Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics / With Some of Their Applications

by William Thomas Thornton

Here, however, our lay preacher candidly warns us that by the vast majority of his clerical brethren this doctrine would be denounced as rankest heresy, and that whoever accepts it is placing his foot on the first rung of a ladder which, in most people's estimation, is the 'reverse of Jacob's, and leads to the antipodes of heaven.' He frankly owns that the terms of his propositions are distinctly materialistic: nay, that whoever commits himself to them will be temporarily landed in 'gross materialism.' Not the less, however, does he, mingling consolation with admonition, recommend us to plunge boldly into the materialistic slough, promising to point out a way of escape from it, and insisting, indeed, that through it lies the only path to genuine spiritualistic truth.

In pronouncing this to be exceedingly evil counsel, as with the most unfeigned respect for its author I feel bound at once to do, it might not be necessary for me to undertake a detailed topographical survey of the path alluded to. It might, perhaps, suffice to specify the conclusions to which the path is represented as leading, in order to show that those conclusions cannot possibly be reached by any such route. By Professor Huxley himself they are thus described:—We know nothing of matter 'except as a name for the unknown and hypothetical cause of states of our own consciousness,' nor of spirit, except that 'it also is a name for an unknown and hypothetical cause of states of consciousness. In other words matter and spirit are but names for the imaginary substrata of groups of natural phenomena.'

But if matter be not a thing, but a name, and a name too not for a real, but only an imaginary thing, one perfect certainty is that matter cannot possibly be composed either wholly or in part of molecules, and, by necessary consequence, that life cannot possibly be 'the product of any disposition of material molecules,' nor the phenomena of life be 'expressions of molecular changes in the matter of life.' Of the particular Huxleian doctrine which we are considering, the two moieties are absolutely irreconcileable; so that on the assumption that either moiety were true, the truth of that moiety would be decisive against the other. If matter have no real, and only a nominal existence, life, which is undeniably a reality, cannot be a property of matter. If life, being an undisputed reality, be a property of matter, matter must needs be a reality also, and not merely a name. Any one, however, who, like myself, is thoroughly convinced that both halves of the doctrine are equally and utterly erroneous, is precluded from employing one for the refutation of the other, and in order to prove, as I shall now attempt to do, that life is in no sense either a product or a property of matter, must resort for the purpose to independent reasoning.

I commence by defining one of the principal terms occurring in the debate. When in scientific discourse we speak of anything as a property of an object, we mean thereby not simply that it is a thing belonging to the object, but also that it is a thing without which the object could not subsist. We mean that it is one of the constituents inherent in and inseparable from the object, whose union gives to the object its distinctive character. When we call fluidity at one temperature, solidity at another, and vaporisation at a third, properties of water, we mean that matter which did not liquefy, congeal, and evaporate at different temperatures would not be water. The habits of exhibiting these phenomena, in conjunction with certain other habits, make up the aquosity or wateriness of water. They are parts of water's nature, and, in the absence of any one of them, water would not be its own self, and could not exist. But in no such sense, nor in any sense whatever, is the life or vitality whereby what we are accustomed to call animated are distinguished from inanimate objects, essential to the existence of the species of matter termed matter of life or protoplasm. Take from water its aquosity, and water ceases to be water; but you may take away vitality from protoplasm, and yet leave protoplasm as much protoplasm as before. Vitality, therefore, evidently bears to protoplasm a quite different relation from that which aquosity bears to water. Protoplasm can do perfectly well without the one, but water cannot for a moment dispense with the other. Protoplasm, whether living or lifeless, is equally itself; but unaqueous water is unmitigated gibberish. But if protoplasm, although deprived of its vitality, still remains protoplasm, vitality plainly is not indispensable to protoplasm, is not therefore a property of protoplasm.

And that it is not a product of protoplasm, or a result of any particular arrangement of protoplasmic particles or molecules, is not less easily or unanswerably demonstrable. For if it were, as long as the particular molecular arrangement remained unaltered, life would necessarily be in attendance; an amputated joint would, until decomposition set in, be as much alive as the trunk from which it had been lopped, even as water poured from a jug into a glass is quite as much liquid as the water remaining in the jug. There would be no such thing as dead meat, which was not putrid as well as dead, any more than water can freeze without changing from a fluid to a solid; and there would moreover be production antecedent in origin to its own producer. The force of the last at least of these objections is not to be resisted. Water, ammonia, and carbonic acid cannot, it is admitted, combine to form protoplasm, unless a principle of life preside over the operation. Unless under those auspices the combination never takes place. At present, whenever assuming its presidential functions, the principle of life seems to be invariably embodied in a portion of pre-existing protoplasm; but there certainly was a time when the fact was otherwise. Time was, as geology places beyond all doubt, when our globe and its appurtenances consisted wholly of inorganic matter, and possessed not one single animal or vegetable inhabitant. In order, then, that any protoplasm or the substance of any organism should have been brought into existence in the first instance, life plainly must have been already existent. It must at one time have been possible for life, without being previously embodied, to mould and vivify inert matter; and it must needs have been by unembodied life that inorganic matter was first organised and animated. There is no possible alternative to this conclusion, except that of supposing that death may have given birth to life—that absolutely lifeless and inert matter may have spontaneously exerted itself with all the marvellous energy requisite for its conversion into living matter, exerting for the purpose powers which, under the conditions of the case, it could not have acquired without exercising before it acquired them. Whoever declines to swallow such absurdity has no choice but to admit that unembodied life must have been the original manufacturer of protoplasm: but to admit this, and yet to suppose that when now-a-days embodied life is observed to give birth to new embodied life, the credit of the operation belongs not to the life itself but to its protoplasmic embodiment, is much the same as to suppose that when a tailor, dressed in clothes of his own making, makes a second suit of clothes, this latter is the product not of the tailor himself but of the clothes he is wearing.

Thus, irrespectively of whatever grounds there may be for believing that life still does, it is incontestable that life once did, exist apart from protoplasm; and that protoplasm both may and continually does exist apart from what is commonly understood by life, must be obvious to every one who is aware that protoplasm is the substance of which all plants and all animals are composed, and has observed also that plants and animals are in the habit of dying. That matter and life are inseparably connected cannot, therefore, it would seem, be asserted except in total disregard of the teachings both of reason and observation, and 'the popular conception of life as a something which works through matter but is independent of it,' would seem to be as true as it is popular. If the only choice allowed to us be between 'the old notion of an Archæus governing and directing blind matter,' and the new conception of life as the product of a certain disposition of material molecules, the absolute certainty that the latter conception is wrong, may be fairly urged as equivalent to certainty, equally absolute, that the former notion is right.

How far soever it may be true that, as Professor Huxley says, 'the progress of physical science means, and has in all ages meant, the extension of the province of matter and causation,' it is certainly not true that, as he proceeds to predict, the same province will ever be extended sufficiently to banish from the region of human thought not 'spontaneity' simply, but likewise 'spirit.' In one direction at least, limits are clearly discernible which scientific investigation need not hope to overleap. How much soever we may eventually discover of the changes whereby inorganic matter becomes gradually adapted for the reception of life, physical science can never teach us what or whence is the life that eventually takes possession of the finished receptacle. Possibly we at length may, as Professor Huxley doubts not that we by-and-by shall, see how it is that the properties peculiar to water have resulted from the properties peculiar to the gases whose junction constitutes water; and similarly how the characteristic properties of protoplasm have sprung from properties in the water, ammonia, and carbonic acid that have united to form protoplasm; but knowing all this, we shall not be a hair's breadth nearer to the more recondite knowledge up to which it is expected to lead. To extract the genesis of life from any data that completest acquaintance with the stages and processes of protoplasmic growth can furnish, is a truly hopeless problem. Given the plan of a house, with samples of its brick and mortar, to find the name and nationality of the householder, would be child's play in comparison. Life, as we have seen, is not the offspring of protoplasm, but something which has been superinduced upon, and may be separated from, the protoplasm that serves as its material basis. It is, therefore, distinct from the matter which it animates, and, being thus immaterial, cannot possibly become better known by any analysis of matter.

Of this emphatically vital question Professor Huxley, as has been already intimated, takes a diametrically opposite view. He does not merely, in sufficiently explicit terms, deny that there is any intrinsic difference between matter and spirit, and affirm the two to be, in spite of appearances, essentially identical. If this were all, I at any rate should not be entitled to object, for I shall myself presently have occasion to use very similar language, although attaching to it a widely different meaning from that with which it is used by Professor Huxley. But the latter goes on to avow his belief that the human body, like every other living body, is a machine, all the operations of which will sooner or later be explained on physical principles, insomuch that we shall eventually arrive at a mechanical equivalent of consciousness, even as we have already arrived at a mechanical equivalent of heat. He considers that with the same propriety with which the amount of heat which a pound weight produces by falling through the distance of a foot, may be called its equivalent in one sense, may the amount of feeling which the pound produces by falling through a foot of distance on a gouty big toe, be called its equivalent in another sense, to wit, that of consciousness. Yet he protests against these tenets being deemed materialistic, which, he declares, they certainly neither are nor can be, for that while he himself certainly holds them, he as certainly is not himself a materialist. Professor Huxley is among the last to be suspected of talking anything, as Monsieur Jourdain did prose, without knowing it. He knows perfectly well that he has here been talking materialism, but he insists that his materialism is only another form of idealism. He seeks to evade the seemingly inevitable deduction from his premises by representing both matter and spirit as mere names, and names, too, not for real things, but for fanciful hypotheses which may be spoken of indifferently in materialistic or in spiritualistic terms, thought in the one case being treated as a form of matter, and matter in the other as a form of thought. The identity of matter and spirit is, in short, represented by him as consisting in this: that the existence of both is merely nominal, or at best merely ideal.

Ordinary folk may perhaps be somewhat slow to derive from this compromising theory all the comfort which its author deems it capable of affording. Most of us may, probably, be inclined to think that we might as well have been left to fret in the frying-pan of materialism as be cast headlong into idealistic fire, to no better end than that of being there fused body and soul together, and sublimated into inapprehensible nothingness. Our immediate concern, however, is not with the pleasantness of the theory, but with its truth; in proceeding to test which we shall probably find that there is as little warrant for idealising matter after this fashion as we have already seen that there is for materialising mind.

The originator of the theory about to be examined, or rather, perhaps, of a somewhat different theory out of which this has been developed—not to say perverted—may, without much inaccuracy, be pronounced to be Descartes. He it was who, perceiving that we are surrounded on all sides by illusions of all sorts, that not only is there no authority or testimony implicitly to be depended on, but that our senses likewise often play the traitor, and that we can never be perfectly sure whether we are really seeing, hearing, or feeling, or merely thinking or dreaming that we see, hear, or feel, and looking anxiously around for one single point at least on which complete confidence might be placed, discovered such a point in thought. Whatever else we may doubt about, we cannot, he justly argued, doubt that there are thoughts. If it were possible to doubt this, our very doubt would be thought, constituting and presenting as evidence the very existence doubted of. Our thoughts, then, are unquestionably real existences. They may be delusive, but they cannot possibly be fictitious.