The Study of Ferments
But how were those complex organic bodies formed, especially those vastly complex proteids with which all life whatsoever, as we know it, is invariably associated? Apart from the laboratories of the synthetic chemists of to-day, these compounds are always the products of pre-existing life, and yet without them there could be no pre-existing life.
Mystery of the Cell
It is my belief that this most difficult question, which quite baffles us, will seem simple and straightforward in another generation, when science has devoted itself on a large scale to a study now in its very infancy—I mean the study of those curious bodies which chemists call ferments. The properties of ferments are shared both by the familiar ferments, such as trypsin and pepsin, and also by certain inorganic substances, such as the metal platinum. Now, though pepsin is a product of living cells, platinum is certainly not. Altogether apart from the living world there are substances which have powers of fermentation; and ferments do not act exclusively, as is erroneously supposed, in breaking down complex compounds, but also build them up from their constituents. The powers of a ferment, moreover, are, so far as we know, inexhaustible. All life whatever is exercised by ferments, and it is true that life, chemically considered, is “a series of fermentations.” Now, there is quite recent evidence already which seems to show that certain ferments, acting in suitable material, have the power of reproducing themselves—that is to say, of converting that material into their like. These facts are highly suggestive, and it is difficult to refrain from suggesting that the gap between living and lifeless matter, which seemed so absolute to our ancestors, and which even to us, who have a new conception of matter, seems wide enough, may yet be bridged by the ferments. We are far too apt, I think, to assume that when we can see no intermediate stage there were no intermediate stages, and thus to make difficulties for ourselves. We declare that life began as a single cell, which was the starting-point of organic evolution. I myself believe rather that the cell constitutes the acme of a vast epoch of evolution, which may yet be reproduced in brief in the laboratory. Denying or declining to think of this, the biologist who knows the amazing complexity and intricacy of the architecture of the cell may well decline to believe that such a thing could spring with a single jump from inorganic matter. We preach and go on preaching that Nature does nothing by jumps, and in the same breath we declare that life began as a simple cell. In another hundred years we may begin to realise that a cell in its own measure and on its own scale is an organism, as complex and mature a product of evolution as a society, or, for the matter of that, as the atom of modern chemistry!
But the reader will legitimately declare that so long as the spontaneous generation of life to-day in the most favourable circumstances is a proved impossibility, he cannot be expected to accept the doctrine of its spontaneous origin in the past. There are signs, however, that the biologists are now beginning to listen to Dr. Charlton Bastian, the sole survivor from the great controversy of the ’seventies, whose book, “The Evolution of Life,” was published only a few months ago. Against Pasteur and Tyndall and Huxley, Dr. Bastian maintained that their experiments, asserted to be conclusive, were not conclusive—the facts observed were certainly facts, but the deductions were unwarrantable. The experiments only proved the impossibility under the experimental conditions. The difference is the difference between proving what you set out to prove, and begging the whole question. First establish conditions under which spontaneous generation is impossible, then demonstrate its non-occurrence under those conditions, and thence infer that it is impossible under any conditions.
The Creed of the Future
The student is right in declining to believe in the spontaneous beginning of life upon the earth so long as the possibility of spontaneous generation to-day is denied, but there are not a few who think that the most conservative attitude that can be adopted is one of suspended judgment.
The present philosophic tendency is undoubtedly in the direction of a return to the ancient conception that matter is not without its own degree of life, and that the distinction between the organic and the inorganic is a distinction of degree and not radical. Nature does not admit of being sorted into any of our puny categories. As the facts accumulate they point more and more definitely towards the opinion that hylozoism, or the doctrine of potential life in all matter, will be part of the scientific creed of the future.
Controversies as to the origin of life, judged in the light of this great conception, seem to become trivial if not puerile. Knowing, as we now do, that Plato’s conception of matter was as false as it possibly could be, and having had revealed to us by radio-activity the omnipresence within the very atoms of matter, of forces incessant and stupendous, we find the doctrine of vitalism, however stated, to be wholly meaningless; we find that the gap between the living and the lifeless is by no means abysmal or impassable.