A Divine origin of the universe is usually rejected, because the Divinity eludes the methods of science. But we cannot supplant the Deity by enthroning force. Science can tell us what force does, but it can no more find what force is, than what an infinite mind is. Force is an irresistible mental inference from matter in motion, but its ultimate nature is defiantly beyond the reach of science.
It appears, then, that to obtain even the ‘elements’ of our modern chemistry, the philosophy of mechanical evolution must, at the beginning, call in uncovenanted aid. Let us remember this, while for the purposes of argument we allow it. There may have been secured, added, and perhaps altered, motion by the surreptitious ‘outside influence;’ but it can be nothing more. The atoms are still without property, and are only affected by motion. Have we any experience to induce us to believe that atoms without property, even affected by thermal vibrations and pushed by gravity, will build themselves up into the seventy ‘elements’ of chemistry with their specific and inalienable qualities? That, through vibrations of heat and pushings of gravity, they could become hydrogen and mercury, carbon and gold, chlorine and phosphorus! And these properties being thus acquired, by their sheer interactions that all the chemistry, the physics, and the order of all the area of space within the galaxy arose? This is what the formula of the most brilliant philosophy of any age would lead us to infer.
In this relation I do not forget the recent and splendid service done by Mr. Crooks to the philosophical side of chemistry in the record of his researches on ‘The Genesis of the Elements.’ It is a most subtile and exquisite means of endeavouring to deduce the method, the ‘law’ according to which what we know as the ‘chemical elements’ were built up. He obtains indications of a primitive element—a something out of which the elements were evolved. He calls it protyle or first stuff, and from its presence he concludes that the elements, as we know them, ‘are not simple and primordial, that they have not arisen by chance, or been created in a desultory and mechanical manner, but have been evolved from simpler matter—or perhaps indeed from one sole kind of matter.’[14]
But this reduction of matter, as we know it, to a simpler but still highly differentiated condition, only causes reason the more earnestly to demand how the rhythmic and complex method, which we express by the word ‘law,’ came into operation, and was established for ever.
The ‘protyle’ is infinitely more complex than the atoms of the homogeneous nebula. It makes no philosophical difference whether the ultimate atoms of the bodies known as elementary are all alike, or in each instance special. In either case there is infinitely more in the matter they severally make, than can be deduced from motion affecting the primitive atoms.
But not only have we by the formula and constructive method of this philosophy to obtain protyle from the mere effects of motion on primitive atoms; but, by the same means alone, we have to change protyle into the seventy ‘elements;’ above all, without an added factor or a change in the method, we have to rise to life!
Let us reflect. By life in this relation is meant that which lives, an organism endowed with life’s properties. Are these properties unique? Or is there some point of fluxion where the properties of life at their minima arise in the activities of not-life at some undiscovered maxima? A point at which some occult molecular complexities arise, changing matter dead into matter living?
The answer must come, not through our abstract logic, but from our laboratories.
Life, it is well known, has its phenomena inherent in, and strictly confined to, a highly complex compound, with fixed chemical constituents. This compound, in its living state, is known as protoplasm. It is clear, colourless, and, to our finest optical resources, devoid of discoverable structure. There is not a living thing on earth but possesses its life in protoplasm, from a microscopic fungus to man.
To depict the properties of life in irreducible simplicity, take one of the lowliest instances within the present range of science. Let it be one of the exquisitely minute, almost infinitely prolific, and universally diffused living forms that set up and carry on putrefaction. The lesser of them may, when considered as solid specks, vary from the fifty thousand millionth of a cubic inch to the twenty billionth of a cubic inch. I select one that is oval in shape. It moves with the agility of the grayling and the grace of a swallow, the motion resulting from the rhythmic action of two motile fibres.