The Breath of Life | Page 6

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. "The problem of the beginning and
end of individual life is physico-chemically clear"--much clearer than
the first beginnings of life. All individual life begins with the egg, but
where did we get the egg? When chemical synthesis will give us this,
the problem is solved. We can analyze the material elements of an

organism, but we cannot synthesize them and produce the least spark of
living matter. That all forms of life have a mechanical and chemical
basis is beyond question, but when we apply our analysis to them, life
evaporates, vanishes, the vital processes cease. But apply the same
analysis to inert matter, and only the form is changed.
Professor Loeb's artificially fathered embryo and starfish and
sea-urchins soon die. If his chemism could only give him the
mother-principle also! But it will not. The mother-principle is at the
very foundations of the organic world, and defies all attempts of
chemical synthesis to reproduce it.
It would be presumptive in the extreme for me to question Professor
Loeb's scientific conclusions; he is one of the most eminent of living
experimental biologists. I would only dissent from some of his
philosophical conclusions. I dissent from his statement that only the
mechanistic conception of life can throw light on the source of ethics.
Is there any room for the moral law in a world of mechanical
determinism? There is no ethics in the physical order, and if humanity
is entirely in the grip of that order, where do moral obligations come in?
A gun, a steam-engine, knows no ethics, and to the extent that we are
compelled to do things, are we in the same category. Freedom of choice
alone gives any validity to ethical consideration. I dissent from the idea
to which he apparently holds, that biology is only applied physics and
chemistry. Is not geology also applied physics and chemistry? Is it any
more or any less? Yet what a world of difference between the
two--between a rock and a tree, between a man and the soil he
cultivates. Grant that the physical and the chemical forces are the same
in both, yet they work to such different ends in each. In one case they
are tending always to a deadlock, to the slumber of a static equilibrium;
in the other they are ceaselessly striving to reach a state of dynamic
activity--to build up a body that hangs forever between a state of
integration and disintegration. What is it that determines this new mode
and end of their activities?
In all his biological experimentation, Professor Loeb starts with living
matter and, finding its processes capable of physico-chemical analysis,

he hastens to the conclusion that its genesis is to be accounted for by
the action and interaction of these principles alone.
In the inorganic world, everything is in its place through the operation
of blind physical forces; because the place of a dead thing, its relation
to the whole, is a matter of indifference. The rocks, the hills, the
streams are in their place, but any other place would do as well. But in
the organic world we strike another order--an order where the relation
and subordination of parts is everything, and to speak of human
existence as a "matter of chance" in the sense, let us say, that the forms
and positions of inanimate bodies are matters of chance, is to confuse
terms.
Organic evolution upon the earth shows steady and regular progression;
as much so as the growth and development of a tree. If the evolutionary
impulse fails on one line, it picks itself up and tries on another, it
experiments endlessly like an inventor, but always improves on its last
attempts. Chance would have kept things at a standstill; the principle of
chance, give it time enough, must end where it began. Chance is a man
lost in the woods; he never arrives; he wanders aimlessly. If evolution
pursued a course equally fortuitous, would it not still be wandering in
the wilderness of the chaotic nebulæ?
III
A vastly different and much more stimulating view of life is given by
Henri Bergson in his "Creative Evolution." Though based upon
biological science, it is a philosophical rather than a scientific view,
and appeals to our intuitional and imaginative nature more than to our
constructive reason. M. Bergson interprets the phenomena of life in
terms of spirit, rather than in terms of matter as does Professor Loeb.
The word "creative" is the key-word to his view. Life is a creative
impulse or current which arose in matter at a certain time and place,
and flows through it from form to form, from