CHAPTER II
Time hath endless rarities, and shows of all varieties;
which reveals old things in heaven, makes new
discoveries in earth, and even earth itself a discovery.
Sir Thomas Browne.
The green leaf of the tree, the blade of the wheat that gives me bread—I look at them and tell myself, as many a man has told himself before, that if I could read their secrets I should know, as from the 'flower in the crannied wall,' 'what God and man is.' So I might, but only as far as their secrets go. If I could read my own I should go farther and know more. I am man and hold far greater secrets in being man. And I have the inestimable advantage of being inside myself, of being alive, besides looking on at living, of both growing and watching growth. There is no other live creature on earth who can possibly tell me as much as I can tell myself about what it means to be alive. And if the blade of wheat is wonderful beyond words, what am I?
Think of it: I have a history; indeed I am a history, I am time alive, time that accumulates and lasts. I have a past that is not past, because it is at work in my present and is writing its indelible signature on my future. There is no least action in my past that has not left its impress on me, made me different from what I should have been without it, and therefore will make my future different too. My whole history is alive, active and changing in my actions and my change. The history of my forefathers, too, is alive in me and in my character and powers. I have an inheritance from their living; I am as and what I am, in part because they were as and what they were. But I have power and I use it to create myself and recreate my inheritance through an impetus transmitted to me in the transmission to me of my life. Therefore every moment of my life is a unique and original moment of a unique and original history, mine and mine alone, never to be repeated, never to be wholly predicted, even by me. The evolutionist philosophy tells me that I endure, I last, and that all my changes and experiences endure, last, in and with me, changing in themselves and among themselves as though they were alive to influence and interpenetrate each other. Indeed they are alive in me and in my life or they could not endure. They would pass like the stages in the height of a sand heap as it grows, as the little heap it was is merged and lost in the larger heap it is. They would be lost as the flowing tide is lost when the ebb succeeds it. Such changes are mere successions, displacements and replacements; they are not history. They enter history only in sharing that of the universe which itself endures, lasts, and within which they are parts.
I, on the other hand, have a life of my own; I am a maker, shaper, creator. I am a master-worker and freeman in a world of relative necessity. Yet my wonderful living body, through which I do my work, depends for its support on the green blades of grass and corn and the green leaves of the trees. Further—every cell of the millions and millions in my body is like the amoeba and the cells of the plant in consisting of protoplasm. Further still—I began my own life as a speck of protoplasm, and if I could trace all the steps of my pedigree to the first display of life on earth, from which I am sure I am descended, I should (I dare to say) find another protoplasmic speck with which every one of the cells of the vast cellular republic whereby and wherein I live is in historical continuity. Bodily I am immensely complicated; I am a congeries and a commonwealth of cells. But the first cell was also complicated although it was but one. Nothing that lives is simple, no, not even if we carry the idea of life far beyond the arbitrary boundaries commonly set to it now. There is unplumbed mystery in the conjunction of two atoms of hydrogen with one of oxygen to make a third and different substance, water; there is unplumbed mystery in every element and every happening of the world. But some mysterious things are scientifically more complex than others, and among the most complex is this thing, protoplasm. Yet it seems that before life could be manifest in the world the molecular complexity of protoplasm must have been attained. By storing power in building up the atoms of the chemical elements from electrons, and making that power useful by the union of atoms in molecules; then, by a further delicate union between molecules (much after the fashion of widely branching, but only slightly tenacious, magnets) forming larger and ever larger groups, a condition of such plasticity of matter and ready discharge and restoring of power has been attained as makes it fit for the rank of a recognized life. The grouped and complicated molecules, each charged with power, are set as with a double-acting hair-trigger, so ready are they to let go energy in heat and work as these are wanted; so ready also for their rebuilding in the peculiar power of the life with which they are imbued.
There are examples of highly complex union to be seen in the chemist's laboratory and elsewhere which are never called living matter. The chemist speaks of some of them as colloids (we should naturally call many of these jellies, or gums) and he calls protoplasm a colloid too. They have remarkable properties, and the new bio-chemist thinks he may some day make that elaborate colloid with more remarkable properties, which we know as protoplasm. He thinks also that we do ill to confine the first production of life-jellies to the age of steaming seas and cloud-shadowed lagoons, before the Pre-Cambrian geologic times. He tells us that in his opinion it may always be going on and always have gone on since the earth was cool enough to permit of it. He thinks that if all the living creatures we are aware of were swept out of the world to-day there would still be living stuff remaining on it of which we are ignorant now; and that in the course of millenniums this would people it once more. The beginnings of the life-jelly must be so small as to be far out of the reach of our microscopes and every other tool we can bring to bear, as yet, he says. And there, doubtless, he is right.