Let us suppose that he is right, too, in his main contention. Let us look at inorganic matter with a new eye, seeing in its evolutionary change the forerunner of greater change and greater evolution, the preparer of the narrow pathway by which life approaches to its display, and at last enters on possession of a body that in union with it shall be the germ of lives to come—enters the realm of physical forces and the relative necessity of material things, where and by use of those forces it will subdue necessity to the purposes of freedom. This indeed seems to be the manner and purposing of life as it extends from the single cell to the assemblage of cells that constitutes my body. There is continuity from first to last; and yet the differences between me and the primitive jelly-speck are even more striking than the resemblances. Students of the cell itself and students of my body as merely composed of cells are, naturally, cytologists, histologists, physiologists, embryologists, and the like. But unless there are others, unless students of psychology, ethics, aesthetics, social science, history, and many more, bring their minds to bear on me, I am studied to little sense and in small part. I am obliged to regard myself as not only physical but psychical; I seek after, and sometimes find, goodness and truth and beauty. I admire, I hate or love. I am a hero or a criminal, or both. I sin. In the advance of life from the minute and primitive colloid lump to me amazing things have happened. When I see life making its humble appearance by that speck of jelly, I must in my mind's eye connect it with what I am, and see there in its almost inchoate wonders the promise of myself. And still I must look behind even that first living thing and consider matter as well as life; for the physical potency of that thing was long of building up; and this physical potency has its place in me. The material pathway of life is the pathway of my powers, and it stretches far back into cosmic happenings smaller or (it depends how you look at these high matters and what you see in them) greater still.
We have no need to stretch imagination unaided; we may watch changes going on which indicate or, maybe, reproduce, stages in the creation of our own world and of its very elements. There are stars in which material elements are being either made or destroyed; it is hard for us to say which. In the constellation Argo there are two suns—furnaces of immeasurable heat—in which hydrogen, the lightest and simplest of our elements, is either being born or disintegrated before our eyes. There are other stars where hydrogen is in the same state as that in which we know it here, and more complex elements (for the elements of the chemist are in reality complex; they are only elements for him, because he cannot disintegrate them) are being born or, again, are being destroyed. There are stars in all stages up to the stage of our own sun and beyond, in age and powers; and there are elements of many degrees of complexity. In the series of those stars there is a series of changes which, taken together, mark for us either an ascent of matter from the immaterial, or a descent towards it. There is iron in its very infancy to be seen in some—proto-iron we call it—which we are able to produce ourselves by exposing ordinary iron to the intense heat of the electric vacuum spark and there disrupting it into a simpler mode which the spectroscope detects as it detects it in a star. We are entitled to say that in these changes material elements declare themselves to be things that somewhere and somehow are born and grow, whether in any one stage that we watch they are moving in one direction or another, from birth or down towards death. Indeed the most probable thing is that in the solar furnace-fires both movements are going on together; elements are being born and elements annulled. They have an origin, these elements. Some scientific men suggest to us that they issue from the universal ether that fills the interstellar spaces and the spaces of the stars themselves, of our own bodies, of all things in all worlds. Here the first stones of the pathway on which life travels may have (in their belief) been shaped. And neither chemist nor physicist can even guess at anything beyond. We stop here, as men of science only. It is at a place full of marvels that we are arrested. This ether is so marvellous that some rash men have deemed it competent to replace God. They have asked what need we have of any other God. And, truly, if the creations of worlds that are no more than physical were all a God was needed for, this amazing source of worlds would seem, not so unreasonably, to be enough. Whether the ether is immaterial or not, we might say the same. There are those who hold that it is the first and finest of the elements of matter. For men who know most about it, it is no kind of matter. But its power and fertility remain, however this may be; it is held to be the medium of communication everywhere, between small and great, distant and near; and the womb of the worlds. Undoubtedly it may serve the pseudo-physicist-philosopher in place of God, while he is no more than that.
The pathway for life has been traced back and back to the utmost of the regressive journey of science. We have seen (perhaps) the first stones being fashioned in the fires of the suns; at least we may believe that in some such place and way they have been and are being fashioned. We know—radium has shown us and the proto-iron—how chemical elements can be disintegrated and brought down to lower states of material complexity. In radio-active matter there is more than a hint that they may be brought lower still, returned to the fecund mother from which they came, restored, let us say, to the ether.
We may have learnt—that depends on our prepossessions—we may have learnt in studying this regress to see in what the chemist calls the 'affinity' of one element for another, and in its 'valency' (that is, its ability to grip one or another and even several to itself and take part in building up compounds), a likeness or a congruity with living stuff. And we have seen a living thing as compounded physically of the compounds of the chemist, though not, as yet, compounded by him. Unless our prepossessions form in us irrational prejudice we may gladly follow the clue science puts in our hands, and confess a continuous advance in order upon order of nature from the womb of the ether to ourselves.
CHAPTER III
There the Eternal Fountain is playing its endless
life-streams of birth and death.
Kabir.
We have followed the physicist and the chemist to the farthest point they have reached in their research. They cannot show us anything beyond, and we, unsatisfied, must look elsewhere. The problems of life remain. We ourselves stand on the great pathway, its continuous road of rising orders, and from our place of vantage we contemplate the first living thing. A profound discrepancy, or what seems like one, stares us in the face, the discrepancy between our mastery over things and our self-conscious, self-creative abilities on the one hand, and, on the other, that first humble yet awe-inspiring revelation by elements generated, perhaps, within a white-hot star. Science has nothing to do with meanings and purposes and values in our lives or with our concern for them. Indeed it has nothing to do, in strictness, with meanings and purposes and values anywhere. This is the business of philosophy and of all ordinary men.