"O heavy laden soul! kneel down and hear
Thy penance in calm fear;
With thine own lips to sentence all thy sin;
Then, by the judge within
Absolved, in thankful sacrifice to part
For ever with thy sullen heart!"
The Physical Basis Of Life.
[Footnote 128]
[Footnote 128: New Theory of Life. Identity of the Powers and Faculties of all Living Matter. A Lecture by Professor T. H. Huxley. New York World, Feb. 18th, 1869.]
We know this rather remarkable discourse only as republished in the columns of The New York World, where it had a sensational title which we have abridged. Professor Huxley's name stands high among English physicists or scientists, and his discourse indicates considerable natural ability, and familiarity with the modern school of science which seeks the explanation of the universe and its phenomena without recognizing a creator, or any existence but ordinary matter and its various combinations. The immediate purpose of the professor is to prove the physical or material basis of life, and that life in all organisms is identical, originating in and depending on what he calls the protoplasm.
The protoplasm is formed of ordinary matter; say, carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. These elements combined in some unknown way give rise to protoplasm; the protoplasm gives rise to the plant, and, through the plant, to the animal; and hence all life, feeling, thought, and reason originate in the peculiar combination of the molecules of ordinary, inorganic matter. The plant differs from the animal, and the animal from man, only in the different combinations of the molecules of the protoplasm. We see nothing in this theory that is new, or not as old as the physics of the ancient Ionian school.
The only novelty that can be pretended is the assumption that all matter, even inorganic, is, in a certain sense, plastic, and therefore, in a rudimentary way, living. The same law governs the inorganic and the organic world. But even this is not new. Many years ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson asserted the identity of gravitation and purity of heart, and we ourselves are by no means disposed to deny that there is more or less analogy between the formation of the crystal or the diamond and the growth of the plant. It is not, perhaps, too much to say that the law of creation is one law, and we have never yet been convinced of the existence of absolutely inert matter. Whatever exists is, in its order and degree, a vis activa, or an active force. Matter, as the potentia nuda of the schoolmen, is simple possibility, and no real existence at all. There is and can be no pure passivity in nature, or purely passive existences. We would not therefore deny a certain rudimentary plasticity to minerals, or what is called brute matter, though we are not prepared to accept the plastic soul, asserted by Plato, and revived and explained in the posthumous and unfinished works of Gioberti under the term methexis, which is copied or imitated by the mimesis, or the individual and the sensible. Yet since, as the professor tells us, the animal can take the protoplasm only as prepared by the plant, must there not be in inorganic matter a preparation or elaboration of the protoplasm for the use of the plant?
The professor speaks of the difficulty of determining the line of demarcation between the animal and the plant; but is it difficult to draw the line between the mineral and the plant, or between the plant and the inorganic matter from which it assimilates its food or nourishment? Pope sings,
"See through this air, this ocean, and this earth,
All matter quick, and bursting into birth;"