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Updated: June 12, 2025
To that question the vast majority of practical biologists answer without hesitancy, No, we have no facts to justify such a conclusion. Prof. Huxley shall represent them. He says: "The properties of living matter distinguish it absolutely from all other kinds of things;" and, he continues, "the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living."
Harvey shared the belief of Aristotle whose writings he so often quotes and of whom he speaks as his precursor and model, with the generous respect with which one genuine worker should regard another that such germs may arise by a process of "equivocal generation" out of not-living matter; and the aphorism so commonly ascribed to him, "omne vivum ex ovo" and which is indeed a fair summary of his reiterated assertions, though incessantly employed against the modern advocates of spontaneous generation, can be honestly so used only by those who have never read a score of pages of the "Exercitationes."
Martineau next alleges that a fatal difficulty is put in the way of the General Doctrine of Evolution by the existence of a chasm between the living and the not-living. He says: "But with all your enlargement of data, turn them as you will, at the end of every passage which they explore, the door of life is closed against them still."
Nor is the value of the doctrine of Evolution to the philosophic thinker diminished by the fact that it applies the same method to the living and the not-living world; and embraces, in one stupendous analogy, the growth of a solar system from molecular chaos, the shaping of the earth from the nebulous cub-hood of its youth, through innumerable changes and immeasurable ages, to its present form; and the development of a living being from the shapeless mass of protoplasm we term a germ.
That this is a great question, a question involving large issues, will be seen by all who have familiarized themselves with the thought and fact of our times. But we must treat it purely as a question of science; it is not a question of how life first appeared upon the earth, it is only a question of whether there is any natural force now at work building not-living matter into living forms.
It is absolutely certain that it required a real Creation to produce life from the not-living at all; and it is just as reasonable that this exercise of creative power may have taken place in all parts of the earth at the same general time, as the Bible teaches. For if a Being saw fit to create life at all, why should He stop with one or two bits of protoplasmic units?
But later on he frankly confessed that his suggestion was fruitless, acknowledging that the present state of our knowledge furnishes us with no link between the living and the not-living. And so the problem remains.
With these expostulations we may turn to the writer's pronouncements on the vitalistic question which seem to us to be worthy of serious consideration. Everybody knows that there are two very diverse opinions on this topic; the one that there is, the other that there is not something more a plus in living than there is in not-living objects.
But the question is, Does this continuity terminate now in the living series, and is there then a break a sharp, clear discontinuity, and beyond, another realm immeasurably less endowed, known as the realm of not-life? or Does what has been taken for the clear-cut boundary of the vital area, when more deeply searched, reveal the presence of a force at present unknown, which changes not-living into the living, and thus makes all nature an unbroken sequence and a continuous whole?
Huxley says: "If the hypothesis of evolution be true, living matter must have arisen from not-living matter, for by the hypothesis, the condition of the globe was at one time such that living matter could not have existed on it, life being entirely incompatible with a gaseous state."
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