of the inorganic in a purely chemical and mechanical way. Organic form which, in its lowest stages, is so simple, like the moneron and the bathybius, and which stands still lower than a cell, is, moreover, something which there is no difficulty in explaining from inorganic matter. Finally, organic motion which alone is the last and lowest characteristic of the organic in its lowest stage—in which the process of life properly consists, and in which, therefore, we have to recognize the punctum saliens of the whole question—is only an increase and complication of the merely mechanical motion of the inorganic, likewise explainable by mechanical causes. This view Häckel expounds in the thirteenth and partly also in the first chapter of his "Natural History of Creation," and explains the origin of the first and most simple organic individuals either through what he calls autogony in an inorganic fluid, or through plasmogony in an organic fluid—a plasma or protoplasma. In fact, according to him, the only correct idea is that all matter is provided with a soul, that inorganic and organic nature is one, that all natural bodies known to us are equally animated, and that the contrast commonly drawn between the living and the dead world does not exist. This is but a repetition, in a more rhetorical way, of the same idea which "Anonymus" expressed in discussing the question as to the origin of sensation.
DuBois-Reymond—who, in his lecture at Leipzig, pronounced the origin of sensation and of consciousness a problem of natural science, never to be solved—is also of the opinion that the explanation of life from mere mechanism of atoms is very probable, and only a question of time. It is well known that the experimental
attempts at originating the organic through chemistry are at present pursued with an eagerness that can have its stimulus only in the hope of success.
It is clear that the main point of the question does not lie in organic matter or in organic form, but in organic motion, for even the specific of the organic form originates only first through organic motion of life. If, therefore, life is to be explained from mechanical causes, it must also be shown that the merely mechanical motion of inorganic matter produces that motion which we know as organic motion, and how it produces it. The idea of "increase and complication of the inorganic, merely mechanical motion," with which Häckel throws a bridge from the living to the lifeless or from the organic to the inorganic, does not yet give us that proof; it seems rather to be one of those pompous phrases with which people hide their ignorance and make the uncritical multitude believe that the explanation is found: a manipulation against which, among others, Wigand, in his great work, repeatedly protests, as also does the Duke of Argyll in his lecture on "Anthropomorphism in Theology," having especially in his mind the deductions of Spencer. For we may review the whole known series of mechanical motions and their mechanical causes, and imagine their mechanical increase and their mechanical complication the largest possible; and still the life-motion of the organic will never result therefrom. If such a keen psychical and physiological investigator and thinker, and such an authority in the realm of the motions of atoms and molecules, as Gustav Theodor Fechner—"Einige Ideen zur Schöpfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen" ("Some Ideas about the History of the
Creation and Development of Organisms"), Leipzig, 1873, p. 1, f.—can find the whole lasting and effectual difference between the organic and inorganic in nothing else than in the way and manner of motion—namely, that the motion of the organic molecules is different from that of the inorganic molecules—and when he traces this difference with mathematical exactness, then an assertion which simply denies that difference, without attempting to show the identity of the two motions, to say nothing of proving this identity, is nothing more than a clear evidence that the mechanical theory has not yet succeeded in explaining the origin of life, and that those scientists who so haughtily look down upon the abuse of "vital power," to the efficacy of which their antagonists began to resort when their knowledge came to an end, make exactly the same abuse with their "mechanism." That organic motion, even the organic motion of molecules, once present, comes into dependence on the well known laws of mechanism, we naturally will not deny; any more than that the human body, when serving the will of the mind, follows in its motions the laws of physiology and mechanism.
Preyer seems to make a mistake similar to that of those who efface sensation and motion, when, in an essay on the hypothesis of the origin of life, in the "Deutsche Rundschau," Vol. I, 7, he even effaces the difference between life and sensation, and simply identifies life and motion. "Self-motion, called life, and inorganic movement of bodies by agencies outside of themselves, are but quantitatively, intensively, or gradually different forms of motion; not in their innermost being different.... Our will changes many kinds of motion into heat, makes
cold metal to be red-hot simply by hammering.... Likewise inversely, as the law of the conservation of force must require, a part of the eternal heat of the metal can be now and forever transposed into the living motion of our soul." This whole manner of investigation and proof is one of those numerous unconscious logical fallacies which, introduced by Hegel, have gradually attained a certain title by possession. From the observation of a process, they abstract a characteristic, as general as possible,—as, for instance, from the observation of life the characteristic of motion; then they find that the process has the characteristic in common with still other processes—as, for instance, the self-motion of the living has the general characteristic of motion in common with the objective motion of the lifeless; and then they persuade themselves that the process which they try to explain is really explained by having found a quality of this process as comprehensive as possible. And in order to hide the falsity of the conclusion, they also give to the general idea, which they have found to be a characteristic of that process, the same name which the special process has,—as, for instance, they call motion life, no matter whether it is a motion of itself or a being moved, no matter whether it is performed from within or in consequence of an impulse from without; and then they say: "Behold, life is explained; life is nothing but motion." But it can be readily seen that life is also motion, and has therefore this characteristic in common with everything which is moved; but that the specific of that motion called life—namely, self-motion in consequence of an impulse renewing itself from within, and, as Fechner shows,
self-motion in a rotatory direction of the molecules, precisely the same thing which in distinction from other motions we call life,—is not explained, but simply ignored.
There is still another bold hypothesis which we have to mention—namely, that the organic germs were once thrown from other spheres upon the earth by ærolites. Years ago this idea was declared by Helmholtz to be scientifically conceivable; then it was formally asserted and brought into general notice by Sir William Thompson, in his opening address before the annual assembly of the British Association at Edinburgh, in 1871, but rejected as formally and materially unscientific by Zöllner, in the preface to his work, "Nature of Comets," and again defended by Helmholtz in his preface to the second volume of a translation of Thompson and Tait's Theoretical Physics. However, this hypothesis also only defers the solution of the question, and, supposing its scientific possibility, leads either to the remoter question, how life did originate in those other spheres, or to the metaphysical assertion of the eternity of life and of the eternal continuity of the living in the world, and shows therewith very clearly the impossibility of its explanation.
This inexplicability would still exist, if what is quite improbable should happen, namely, that the experimental attempts at artificially producing organic life should be successful, and if thus the question as to the generatio æquivoca, which during the past decades so much alarmed the minds of scientists and theologians, should be experimentally solved and answered in the affirmative. For in view of the hopes of a possible explanation of life, which is expected to be the reward for the success of