"Plato lived." He ate, he drank, he talked divinely. He was the occupant of an admirably constructed life-mansion; one that St. Paul would have looked upon as "the temple of God," and all the world would have recognized as a god-like temple. His head was a study for the Greek chisel; none was ever more perfectly modeled, or artistically executed. All agreed in this. And yet it was not the habitat but the habitant that attracted the admiration of the Greek mind; enkindled its highest enthusiasm; drew all the schools of philosophy, about him at once. It was the lordly occupant of the temple, the indwelling Archeus, presiding over all the organic phenomena and directing all the dynamic powers therein, which was so profoundly present in the living Plato. Even Professor Haeckel, of the famous University of Jena, would not deny this, with all that his new terms "ontogeny" and "phylogeny" may imply. When potential life passed over into actual life in the individual Plato, it was not the pabulum that assimilated the man, but the man the pabulum. If this were not so, then the mere potentiality of growing, as in the case of plants and animals, would be all there is to distinguish the phenomenal manifestation of a Plato from that of a mole or a cabbage-stalk. In other words, if the animating principle of life--or, as the Bible has it, the "animating soul of life"--is not what manifests itself in material embodiment, but the reverse, what can Professor Haeckel mean by his new term "phylogeny," which ought to cover the lines of descent in all organic beings?
If it be a question of mere pabulum, it is altogether mal posé. Pabulum is nothing without a preëxisting "something" to dispose of it. It is not so much as a jelly-mass breakfast for one of Professor Haeckel's "protamoebæ;" for if it were served up in advance, there would be none of his little non-nucleated jelly-eaters to partake of it, much less any of his "protogenes." As the famous Mrs. Glass would say, in her "hand-book of cookery," if you want a delightful "curry," first catch your hare. But our ingenious professor of Jena dispenses with both the hare and the curry, in serving up his pabulum to the "protamoebæ." The improvident pabulum "evolves" its own eaters, and then, spider-like, is eviscerated by them, as was Actaeon by his own hounds. As Life, therefore, begins in the tragedy of Mount Cithæron, it is to be hoped it will end in the delights of Artemis and her bathing nymphs.
Chapter VIII.
Materialistic Theories of Life Refuted.
The methods by which the advocates of a purely physical origin of life seek to establish the correctness of their conclusions, are unfortunately not always attended by uniform results in experimentation. They subject their solutions of organic matter to a very high temperature by means of super-heated flasks, the tubes to which are so packed in red-hot materials that whatever air may enter them shall encounter a much greater degree of heat than that indicated by boiling water. At this temperature (100° C--212° F) they assume that all living organisms perish, especially when the solutions containing them have been kept, for the space of fifteen or twenty minutes, at this standard point of heat. But, in the light of all the experiments which have been made in this direction, there is some doubt as to the entire correctness of their assumption. That many, if not most living organisms, perish at a temperature of 100° C, there is little or no doubt; but that there are some which are much more tenacious of life, that is, possess greater vital resistance to heat, is equally unquestionable.
M. Pasteur, for instance, mentions the spores of certain fungi which are capable of germinating after an exposure of some minutes to a temperature of 120° to 125° C. (248-257° F), while the same spores entirely lose their germinating power after an exposure for half an hour or more to a slightly higher temperature. Dr. Grace-Calvert, in a paper on "The Action of Heat on Protoplasmic Life," recently published in the proceedings of the Royal Society, asserts that certain "black vibrios" are capable of resisting the action of fluids at a temperature as high as 300° F, although exposed therein for half an hour or more. But none of these crucial tests, however diverse in experimental results, really touch the all-important question in controversy. They all relate either to living organisms, or to the seeds and spores of vegetation, not to living indestructible "germs"--invisible vital units--declared to be in the earth itself.
We use the term "vital unit" in the same restricted sense in which the materialists speak of "chemical units," "morphological units," etc., which they admit are invisible in the microscopic field, and hence they can have no positive information as to their destructibility or indestructibility by heat. That this vital unit lies, in its true functional tendencies, between the chemical and morphological units--manifesting itself in the conditions of the one and resulting in the structural development of the other--is no new or startling theory, but one that has been more or less obscurely hinted at by Leibnitz, and even acknowledged as possible by Herbert Spencer. It is this vital unit that assimilates or aggregates protoplasmic matter into the morphological cell, or the initial organism in a vital structure, or an approach towards structural form. Morphological cells are not therefore "units," considered as the least of any given whole, nor are they mere structureless matter, or any more homogeneous in character than in substance. Different chemical solutions give rise to different morphological cells, as differently constituted soils produce different vegetal growths. Change the chemical conditions in any solution or infusion, and you change the entire morphological character of the infusoria appearing therein.[[28]] The cells are living organisms springing from vital units, and can no more manifest themselves independently of these units than life can manifest itself independently of an actual organism. And they make their appearance in the proper environing conditions, just as the oak comes from its primordial germ or vital unit in the chemically changed conditions of the soil. Everywhere the vital germ or unit precedes the vital growth as the plant or tree precedes the natural seeds it bears.
This is not only the logical order, but the exact scientific method of vital manifestation and growth. In this truth lies the whole mystery of vegetal and animal life as hitherto manifested on our globe, with the single exception of man whose crowning distinction it was to receive "a living soul." This may be rejected as a scientific statement, but its verification will appear in the very act of its rejection. Pry as deeply as we may into the arcana of nature in search of exact scientific truth, and we shall ultimately land in one or the other of these propositions,--either that nature was originally endowed with some occult and unknown power "to bring forth," which power is either continuously inherent or continuously imparted, or else "specific creation" was the predetermined plan and purpose, with no higher or more specialized animal or vegetal forms than were specifically created in the beginning. Otherwise, we are inevitably forced back, by our mental processes, which we cannot resist, upon an effect without a cause--a physical law of the universe without any conceivable law-giver--an all-pervading, all-energizing principle of matter which must have existed as a cause infinitely anterior to its first effect. And this is forcing language into such crazy and paralytic conclusions as to utterly destroy its efficiency as a vehicle of thought.
To conceive of the existence of the universe, or of any possible law that may be operative therein, without an adequate antecedent cause, is as metaphysically impossible as to conceive of substance without form, space without extension, or a God who has been superceded in the universe by the operation of his own laws. For if the world-ordaining and world-arranging intelligence of the universe has ceased to ordain and arrange,--if all things therein have been left to the operation of fixed and eternally unchangeable laws--then no further supervisional direction is required on the part of either an infinite or a finite intelligence, and our idea of a God must disappear in the paramount induction of a universe which has successfully risen up in insurrection against its own maker and lawgiver, if it has not remorselessly consigned him to some inconceivable limbo outside of the universe itself. But this Titanic, and worse than satanic, insurrection on the part of a universe of matter and motion, is only the conjectural coinage of the human brain--the wild supposition hazarded by the materialistic mind--and fortunately has no conceivable counterpart outside of it.
But the palpable blunder, in materialistic science, consists in its overlooking the necessary outgrowth of theological ideas in the human mind--as conclusively a phenomenal fact of nature as the invariable uniformity of astronomical movements, the ebb and flow of the tides, or the electro-magnetic waves of the earth itself. And nature furnishes no greater clue to the one set of phenomena than the other. For when we say that bodies act one upon another by the force of gravity, we are no nearer an explication of the force itself, than we should be were we to allege any corresponding manifestation on the part of the human mind. Kant says; "We cannot conceive of the existence of matter without the forces of attraction and repulsion--the conflict of two elementary forces in the universe;" much less can we have any conception of the elementary forces themselves. Science can, therefore, assign no more conclusive reason for overlooking psychical manifestations than physical phenomena. Nor is the one set of phenomena any more marvellous in its manifestations than the other. They may both furnish food for speculative thought and inquiry, and yet the nearer we get to the ultimate implications of either, the more completely are we lost in Professor Tyndall's "primordial haze," from which he assumes that the universe, and all the phenomenal manifestations therein, originally came.