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He must either admit of a break in the course of nature and the introduction of a new principle, the vital principle, which, if he is a man of science, he finds it hard to do; or he must accept the theory of the physico-chemical origin of life, which, as a being with a soul, he finds it equally hard to do.
The living and the non-living mark off the two grand divisions of matter in the world in which we live, as no two terms merely descriptive of chemical and physical phenomena ever can. Life is a motion in matter, but of another order from that of the physico-chemical, though inseparable from it. We may forego the convenient term "vital force." Modern science shies at the term "force."
And do such conclusions affect in any way the conclusions now current? In the first place, it seems inferable from physico-chemical facts at large, that only through the instrumentality of those combinations which formed the elements, did the concentration of diffused nebulous matter into concrete masses become possible.
Combining them with the mechanical theory of heat and the doctrine of the conservation of energy, which are also products of our time, physicists have arrived at an entirely new conception of the nature of gaseous bodies and of the relation of the physico-chemical units of matter to the different forms of energy.
The rigidly scientific man sees no need of the conception of a new form or kind of force; the physico-chemical forces as we see them in action all about us are adequate to do the work, so that it seems like a dispute about names.
Analysis will undoubtedly resolve the process of organic creation into an ever-growing number of physico-chemical phenomena, and chemists and physicists will have to do, of course, with nothing but these. But it does not follow that chemistry and physics will ever give us the key to life. A very small element of a curve is very near being a straight line. And the smaller it is, the nearer.
On page 144 the Duke of Argyll quotes me as omitting "for the present any consideration of a factor which may be distinguished as primordial;" and he represents me as implying by this "that Darwin's ultimate conception of some primordial 'breathing of the breath of life' is a conception which can be omitted only 'for the present." Even had there been no other obvious interpretation, it would have been a somewhat rash assumption that this was my meaning when referring to an omitted factor; and it is surprising that this assumption should have been made after reading the second of the two articles criticised, in which this factor omitted from the first is dealt with: this omitted third factor being the direct physico-chemical action of the medium on the organism.
And, with these partial views put end to end, you will not make even a beginning of the reconstruction of the whole, any more than, by multiplying photographs of an object in a thousand different aspects, you will reproduce the object itself. So of life and of the physico-chemical phenomena to which you endeavor to reduce it.
In the latter case, the anthropo- or geo-centric view came to an end when it was shown that the motions of the planets were regulated by Newton's law, and that there was no room left for the activities of a guiding power. Likewise, in the realm of instincts, when it can be shown that these instincts may be reduced to elementary physico-chemical laws, the assumption of design becomes superfluous."
In his concluding chapter, after a discussion of the theories of Darwin, Nägeli, and Weismann, he postulates, for variation, heredity, and species-formation in particular, “forces other than physico-chemical,” “let us call them frankly psychical.” A very fresh and lucid presentation of the whole case is given by Borodin, Professor of Botany in St.
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