Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
We hear much of the claims of scientists who announce that they are on the eve of "creating life" from non-living matter. This is all nonsense life can come only from life. Life from non-life is an absurdity. And all Life comes from the One Life underlying All.
Certain it is that living and non-living matter are sharply separated, though when reduced to their chemical constituents in the laboratory they are found to be identical. The carbon, the hydrogen, the nitrogen, the oxygen, and the lime, sulphur, iron, etc., in a living body are in no way peculiar, but are the same as these elements in the rocks and the soil.
When we say growth, metabolism, osmosis, the colloidal state, science points out that all this may be affirmed of inorganic bodies. When we say a life principle, a vital force or soul or spirit or intelligence, science turns a deaf ear. The difference between the living and the non-living is not so much a physical difference as a metaphysical difference. Living matter is actuated by intelligence.
We should endeavour to see the so-called inorganic as living, in respect of the qualities it has in common with the organic, rather than the organic as non-living in respect of the qualities it has in common with the inorganic.
Physical science is clear that the non-living or inorganic world was before the living or organic world, but that the latter in some mysterious way lay folded in the former. Science has for many years been making desperate efforts to awaken this slumbering life in its laboratories, but has not yet succeeded, and probably never will succeed.
But are we not compelled to think of a kind of difference between a living and a non-living body that we cannot fit into any of the mechanical or chemical concepts that we apply to the latter?
Here is a suggestion that the same laws control the living and the non-living world; and a suspicion that if we can find a natural explanation of the burning of a piece of coal and the motion of a locomotive, so, too, we may find a natural explanation of the motion of a living machine.
Meanwhile Sobakevitch sat with his head drooping. Nevertheless, said Chichikov, the general equity of this measure did not obviate a certain amount of annoyance to landowners, since it forced them to pay upon a non-living article the tax due upon a living. Meanwhile Sobakevitch listened with bent head; though something like a trace of expression dawned in his face as he did so.
While the study of plants and animals was showing scientists that natural forces would explain the origin of more complex types from simpler ones through the law of natural selection, here in this conception of protoplasm was a theory which promised to show how the simplest forms may have been derived from the non-living.
His fires are banked, so to speak; his temperature is very low, and he breathes only at long intervals. If, then, we ask with Emerson, "why Nature loves the number five," and "why the star form she repeats," we shall be put to it for an answer. We can only say that with living things odd numbers are more likely to prevail, and with non-living, even numbers.
Word Of The Day