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Updated: June 10, 2025
But the enlightened mind, he says, does not need such proof to be convinced that there is no essential difference between living and non-living matter. Professor Henderson, though an expounder of the mechanistic theory of the origin of life, admits that he does not know of a biological chemist to whom the "mechanistic origin of a cell is scientifically imaginable."
Professor Schäfer, in his presidential address before the British Association in 1912, argued that all the main characteristics of living matter, such as assimilation and disassimilation, growth and reproduction, spontaneous and amoeboid movement, osmotic pressure, karyokinesis, etc., were equally apparent in the non-living; therefore he concluded that life is only one of the many chemical reactions, and that it is not improbable that it will yet be produced by chemical synthesis in the laboratory.
In the body of a small child there is still comparatively little contrast between living and non-living organs. There is equally little contrast between sleeping and waking condition in its soul. And the nature of the soul at this stage is volition throughout.
Lastly, we are told by the anonymous writer already quoted that at the present time discussion is chiefly concentrated on the question as to whether life is dependent only on the physical and chemical properties of the living substance, protoplasm, or whether there is at work an independent vital principle which sharply separates living from non-living matter!
A comprehensive view of nature, living and non-living, past and present, discovers scores of illuminating connections, and even sees at times the inevitable sequence of events.
All things have evolved, if they have evolved at all, by chance. Now, over against this doctrine of chance there stands the monumental fact that throughout nature, living and non-living, there runs a principle of design. The minerals, the plants, the animals, all exhibit, as even the superficial observer knows or might know, a plan.
The available chemical knowledge of the substances of which protoplasm is made up is insufficient to render the vital processes intelligible. It is true, he admits, that many of the phenomena in plants can be explained in purely mechanical terms, but they are only those which may occur also in non-living structures. The specific expressions of life cannot be explained in this way.
For centuries it was one of the beliefs of popular superstition, with its naïve way of regarding nature, that earthworms “developed” from damp soil, and vermin from shavings, and in general that the living arose from the non-living.
And thus you will come to pity all things; you will arrive at universal love. In order to love everything, in order to pity everything, human and extra-human, living and non-living, you must feel everything within yourself, you must personalize everything. For everything that it loves, everything that it pities, love personalizes.
As we go down the scale toward the inorganic, can we find the point where the living and the non-living meet and become one? "Life had to surge a long way up from the depths before a green plant cell came into being." When the green plant cell was found, life was fairly launched.
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