God and the World: A Survey of Thought

by Arthur William Robinson

NOTE

Since the preceding chapters were written, the meeting of the British Association has been held at Birmingham (September, 1913). Its interest was unusually great inasmuch as the President's address and the principal discussions were occupied with the most critical and debatable scientific questions of the present moment. The following extracts will give a general idea of the line taken at the outset by the President, Sir Oliver Lodge.

"Theological controversy is practically in abeyance just now." "It is the scientific allies, now, who are waging a more or less invigorating conflict among themselves, with philosophers joining in." "Ancient postulates are being pulled up by the roots." "The modern tendency is to emphasise the discontinuous or atomic character of everything." "The physical discovery of the twentieth century, so far, is the electrical theory of matter." "So far from Nature not making jumps, it becomes doubtful if she does anything else." "The corpuscular theory of radiation is by no means so dead as in my youth we thought it was." "But I myself am an upholder of ultimate continuity, and a fervent believer in the aether of space."

"I have been called a vitalist, and in a sense I am; but I am not a vitalist if vitalism means an appeal to an undefined 'vital force' (an objectionable term I have never thought of using) as against the laws of chemistry and physics." "There is plenty of physics and chemistry and mechanics about every vital action, but for a complete understanding of it something beyond physics and chemistry is needed." "No mathematics could calculate the orbit of a common house-fly." "I will risk the assertion that life introduces something incalculable and purposeful amid the laws of physics; it thus distinctly supplements those laws, though it leaves them otherwise precisely as they were and obeys them all."

"The Loom of Time is complicated by a multitude of free agents who can modify the web, making the product more beautiful or more ugly according as they are in harmony or disharmony with the general scheme. I venture to maintain that manifest imperfections are thus accounted for, and that freedom could be given on no other terms, nor at any less cost."

"I will not shrink from a personal note summarising the result on my own mind of thirty years of experience of psychical research, begun without predilection—indeed, with the usual hostile prejudice." "The facts so examined have convinced me that memory and affection are not limited to that association with matter by which alone they can manifest themselves here and now, and that personality persists beyond bodily death."

Of the debates on the subsequent days those on "Radiation" and "The Origin of Life" were, perhaps, the most remarkable. At the former the point at issue was the amount of truth contained in Planck's "famous hypothesis that energy was transferred by jumps instead of in a continuous stream." Sir Joseph Larmor evidently expressed the prevailing opinion when he said that "some advance in that direction had become necessary, and old-fashioned physicists like himself had either to take part in it or run the risk of becoming obsolete."

For the discussion about "Life," the three sections of Physiology, Zoology, and Botany were combined. Professor Moore stood stoutly for the older views, and "believed that he could demonstrate a step which connected inorganic with organic creation." Then he gave an abstruse and highly technical account of a process by which in "solutions of colloidal ferric hydroxide, exposed to strong sunlight," compounds could be formed similar to those to be found in the green plant. With a proper grouping of molecules it might be imagined how "colloidal aggregates appeared," and eventually "organic colloids" which "acquired the property of transforming light energy into chemical activity." The speakers who followed seemed to be agreed that, even were such "potentially living matter" to be produced, we should have reached, not the discovery of the secret of life, but only the construction of "its physical vehicle." Professor Hartog strongly protested against the notion that there was "a consensus of opinion among biologists that life was only one form of chemical and physical actions which could be reduced in the laboratory." He wished it to be understood that "the preponderance of weight among scientific men" was opposed to such a position.