Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and EssaysTyndall, John
Philosophy
Half Hours With Modern Scientists: Lectures and Essays
Tyndall, John
Science
The differences alluded to (they are, in order, organization and life,
the objective idea—design, and the subjective idea—thought), it may be
remarked, are admitted by those very Germans to whom protoplasm, name
and thing, is due. They, the most advanced and innovating of them,
directly avow that there is present in the cell “an architectonic
principle that has not yet been detected.” In pronouncing protoplasm
capable of active or vital movements, they do by that refer, they admit
also, to an immaterial force, and they ascribe the processes exhibited
by protoplasm—in so many words—not to the molecules, but to organization
and life. It is remarked by Kant that “the reason of the specific mode
of existence of every part of a living body lies in the whole, whilst
with dead masses each part bears this reason within itself;” and this
indeed is how the two worlds are differentiated. A drop of water, once
formed, is there passive for ever, susceptible to influence, but
indifferent to influence, and what influence reaches it is wholly from
without. It may be added to, it may be subtracted from; but infinitely
apathetic quantitatively, it is qualitatively independent. It is
indifferent to its own physical parts. It is without contractility,
without alimentation, without reproduction, without specific function.
Not so the cell, in which the parts are dependent on the whole, and the
whole on the parts; which has its activity and _raison d’être_ within;
which manifests all the powers which we have described water to want;
and which requires for its continuance conditions of which water is
independent. It is only so far as organization and life are concerned,
however, that the cell is thus different from water. Chemically and
physically, as said, it can show with it quality for quality. How
strangely Mr. Huxley’s deliverances show beside these facts! He can “see
no break in the series of steps in molecular complication;” but,
glaringly obvious, there is a step added that is not molecular at all,
and that has its supporting conditions completely elsewhere. The
molecules are as fully accounted for in protoplasm as in water; but the
sum of qualities, thus exhausted in the latter, is not so exhausted in
the former, in which there are qualities due, plainly, not to the
molecules as molecules, but to the form into which they are thrown, and
the force that makes that form one. When the chemical elements are
brought together, Mr. Huxley says, protoplasm is formed, “and this
protoplasm exhibits the phenomena of life;” but he ought to have added
that these phenomena are themselves added to the phenomena for which all
that relates to chemistry stands, and are there, consequently, only by
reason of some other determinant. New consequents necessarily demand new
antecedents. “We think fit to call different kinds of matter carbon,
oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen, and to speak of the various powers and
activities of these substances as the properties of the matter of which
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account