Post 24764
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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.