The great influence of Plato taught men to despise matter in this fashion, and there was the everyday experience that a stone lies where it is placed until something from outside moves it, being, therefore, inert, whilst a living creature such as a bird moves freely at its own will. The more strongly men held the natural matter of which the earth is composed to be inert, the more necessary was it to suppose that when life was displayed in it the difference consisted in the taking possession of this dull clay by a vital force—a mystic and wonderful principle of quickening—which endowed even gross, inert matter with activity and power. From the time of Plato until the last few years of the nineteenth century thinkers vied with one another in insisting upon the impotence and grossness and inertness of matter, and each fresh insistence upon this doctrine rendered more necessary a corresponding doctrine of vital force or vitalism, which should explain the amazing transformation undergone by, let us say, the gross and inert matter composing food, when that food was converted by the “living principle” into the tissue of a living creature, and then displayed self-movement.
Philosophy of Dead Matter
This doctrine of vitalism, which held sway for so long, was naturally invoked to explain the origin of life upon the earth, when the advance of astronomy and geology demonstrated a natural evolution for the earth and proved that there must have been a time when no life was possible upon it. The prevalent conception of matter came in at this point and denied altogether any such monstrous doctrine as that the wonderful thing called life could spontaneously arise in the despicable thing called matter. The material of the earth, whether solid, liquid or gaseous, consisted of eternal, unchangeable, and indestructible atoms. These were moved as forces from outside moved them. They had no energy or power of their own. Men simply thought of them as of incredibly minute grains of sand of various shapes and sizes, and it was as impossible to conceive of life being spontaneously generated in a chance heap of inert atoms as to conceive that a heap of grains of sand should organise themselves into a little organism. As for spontaneous generation occurring on the earth to-day, the development of mites from cheese and so forth, that was a very different matter, men must have thought—in so far as they thought at all—since cheese and flesh and so forth were themselves products of life. It is well worth noting that the common doctrine of spontaneous generation was always held in reference to organic materials, such as the slime of the Nile—not the dry sand of the desert. The reader may be inclined to say that men’s beliefs on this subject in the past generation make very confused reading, and indeed, that is true. But the fact is that their beliefs were most confused. The work of Darwin had staggered everybody, and straightforward, systematic, unprejudiced thinking was very nearly impossible in the welter of controversy. Nevertheless, something apparently definite was done. The doctrine of the beginning of life upon the earth was left almost undiscussed, and the accepted notion of the nature of matter—a notion which to us who know radium seems puerile—was left unchallenged in all its falsity. But the work of the great French chemist Pasteur led to a close examination of the belief that humble forms of life are daily produced from lifeless organic materials, and the conclusion was reached that no such spontaneous generation occurs.
Every Living Thing from a Living Thing
This conclusion is of great importance in the history of modern thought, and it was proclaimed with much rejoicing and vigour as a great achievement of science, whilst some of its chief advocates seemed at times to forget the extreme awkwardness of the inferences which had to be made from it. The doctrine may be stated in Latin in the form of the familiar dogma, “Omne vivum ex vivo,” every living thing from a living thing. Just as the existence of a man is quite sufficient to prove to us the prior existence of living human parents, just as we feel sure that every beast of the field has had living parents and that every oak has sprung from an acorn developed in a previous oak, so, according to the doctrine of “Omne vivum ex vivo,” we must believe that every living creature, whether human, animal, or vegetable, whether as big as the mammoth or as small as the smallest microbe not one-twenty-thousandth part of an inch in diameter, has sprung from living parents. Nature, according to this doctrine, was divided—as Nature, being a mighty whole, can never be divided—into two absolute categories, the living and the lifeless, or living matter and dead matter. Dead matter was notoriously dead and impotent, and life could not conceivably arise in it, though it could be used by life for purposes of food. On the other hand, living matter rejoiced in the possession of all those great attributes which lifeless matter lacked, and, in accordance with the contrast between the two kinds of matter, the living could never be produced from the lifeless but only from the living: for every creature, microbe or mammoth or man, we must trace back in imagination a series of living ancestors, differing perhaps in various characters, but always living. This series must be traced back and back and back until——?
Life Evolved from the Lifeless
And there the difficulty arose. For the uninhabitableness of the primitive earth was a fact of which men of science were as certain as if from some habitable planet they had been able to gaze upon it. Notwithstanding the dogma of “Omne vivum ex vivo,” it was impossible to assert that every living creature has an endless series of ancestors. How, then, did life begin?
What we may call the doctrine of the older orthodoxy—the doctrine of special creation, of supernatural interposition for the introduction of a new entity into the scheme of things—offered one alternative. To accept it, however, would be to abandon the whole modern conception of natural law and of a universe which was not created once on a day, and has not been tinkered with subsequently, but from everlasting to everlasting is the continuous expression to us of the Infinite and Eternal Power which to some eyes it veils and to others it reveals. Unless we are to abandon our philosophy, this alternative cannot be accepted, and it is now accepted by no philosophic thinker.
