In introducing here the views of Dr. Gould in a discussion with Professor Mach, I am fully aware of the great difference that obtains between the two. While Professor Mach's thought moves in an outspoken monistic direction, Dr. Gould presents a bold dualism, attributing to all life, to the lichen on the withered rock no less than to the human soul, an extramundane origin. Why should we not then rather adopt the more consistent theological supernaturalism which attributes to inorganic nature also an extramundane origin, thus to realise by a short cut a complete unitary world-conception?
Dr. Gould's proposition is contained in the following:
"Certain confused and confusion-breeding philosophers, in the interests of a theoretical monism or pantheism pretend to find, or to believe, that the organic is born out of the inorganic, that the physical world shows evidence of design, that life and mentality were implicate and latent in pre-existent matter. Yet they will accept the evidence against spontaneous generation derived from the fact that if you kill all organic life by intense heat and then exclude life from without you will never find life to arise. But it is plain that in the condensation of the dust of space into suns and planets, all organic life was killed in the hottest of all conceivable heat. But as the planets cool, life appears. It must have come from without, and must therefore be a universal self-existent power."
#What can externality of life mean?#
The idea that "life must have come from without" is not quite clear. Does Dr. Gould mean "from without our planetary system, out of other planetary systems"? If so, the same objection holds good: In other planetary systems also when they were in a nebular state "all organic[85] life was killed in the hottest of all conceivable heat." Shall we perhaps consider the cold interstellar regions as the place whence life does come? And if "from without" means "from without the whole universe," we should be driven back to the old supernaturalistic dualism which regards nature as dead and life as a foreign element that has been blown into the nostrils of material forms so as to animate them.
[85] Dr. Gould does not seem to make a distinction between "organic" and "organised." We should here prefer the expression "organised life." Carbon is an "organic substance" but not an "organised substance." A cell and its protoplasm, however, are "organised substance."
#A modern thinker on the externality of life.#
Dr. Gould proposes his theory of the external origin of life, with great confidence, in the name of modern science. Must we add that modern science is very far from sustaining his view? Professor Clifford touches the subject of spontaneous generation in his article "Virchow on the Teaching of Science." He says:
"Why do the experiments all 'go against' spontaneous generation? What the experiments really prove is that the coincidence which would form a Bacterium—already a definite structure reproducing its like—does not occur in a test-tube during the periods yet observed…. The experiments have nothing whatever to say to the production of enormously simpler forms, in the vast range of the ocean, during the ages of the earth's existence…. We know from physical reasons that the earth was once in a liquid state from excessive heat. Then there could have been no living matter upon it. Now there is. Consequently non-living matter has been turned into living matter somehow. We can only get out of spontaneous generation by the supposition made by Sir W. Thompson, in jest or earnest, that some piece of living matter came to the earth from outside, perhaps with a meteorite. I wish to treat all hypotheses with respect, and to have no preferences which are not entirely founded on reason; and yet whenever I contemplate this
simpler protoplasmic shape
Which came down in a fire-escape,