chemical and mechanical activities. It is by such enumeration that we
describe a watch, or a steam-engine, or any other piece of machinery.
Describe I say, but such description does not account for the watch or
tell us its full significance. To do this, we must include the
watchmaker, and the world of mind and ideas amid which he lives. Now, in
a living machine, the machine and the maker are one. The watch is
perpetually self-wound and self-regulated and self-repaired. It is made
up of millions of other little watches, the cells, all working together
for one common end and ticking out the seconds and minutes of life with
unfailing regularity. Unlike the watch we carry in our pockets, if we
take it apart so as to stop its ticking, it can never be put together
again. It has not merely stopped; it is dead.
The late William Keith Brooks, of Johns Hopkins University, said in
opposition to Huxley that he held to the "old-fashioned conviction that
living things do in some way, and in some degree, control or condition
inorganic nature; that they hold their own by setting the mechanical
properties of matter in opposition to each other, and that this is their
most notable and distinctive characteristic." And yet, he said, to think
of the living world as "anything but natural" is impossible.
VIII
Life seems to beget a new kind of chemistry, the same elements behave so
differently when they are drawn into the life circuit from what they
did before. Carbon, for instance, enters into hundreds of new compounds
in the organic world that are unknown in the inorganic world. I am thus
speaking of life as if it were something, some force or agent, that
antedates its material manifestations, whereas in the eyes of science
there is no separation of the one from the other. In an explosion there
is usually something anterior to, or apart from, the explosive compound,
that pulls the trigger, or touches the match, or completes the circuit,
but in the slow and gentle explosions that keep the life machinery
going, we cannot make such a distinction. The spark and the powder are
one; the gun primes and fires itself; the battery is perpetually
self-charged; the lamp is self-trimmed and self-lit.
Sir Oliver Lodge is apparently so impressed with some such
considerations that he spiritualizes life, and makes it some mysterious
entity in itself, existing apart from the matter which it animates and
uses; not a source of energy but a timer and releaser of energy. Henri
Bergson, in his "Creative Evolution," expounds a similar philosophy of
life. Life is a current in opposition to matter which it enters into,
and organizes into the myriads of living forms.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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