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I fancy that the difficulty which an increasing number of persons find in accepting the mechanistic view of life, or evolution, the view which Herbert Spencer built into such a ponderous system of philosophy, and which such men as Huxley, Tyndall, Gifford, Haeckel, Verworn, and others, have upheld and illustrated, is temperamental rather than logical.
They can only be called organisms in so far as they are capable of exercising the organic phenomena of life, of nutrition, reproduction, sensation and movement." Verworn records an interesting instance of life and mind among the Rhizopods, a very low form of living thing.
Life, says Verworn, is like fire, and "is a phenomenon of nature which appears as soon as the complex of its conditions is fulfilled." We can easily produce fire by mechanical and chemical means, but not life.
Verworn said essentially the same thing in a lecture before one of our colleges while in this country a few years ago easy enough to manufacture a living being of any order of intellect if you can reproduce in the laboratory his "internal and external vital conditions."
It is just as easy to think of a stick with only one end. Such stanch materialists and mechanists as Haeckel and Verworn seem to have felt compelled, as a last resort, to postulate a psychic principle in nature, though of a low order. Haeckel says that most chemists and physicists will not hear a word about a "soul" in the atom.
And, finally, Verwörn and Binet have found in a single living cell manifestations of the emotions of surprise and fear and the rudiments of an ability to adapt means to an end. Let us now consider pluricellular organisms and consider them particularly from the standpoint of organic evolution.
Thus the German physiologist Verworn, the determined enemy of the old conception of life, in his great work on "Irritability," has recourse to "the specific energy of living substances." One is forced to believe that without this "specific energy" his "living substances" would never have arisen out of the non-living.
Professor Loeb, with his "Mechanistic Conception of Life"; Professor Henderson, of Harvard, with his "Fitness of the Environment"; Professor Le Dantec, of the Sorbonne in Paris, with his volume on "The Nature and Origin of Life," published a few years since; Professor Schäfer, President of the British Association, Professor Verworn of Bonn, and many others find in the laws and properties of matter itself a sufficient explanation of all the phenomena of life.
Verworn, too, in his “Physiology” gives a clear example of the way in which the mechanical theory in its most consistent form is sublimed, apparently in the idealism of Kant and Fichte, but in reality in its opposite—the Berkeleyan psychology. A similar outcome is in various ways indicated in the modern trend of things.
Amid all the activities of his mechanical and chemical factors, there is ever present a factor which he ignores, which his analytical method cannot seize; namely, what Verworn calls "the specific energy of living substance." Without this, chemism and mechanism would work together to quite other ends.
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