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Updated: June 10, 2025
Remember Professor Allman's address to the British Association, 1879; ask, again, any medical man what is the most approved scientific attitude as regards the protoplasmic and non-protoplasmic parts of the body, and he will say that the thinly veiled conclusion arrived at by all of them is, that the protoplasmic parts are alone truly living, and that the non-protoplasmic are non-living.
Yet if the artificial production of life were to happen to-day if in some of our laboratories living matter were produced from non-living, should we not still have to credit the event to some mysterious potency residing in matter itself?
Brown at first thought they were alive, but they were only non-living particles dancing to the same tune which probably sets suns and systems whirling in the heavens. Ramsay says that tobacco smoke confined in the small flat chamber formed in the slide of a microscope, shows this movement, in appearance like the flight of minute butterflies.
For while the nonliving act upon the endocrines directly, the living act upon the vegetative system, as a whole. The non-living factors are those with the intimate scrutiny of which physics and chemistry have busied themselves: food, water, air, light, heat, electricity, magnetism. The living are the animals that prowl all over the planet, the predatories spreading the gospel of fear.
Nothing perhaps more fully exemplifies this than the history of the controversy respecting the subject whose name is set down as the title of this paper. For centuries a controversy raged at intervals around the question of spontaneous generation. Did living things originate, not merely in the past but every day, from non-living matter?
They shut their eyes to this for a long time, but in the end appear to have seen that if they were in search of an absolute living and absolute non-living, the path along which they were travelling would never lead them to it.
The same disposition to avoid committing themselves to the assertion that any part of the body is non-living may be observed in the writings of the other authorities upon protoplasm above referred to; I have searched all they said, and cannot find a single passage in which they declare even the osseous parts of a bone to be non- living, though this conclusion was the raison d'etre of all they were saying and followed as an obvious inference.
At the same time it has the power, analogous to that of polymerisation in molecules, of increasing, of “growing.” The case is the same in regard to physical laws. They are identical in the living and the non-living. And many of the processes of life have already been analysed into a complex of simpler physical processes.
It almost seems as if we might regard the lowest forms of life known to us, which seem little more than aggregated homogeneous masses of flowing rather than creeping protoplasm, as an intermediate link between the higher forms of life and the non-living.
In the absence of proof by experiment scientific proof to get the living out of the non-living we have either got to conceive of matter itself as fundamentally creative, as the new materialism assumes, or else we have got to have an external Creator, as the old theology assumes. And the difference is more apparent than real.
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