Post 24087
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Could one by analyzing a hive of bees find out the secret of its organization–its unity as an aggregate of living insects? Behold its wonderful economics, its division of labor, its complex social structure,–the queen, the workers, the drones,–thousands of bees without any head or code of laws or directing agent, all acting as one individual, all living and working for the common good. There is no confusion or cross-purpose in the hive. When the time of swarming comes, they are all of one mind and the swarm comes forth. Who or what decides who shall stay and who shall go? When the honey supply fails, or if it fail prematurely, on account of a drought, the swarming instinct is inhibited, and the unhatched queens are killed in their cells. Who or what issues the regicide order? We can do no better than to call it the Spirit of the Hive, as Maeterlinck has done. It is a community of mind. What one bee knows and feels, they all know and feel at the same instant. Something like that is true of a living body; the cells are like the bees: they work together, they build up the tissues and organs, some are for one thing and some for another, each community of cells plays its own part, and they all pull together for the good of the whole. We can introduce cells and even whole organs, for example a kidney from another living body, and all goes well; and yet we cannot find the seat of the organization. Can we do any better than to call it the Spirit of the Body?
Our French biologist is of the opinion that the artificial production of that marvel of marvels, the living cell, will yet take place in the laboratory. But the enlightened mind, he says, does not need such proof to be convinced that there is no essential difference between living and non-living matter.
Professor Henderson, though an expounder of the mechanistic theory of the origin of life, admits that he does not know of a biological chemist to whom the “mechanistic origin of a cell is scientifically imaginable.” Like Professor Loeb, he starts with the vital; how he came by it we get no inkling; he confesses frankly that the biological chemist cannot even face the problem of the origin of life. He quotes with approval a remark of Liebig’s, as reported by Lord Kelvin, that he (Liebig) could no more believe that a leaf or a flower could be formed or could grow by chemical forces “than a book on chemistry, or on botany, could grow out of dead matter.” Is not this conceding to the vitalists all that they claim? The cell is the unit of life; all living bodies are but vast confraternities of cells, some billions or trillions of them in the human body; the cell builds up the tissues, the tissues build up the organs, the organs build up the body. Now if it is not thinkable that chemism could beget a cell, is it any more thinkable that it could build a living tissue, and then an organ, and then the body as a whole? If there is an inscrutable something at work at the start, which organizes that wonderful piece of vital mechanism, the cell, is it any the less operative ever after, in all life processes, in all living bodies and their functions,–the vital as distinguished from the mechanical and chemical? Given the cell, and you have only to multiply it, and organize these products into industrial communities, and direct them to specific ends,–certainly a task which we would not assign to chemistry or physics any more than we would assign to them the production of a work on chemistry or botany,–and you have all the myriad forms of terrestrial life.