United States or Kuwait ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Is it a mere phenomenon, accompanying the physico-chemical reactions of life and vanishing with the end of the reaction, just as the phenomenon of a flame may accompany a chemical reaction, and vanish when the reaction is completed? Or is mind an entity, just like the entity energy and the entity matter, but differing from either of them in short, a third entity?
In the same way we seem forced to think of life, vitality, as an entity a fact as real as electricity or light, though it may be only a mode of motion. It may be of physico-chemical origin, as much so as heat, or light; and yet it is something as distinctive as they are among material things, and is involved in the same mystery.
A recent contemptuous critic of M. Bergson's book, Hugh S. R. Elliot, points out, as if he were triumphantly vindicating the physico-chemical theory of the nature and origin of life, what a complete machine a cabbage is for converting solar energy into chemical and vital energy how it takes up the raw material from the soil by a chemical and mechanical process, how these are brought into contact with the light and air through the leaves, and thus the cabbage is built up.
When Helmholtz says that life had no beginning, he is in the same case. When our later biophysicists say that life is of physico-chemical origin, they are in the same case; when Tyndall says that there is no energy in the universe but solar energy, he is in the same case; when Sir Oliver Lodge says that life is an entity outside of and independent of matter, he is in the same case.
The mechanical reduction of vital phenomena to physico-chemical forces, he says, is impossible, and becomes more and more so as our knowledge deepens. He brings forward a series of convincing examples of the way in which apparent mechanical explanations have broken down.
Life comes and goes, but the physical and chemical orders remain. The vegetable and animal kingdoms wax and wane, or disappear entirely, but the physico-chemical forces are as indestructible as matter itself.
He believes that the origin of life can be traced to the same physico-chemical activities, because, in his laboratory experiments, he has been able to dispense with the male principle, and to fertilize the eggs of certain low forms of marine life by chemical compounds alone.
It is only with these facts of katagenetic order that physico-chemistry deals that is, in short, with the dead and not with the living. The other kind of facts certainly seem to defy physico-chemical analysis, even if they are not anagenetic in the proper sense of the word.
However, it may be asked, is there any necessary opposition between the so-called "vital" and the strictly physico-chemical views of fermentation? It is quite possible that the living Torula may excite fermentation in sugar, because it constantly produces, as an essential part of its vital manifestations, some substance which acts upon the sugar, just as the synaptase acts upon the amygdalin.
The phenomena of life are as obvious to us as anything in the world; we know their signs and ways, and witness their power, yet in the alembic of our science they turn out to be only physico-chemical processes; hence that is all there is of them. Vitality, says Huxley, has no more reality than the horology of a clock.
Word Of The Day