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Updated: June 12, 2025
When we examine carefully the differences between the living and the not-living, we see that the chief difference between them is in their origin. The matter of growth is not a real distinction; for crystals grow on the outside, while inorganic liquids grow by intussusception, as when a soluble substance is added to them, in very much the same way as an animal grows by the ingestion of food.
The ability to create life from the not-living implies the ability to make full-grown trees or birds or beasts in twenty-four hours, instead of waiting for months or years, as is usual at the present time. As we have already found regarding matter and energy, so of life.
Ever since René Descartes, in his Holland laboratory, dissected the heads of great numbers of animals in order to discover the processes of imagination and memory, men have been seeking a physical or materialistic answer to such questions as, What is life? What is it to be alive? How shall we distinguish the living from the not-living?
Whether not-living matter may pass, or ever has, under any conditions, passed into living matter, without the agency of pre-existing living matter, necessarily remains an open question; all that can be said is that it does not undergo this metamorphosis under any known conditions.
And after careful and prolonged experiment and research the legitimate question to be asked is, Do we find that, in our laboratories and in the observed processes of nature now, the not-living can be, without the intervention of living things, changed into that which lives?
A thousand possible errors surround it. It can only yield scientific results in the hands of a master in physical experiment. And we find that when it has secured the requisite skill, as in the hands of Prof. Tyndall, for example, the result has been the irresistible deduction that living things have never been seen to originate in not-living matter.
Death cannot create nor destroy. What is, is. The little brooding Christ knows this. What is he brooding, then? His static patience and endurance is wistful. What is it that he secretly yearns for, amid all the placidity of fate? 'To be, or not to be, this may be the question, but is it not a question for death to answer. It is not a question of living or not-living.
Those who uphold the theory most strongly are wont to compare the development of organisms to crystal-formation in order in some way to tack on the living to the not-living. Crystal-formation, with its processes of movement and form-development, is, they say, a kind of connecting link between the living and the not-living.
The publication of 'The Principles of Geology, in 1830, constituted an epoch in geological science. But it also constituted an epoch in the modern history of the doctrines of evolution, by raising in the mind of every intelligent reader this question: If natural causation is competent to account for the not-living part of our globe, why should it not account for the living part?
The conservation laws of matter and of energy, the impassable gulf between the living and the not-living, the laws governing cell multiplication, are matters of common knowledge and will be found in the appropriate college text-books throughout the civilized world.
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