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Updated: June 10, 2025
But given a happy concurrence of qualities, say a certain union of heat and cold, and a new power does become manifest: the power of life. Thus, in a sense, Aristotle does envisage the spontaneous generation of life; and he knows, roughly, what he means by life. The living thing can go through far more changes than the non-living, while yet remaining recognizably the same thing.
If there is a single thing in the Universe that is "dead" non-living lifeless then the theory must fall. If a thing is non-living, then the essence of the Absolute cannot be in it it must be alien and foreign to the Absolute, and in that case the Absolute cannot be Absolute for there is something outside of itself.
Another way is to assume an act of spontaneous generation, i.e. a transition somewhere and somewhen from absolutely non-living to absolutely living. You cannot have it both ways. But it seems to me that you must have it both ways. If, then, it is only an escape from one incomprehensible position to another, cui bono to make a change? Why not stay quietly in the Athanasian Creed as we are?
The more we know matter, the more we know mind; the more we know nature, the more we know God; the more familiar we are with the earth forces, the more intimate will be our acquaintance with the celestial forces. When we speak of the gulf that separates the living from the non-living, are we not thinking of the higher forms of life only?
The Tree has a short trunk, indicating common origin of the living from the non-living, and is divided into two large trunks representing plants and animals respectively.
When we regard all the phenomena of life and the spell it seems to put upon inert matter, so that it behaves so differently from the same matter before it is drawn into the life circuit, when we see how it lifts up a world of dead particles out of the soil against gravity into trees and animals; how it changes the face of the earth; how it comes and goes while matter stays; how it defies chemistry and physics to evoke it from the non-living; how its departure, or cessation, lets the matter fall back to the inorganic when we consider these and others like them, we seem compelled to think of life as something, some force or principle in itself, as M. Bergson and Sir Oliver Lodge do, existing apart from the matter it animates.
Some think that the germs of life may have come to the earth from some other body in the universe; some think that life was evolved out of non-living matter in the early ages of the earth, under exceptional conditions which we do not at present know, or can only dimly conjecture; and some think that life is being evolved from non-life in nature to-day, and always has been so evolving.
If we answer "yes," then, as we have seen, moiety after moiety is filched from us, till we find ourselves left face to face with a tenuous quasi immaterial vital principle or soul as animating an alien body, with which it not only has no essential underlying community of substance, but with which it has no conceivable point in common to render a union between the two possible, or give the one a grip of any kind over the other; in fact, the doctrine of disembodied spirits, so instinctively rejected by all who need be listened to, comes back as it would seem, with a scientific imprimatur; if, on the other hand, we exclude the non-living from the body, then what are we to do with nails that want cutting, dying skin, or hair that is ready to fall off?
He says that such great progress has been made in his science the science of the chemical processes in living things that "their cryptic character seems to have disappeared almost suddenly." On the strength of this new knowledge of living matter, he ventures to say that "a series of lucky accidents" could account for the first formation of living things out of non-living matter in Archaean times.
It was little doubted that a so-called "vital force" operated here, replacing or modifying the action of ordinary "chemical affinity." It was, indeed, admitted that organic compounds are composed of familiar elements chiefly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen; but these elements were supposed to be united in ways that could not be imitated in the domain of the non-living.
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