Post 00692
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Professor Soddy says, “Natural philosophy may explain a rainbow but not a rabbit.” There is no secret about a rainbow; we can produce it at will out of perfectly colorless beginnings. “But nothing but rabbits will or can produce a rabbit, a proof again that we cannot say what a rabbit is, though we may have a perfect knowledge of every anatomical and microscopic detail.”
To regard life as of non-natural origin puts it beyond the sphere of legitimate inquiry; to look upon it as of natural origin, or as bound in a chain of chemical sequences, as so many late biochemists do, is still to put it where our science cannot unlock the mystery. If we should ever succeed in producing living matter in our laboratories, it would not lessen the mystery any more than the birth of a baby in the household lessens the mystery of generation. It only brings it nearer home.
What is peculiar to organic nature is the living cell. Inside the cell, doubtless, the same old chemistry and physics go on–the same universal law of the transformation of energy is operative. In its minute compass the transmutation of the inorganic into the organic, which constitutes what Tyndall called “the miracle and the mystery of vitality,” is perpetually enacted. But what is the secret of the cell itself? Science is powerless to tell us. You may point out to your heart’s content that only chemical and physical forces are discoverable in living matter; that there is no element or force in a plant that is not in the stone beside which it grew, or in the soil in which it takes root; and yet, until your chemistry and your physics will enable you to produce the living cell, or account for its mysterious self-directed activities, your science avails not. “Living cells,” says a late European authority, “possess most effective means to accelerate reactions and to cause surprising chemical results.”