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Updated: June 10, 2025
"In the pursuit of my investigations I was unconsciously led into the border region of physics and physiology. To my amazement, I found boundary lines vanishing, and points of contact emerging, between the realms of the living and the non-living. Inorganic matter was perceived as anything but inert; it was athrill under the action of multitudinous forces.
Yet even numbers are certainly more suggestive of mechanics than of life, while odd numbers seem to go more with the freedom and irregularity of growing things. One may make pretty positive assertions about non-living things. Crystals, so far as I know, are all even-sided, some are six and some eight-sided; snowflakes are of an infinite variety of pattern, but the number six rules them.
There is another little difficulty in the question whether the matter that I suppose introduced into the parents' bodies during their life- histories, and that goes to form the germs that afterwards become their offspring, is living or non-living.
Thus the German physiologist Verworn, the determined enemy of the old conception of life, in his great work on "Irritability," has recourse to "the specific energy of living substances." One is forced to believe that without this "specific energy" his "living substances" would never have arisen out of the non-living.
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."
Alfred Russell Wallace, who, with Darwin, devised the evolution theory, says: "There must have been three interpositions of a Divine and supernatural power to account for things as they are: the agreement of science with Genesis is very striking: There is a gulf between matter and nothing; one between life and the non-living; and a third between man and the lower creation; and science can not bridge them!"
Here is an action not prompted by the environment, but by the morphological needs of the tree, and it illustrates how different is its unity from the unity of a mere machine. I am only aiming to point out that in all living things the material forces behave in a purposive way to a degree that cannot be affirmed of them in non-living, and that, therefore, they imply intelligence.
The amount of living matter in the universe, so far as we can penetrate it, compared with the non-living, is, in amount, like a flurry of snow that whitens the fields and hills of a spring morning compared to the miles of rock and soil beneath it; and with reference to geologic time it is about as fleeting.
Our science can describe the processes of a living body, and name all the material elements that enter into it, but it cannot tell us in what the peculiar activity consists, or just what it is that differentiates living matter from non-living. Its analysis reveals no difference.
In other words, I think that every investigation of civic, and for that matter country life should be studied from two aspects: to note the peculiarities, growth and development of the material, non-living and non-thinking elements in the problem the buildings, their geographical position, their age, their fitness for past and present life, and the distinctive local features that are evolving or retrogressing with the multiplication of some trades and industries and the decline of others in each area that is studied; the change in the quality of the citizens themselves through racial, educational, and other factors, noting how far ideals are altering, not only in the mass of individuals taken as a whole, but also by examining the changing outlook in every trade and profession.
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