United States or Bahamas ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It may be that, by and by, philosophers will discover some higher laws of which the facts of life are particular cases very possibly they will find out some bond between physico-chemical phænomena on the one hand, and vital phænomena on the other.
In the simpler physico-chemical processes of nature, entity "X" also would appear, but in other, simpler forms. It would mean that things such as mind and intellect are not limited to the higher living beings, but characteristics akin thereto would be found grading down throughout all living and inanimate nature.
Some think the outer conditions capable of causing change in organisms in a direct manner, in a definite direction, through physico-chemical alterations induced by them in the living substance; such is the hypothesis of Eimer, for example.
The physico-chemical forces do play second fiddle; that inexplicable something that we call vitality dominates and leads them. True it is that a living organism yields to scientific analysis only mechanical and chemical forces a fact which only limits the range of scientific analysis, and which by no means exhausts the possibilities of the living organism.
If mind is a third entity, correlated with the entities of energy and of matter, we should expect that mental activity, or entity "X," should occur not only in the highly complex transformations of energy and of matter taking place in the brains of the highest orders of living beings, but that entity "X" should appear in all physico-chemical reactions, just as energy transformations always occur in transformations of matter, and inversely.
It goes without saying that the theory of life is dependent upon, and in a large measure consists of physico-chemical interpretations, investigations, and methods.
'Atoms' appear to be used as mere names for physico-chemical units which have not yet been subdivided, and 'molecules' for physico-chemical units which are aggregates of the former. And these individualised particles are supposed to move in an endless ocean of a vastly more subtle matter the ether.
In the first place it is said and I take this point first, because the imputation is too frequently admitted by Physiologists themselves that Biology differs from the Physico-chemical and Mathematical sciences in being "inexact." Now, this phrase "inexact" must refer either to the methods or to the results of Physiological science.
"Each link in the living chain may be physico-chemical, but the chain as a whole, and its purpose, is something else."
This allusion to billiard-balls recalls to my mind a striking passage from Tyndall's famous Belfast Address which he puts in the mouth of Bishop Butler in his imaginary argument with Lucretius, and which shows how thoroughly Tyndall appreciated the difficulties of his own position in advocating the theory of the physico-chemical origin of life.
Word Of The Day