, organisms at all, for they have no distinctions of parts, no traces of organization.’ If it were true that our lenses cannot reveal organization in the lowliest and smallest organisms, does it follow that there _is_ none? Will Mr. Spencer risk the validity of the doctrine of material atoms on the ability of our lenses to show the atom? Surely not.

But the affirmation is not supported by facts. The splendid increase of microscopical lens power during the past decade has not only enabled us to see that there is complexity and structure in both the animal and vegetable cell, which bisects by an elaborate process; but even the minute nucleus of the minutest organisms, often not more than one tenth part of the infinitesimal body itself, is now proved to undergo profound structural changes, which precede all the great cyclic changes of the organism as a whole. The nucleus is the centre, in fact, of all the higher activities of the least and lowest infusoria; and is the centre of most delicate but clearly demonstrable structural changes.[18]

[Footnote 18: _Jour. Roy. Micro. Soc._, President’s Address, 1886.]

We cannot reduce the mystery of life by treating contemptuously its ultimate cells. They are as defiant of interpretation by our present methods as the more complex structures they compose. The mystery of life, _per se_, is as great and as deep, in a monad and a mildew, as in a man. Every attempt to argue away the meaning of vital function and property, on the basis of the organic simplicity of unicellular organisms, is wholly fallacious. It is knowledge, not speculation, which affirms that the least and lowest, as well as the largest and most complex of living forms, are distinguished absolutely from all other kinds of things. There is ‘no link’ between matter living and matter without life. To attempt to build up ‘life’ by slow increments of added complexity, in atomic or molecular structure, is a philosophical ingenuity; but it expresses no natural truth within the horizon of our knowledge. A higher number of primal, or even chemical atoms, arranged in the most complex ratios, and affected by the most rhythmic movements, are not the data from which to deduce a living organism. And to affirm of the lowest living things that ‘they are not, properly speaking, organisms at all,’[19] because the instruments used at a given date did not reveal structure, is, at best, an _argumentum a silentio_; while simultaneously it contradicts the facts of biology, and assumes the whole point at issue.

[Footnote 19: _Principles of Biology_, vol. i. p. 482.]

On the other hand, there is not a single fact within the present range of our knowledge that indicates, or even suggests, that the quarternary compounds approximate, under any known conditions, to the state of matter living.

As the sheets of this Lecture are passing through the press, Sir Henry Roscoe, as President of the British Association, has delivered a brilliant and essentially scientific address. On the subject of chemistry none can speak with a voice more authoritative: and on this very question he writes as follows: ‘But now the question may well be put—Is any limit set to this synthetic power of the chemist? Although the danger of dogmatizing as to the progress of science has already been shown in too many instances, yet one cannot help feeling that the barrier which exists between the organized and unorganized worlds is one which the chemist sees no chance of breaking down. It is true that there are those who profess to foresee that the day will arrive, when the chemist, by a succession of constructive efforts, may pass beyond albumen, and gather the elements of lifeless matter into a living structure. Whatever may be said regarding this from other standpoints, the chemist can only say that at present no such problem lies within his province. Protoplasm, with which the simplest manifestations of life are associated, is not a compound, but a structure built up of compounds. The chemist may successfully synthesize any of its component molecules, but he has no more reason to look forward to the synthetic production of the structure than to imagine that the synthesis of gallic acid leads to the artificial production of gall-nuts.’[20]

To assume, then, that by starting with atoms in equilibriated motions, uncounted millenniums of ages ago, and that by adding atoms and groups of atoms, with altered and re-altered motions as the ages roll away, with the result that at last, with these factors and no others, we shall get organism and life, is, surely, as fallacious as to explain Millais’s picture of the Huguenots as having been brought about by a skilful arrangement of palettes and brushes, easels and pigments.

Now let it be clearly recalled that Charles Darwin involved himself in none of this philosophic ambiguity. To him life was more than a complexity of elementary atoms affected by motion. It was something he could not ‘explain.’ He postulated, therefore, the unexplained presence of ‘primordial living germs,’ endowed with the properties, which, experience teaches, are possessed by living matter to-day.

How, in the great past, mineral and gaseous matters on this earth were, as a question of scientific method, so affected as to become living matter is, to our present resources at least, impenetrable.

[Footnote 20: The _Times_ report of the address of Sir H. E. Roscoe before the British Association at Manchester.—_Times_, September 1, 1887.]

‘Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies; I hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower.—But _if_ I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what God and man is.’

I merely contend that whatever were the means by which dead matter first lived, they were higher, infinitely higher, than matter and motion; they could only have been the resources of a _competent_ power.

I adopt gladly the language of Professor Huxley: ‘Belief, in the scientific sense of the word,’ he says, ‘is a serious matter, and needs strong foundations. To say, therefore, in the admitted absence of evidence, that I have any belief as to the mode in which existing forms of life have originated, would be using words in a wrong sense. But expectation is permissible where belief is not; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not-living matter.’[21] So should I.

[Footnote 21: _Critiques and Addresses_, p. 239.]

By what other means than by the operation of natural ‘laws’ can we think of the Infinite Power, extending through all extent, as the fountain of all being, as acting? Every process of nature that ever man has investigated throughout all space and all time, results from a perfect and unalterable method which we call a ‘law’ of nature. Then why should the primal process, by which not-living matter became, once for all, living, be brought about by any other means than the predetermined action of competent natural laws? Because life—living matter—does not _now_ arise directly from that which is not-life, does it follow that the creative method was discontinuous? that the primordial creative laws willed into operation ‘in the beginning’ were only competent to evolve the inorganic and not-living? and that at this point a supernatural ‘interference,’ a ‘miraculous interposition,’ had to be effected to endow what was dead with the transcendent properties of life? The whole line of human experience, interpreted in the light of modern scientific knowledge, compels the conclusion that the ‘primordial germs’ in which life on earth began, arose by the operation of natural creative laws. That an energy, not now operating within the area of our experience, was at work, when not-living matter progressed into living structure, is certain. But there is nothing, within the range of our knowledge, that permits the inference that it was brought about by any other means, than such as, if we could have seen them in operation, we should have called ‘laws’ of nature. This view surely ennobles without limit our fatally humanized view of creative action. ‘The beginning’ was thus, by the unsearchable mystery of a creative mind and will, the _potentiality_ of all the universe through all its duration; which it only required ‘time’ in which the potential powers and modes should operate, to make actual, in the universe we see.

As the highest mental powers and products of the most gifted of our race, were originally potential in the primitive ovum from which each took his origin, so, it is congruous, and capable of being grasped by our thought although it cannot be portrayed by our imagination, that the mind and will of the inscrutable Creator prevised and preordered the whole series of conditions which, by their immutable action, interaction, and rhythmic concurrence as ‘laws,’ evolved the universe.