on, blindly, aimlessly, for an almost indefinite time. The cells
multiply, but they do not organize themselves into a constructive
community and build an organ or any purposeful part. They may be likened
to a lot of blind masons piling up brick and mortar without any
architect to direct their work or furnish them a plan. A living body of
the higher type is not merely an association of cells; it is an
association and cooeperation of communities of cells, each community
working to a definite end and building an harmonious whole. The
biochemist who would produce life in the laboratory has before him the
problem of compounding matter charged with this organizing tendency or
power, and doubtless if he ever should evoke this mysterious process
through his chemical reactions, it would possess this power, as this is
what distinguishes the organic from the inorganic.
I do not see mind or intelligence in the inorganic world in the sense in
which I see it in the organic. In the heavens one sees power, vastness,
sublimity, unspeakable, but one sees only the physical laws working on a
grander scale than on the earth. Celestial mechanics do not differ from
terrestrial mechanics, however tremendous and imposing the result of
their activities. But in the humblest living thing--in a spear of grass
by the roadside, in a gnat, in a flea--there lurks a greater mystery. In
an animate body, however small, there abides something of which we get
no trace in the vast reaches of astronomy, a kind of activity that is
incalculable, indeterminate, and super-mechanical, not lawless, but
making its own laws, and escaping from the iron necessity that rules in
the inorganic world.
Our mathematics and our science can break into the circle of the
celestial and the terrestrial forces, and weigh and measure and separate
them, and in a degree understand them; but the forces of life defy our
analysis as well as our synthesis.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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