The production of the symmetrical forms of organised beings, though not
of course due to a turning over of bodies of any appreciable size in
four-dimensional space, can well be imagined as due to a disposition in
that manner of the smallest living particles from which they are built
up. Thus, not only electricity, but life, and the processes by which we
think and feel, must be attributed to that region of magnitude in which
four-dimensional movements take place.
I do not mean, however, that life can be explained as a
four-dimensional movement. It seems to me that the whole bias of
thought, which tends to explain the phenomena of life and volition, as
due to matter and motion in some peculiar relation, is adopted rather
in the interests of the explicability of things than with any regard to
probability.
Of course, if we could show that life were a phenomenon of motion, we
should be able to explain a great deal that is at present obscure. But
there are two great difficulties in the way. It would be necessary to
show that in a germ capable of developing into a living being, there
were modifications of structure capable of determining in the developed
germ all the characteristics of its form, and not only this, but of
determining those of all the descendants of such a form in an infinite
series. Such a complexity of mechanical relations, undeniable though
it be, cannot surely be the best way of grouping the phenomena and
giving a practical account of them. And another difficulty is this,
that no amount of mechanical adaptation would give that element of
consciousness which we possess, and which is shared in to a modified
degree by the animal world.
In those complex structures which men build up and direct, such as a
ship or a railway train (and which, if seen by an observer of such a
size that the men guiding them were invisible, would seem to present
some of the phenomena of life) the appearance of animation is not due
to any diffusion of life in the material parts of the structure, but to
the presence of a living being.
The old hypothesis of a soul, a living organism within the visible one,
appears to me much more rational than the attempt to explain life as a
form of motion. And when we consider the region of extreme minuteness
characterised by four-dimensional motion the difficulty of conceiving
such an organism alongside the bodily one disappears. Lord Kelvin
supposes that matter is formed from the ether. We may very well suppose
that the living organisms directing the material ones are co-ordinate
with them, not composed of matter, but consisting of etherial bodies,
and as such capable of motion through the ether, and able to originate
material living bodies throughout the mineral.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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