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What, on the protoplasmic theory, the skin and bones are, that the hammer and spade are also; they differ in the degree of closeness and permanence with which they are associated with protoplasm, but both bones and hammers are alike non-living things which protoplasm uses for its own purposes and keeps closer or less close at hand as custom and convenience may determine.
At present our leading men of science are in this difficulty; on the one hand their experiments and their theories alike teach them that spontaneous generation ought not to be accepted; on the other, they must have an origin for the life of the living forms, which, by their own theory, have been evolved, and they can at present get this origin in no other way than by Deus ex machina method, which they reject as unproved, or spontaneous generation of living from non-living matter, which is no less foreign to their experience.
As with the non-living so also with the living. Are we to let it pass beyond the limits of the body, and allow a certain temporary overflow of livingness to ordain as it were machines in use? Then death will fare, if we once let life without the body, as life fares if we once let death within it. It becomes swallowed up in life, just as in the other case life was swallowed up in death.
But it shows at once a possible connection between living and non-living nature. The living organism also exhibits motion and heat, and, if the doctrine of the conservation of energy be true, this energy must be correlated with other forms of energy.
A living body awakens a train of ideas in our minds that a non-living fails to awaken a train of ideas that belong to another order from that awakened by scientific demonstration. We cannot blame science for ruling out that which it cannot touch with its analysis, or repeat with its synthesis.
We have already referred to the phrases "living matter" and "non-living matter" as altogether objectionable in biological statement, since they are more than half-way concessions to the materialists, who contemptuously order the vitalists to take a "back seat" in the discussions now going forward as to the true origin of life.
In this way they were brought into closer touch with the outer world and thereby gained the lead of their duller neighbor cells, and became the real rulers of the body, and developed the mind. It is bewildering to be told by so competent a person as Professor Schäfer that at bottom there is no fundamental difference between the living and non-living.
All was as it should be. Consequently, in spite of Manilov's cogitations, he could think of nothing better to do than to sit letting a stream of tobacco smoke escape from his mouth. "So," continued Chichikov, "what I desire to know is whether you are willing to hand over to me to resign these actually non-living, but legally living, peasants; or whether you have any better proposal to make?"
In fact, one may say that disease, pestilence, famine, tornadoes, wars, and all forms of what we call evil are disharmonies, because their tendency is to defeat the orderly development of life. The disharmonies in Nature in both the living and the non-living worlds tend to correct themselves. When Nature cannot make both ends meet, she diminishes her girth.
But all these strange and beautiful phenomena springing up in a world of inert matter are but faint symbols of the mystery and the miracle of the change of matter from the non-living to the living, from the elements in the clod to the same elements in the brain and heart of man.
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