Then what lives is, in its qualities, utterly unlike—sharply marked off from—what is not living. Yet the elements that make up the living stuff are the most common on the earth. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen: we know them each and all; we know their properties and reactions on each other, and on all the minor elements of the living matter; but that knowledge only complicates the nature of the problem. The mystery of life is, not that any occult elements compose the matter in which it dwells; the mystery of life consists solely in the question, how the elements that make up protoplasm can be so combined, as, by their combination, to acquire the splendid and solitary properties of that which lives.
Manifestly, then, there was a time in the past history of the globe, when its matter was without life, and therefore there must have been a time, perhaps at a point of intense activity in the not-living matter of the globe, when it became endowed with the properties of life.
By what agency that transcendent upward movement was wrought, science claims no vocation to inquire. But let the earth, and air, and sea, with all their teeming denizens, attest,—that power was competent.
Now let us ask, can we as rational beings account for all the properties of living things in terms of matter and motion? Will vibrating atoms, with millenniums of ages to work in, but no power to direct them, explain the wonder? Was the transmutation of not-living matter into living brought about merely by what we can reduce to solid geometry and transcendental numbers? atoms, which we can approximately measure, dancing to the rhythm of complex motion?
All that mechanical evolution has to work with, is atoms and motions. Pile the atoms into complexities too large for clear thought, cluster molecule round molecule, and let them beat in multitudinous harmonies defiant of conception, yet all you have is matter in motion. It is not life with its sentiency; it is not life with its self-chosen movement; it is not life with its power to construct its own substance out of matter that is dead, and to multiply its kind ad libitum.
And yet Mr. Spencer begins by taking what no mental manipulation of the naked formula of his philosophy could provide, the ‘elements’ of our present chemistry; and by imagining higher and higher complexities of atomic structure a complicated molecule is reached; and then, by a change in name, which is justified by no change in the facts, he calls the complex substance organic matter; and by simply continuing this process, thinks he sees it become living.[16]
The justification of all this is the affirmation ‘that organic matter was not produced all at once,’ and that there is in the laboratory of the chemist ‘what we may literally call artificial evolution.’ Mr. Spencer instances a laboratory product of what is counted a sufficiently typical organic compound.[17] But to obtain it the chemist has to employ no less than twenty distinct chemical and physical processes, involving many varying temperatures, from a red heat to the intensity of the electric arc, and between thirty and forty reagents and their products, are employed in the process. Compare this with the silent and impenetrable simplicity of the chemistry of life, and vivid and striking is the contrast. And yet when this product of the chemist lies before you, produced by the tremendous relative labours of the laboratory, it is as far off from dead white of egg, to say nothing of living protoplasm, as the qualities of a flint pebble are from the qualities of the diamond.
The facts of nature—surely our safest guide—declare that the transition from not-life to life is abrupt. The break is absolute and clear. A ‘complex molecule’ is a molecule of atoms in motion,—nothing more. More atoms and more motion cannot, by themselves, as Mr. Spencer would teach, make it ‘organic;’ much less can any further addition of atoms and tremors make it live. It is in vain for Haeckel to call the simplest moneron that lives ‘primeval slime,’ or to call numbers of them ‘individualized lumps of albumen.’ It is a travesty. Under the same lens place ‘a lump of albumen’ and the lowest living infusorian, and a voiceless contradiction of Haeckel’s phrase which none can ever question is indubitably given. The infusorian lives; the albumen is dead. The infusorian constructs the vital matter of its own body from the heterogeneous matter in which it lives; the albumen decomposes as it lies there. The infusorian has soon multiplied by millions, while the albumen disappears by decadence. To write of living monera as ‘albumen,’ or of ‘complex molecules’ with nothing more than their complexity, as living, is to contradict, in the name, the essential and distinguishing qualities of both.
This impropriety may be yet more manifest by another quotation from Haeckel. His aim is to endeavour by the use of vague language to reduce the impassable gulf between the living and the not-living, and he writes of the animal ovum, as ‘a little lump of albumen in which another albuminous body is enclosed—the nucleus.’ What profound trifling is this! Think of, say a human ovum, an invisible particle less than the hundredth of an inch in diameter; it lives; and there lies coiled up in the mystery of its minuteness all the potentiality of the highest manhood; all the possible power of Socrates, or Homer, or Goethe. Is that simply ‘a lump of albumen’? Not unless a man can be justly described as such, by the bottles of chemical substances to which his body can be reduced.
Even Mr. Spencer pleads that ‘the lowest living things are not, properly speaking, organisms at all, for they have no distinctions of parts, no traces of organization.’ If it were true that our lenses cannot reveal organization in the lowliest and smallest organisms, does it follow that there is none? Will Mr. Spencer risk the validity of the doctrine of material atoms on the ability of our lenses to show the atom? Surely not.