United States or Uganda ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Even movement is hardly an absolute distinction between the living and the not-living; for no movement can be detected in quiescent seeds, which may lie dormant for thousands of years; and on the other hand inorganic foams when brought into contact with liquids of different composition display movements that very closely simulate those of the living matter.
These are the Monads, they are strictly putrefactive organisms, they are midway in size between the least and largest Bacteria, and are, from their form and other conditions, more amenable to research, and twelve years ago I resolved, with the highest power lenses and considerable practice in their use, to attack the problem of their origin; whether as physical products of the not-living, or as the natural progeny of parents.
Or would we not rather be compelled to acknowledge that the simplest, the most truly rational view of the question is that in living matter we have merely a special manifestation of the presence and the direct action of the God of nature which we cannot so readily recognize in not-living matter? This, it seems to me, is all that we really know, and all that we are likely ever to know.
But if life is not now being created from the not-living, if new kinds of life are not now appearing by natural process, if above all we cannot prove in any way worthy of being called scientific that certain types of life lived before others, if in fine man himself is found fossil and no one fossil can be proved older than another or than that of man himself, why is not a literal Creation demonstrated as a scientific certainty for every mind capable of appreciating the force of logical reasoning?
But would not this be a real Creation in the old-fashioned sense of this term? We cannot avoid this conclusion; nor is there anything in either science or philosophy to indicate that this creation of the living from the not-living was confined to one mere speck of protoplasm.
In the living world, facts of this kind are now understood to mean evolution from a common prototype. It is difficult to imagine that in the not-living world they are devoid of significance. Is it not possible, nay probable that they may mean the evolution of our 'elements' from a primary undifferentiated form of matter?
First we must summarize the facts as we now know them in the five departments of knowledge with which we have had to deal. The origin of life is veiled in a mist that science has not dispelled and does not hope to dispel. By none of the processes that we call natural can life now be produced from the not-living.
The Zen priests taught an introspective philosophy. They preached that life springs from not-living, indestructibility from destruction, and that existence and non-existence are one in reality. No creed could better inspire a soldier.
It is a far cry from man to the dumb brutes, and from the brutes to the vegetable world, and from the vegetable to inert matter; but the germ and start of each is in the series below it. The living came out of the not-living. If life is of physico-chemical origin, it is so by transformations and translations that physics cannot explain.
It cannot arise from the not-living; or at least it never has done so since the beginning of scientific observation, though on this point have been concentrated the learning and the laboratory technique of thousands of chemists and microscopists.
Word Of The Day