128 Difference in forces. [LECT. the question of growth, change, decay in the experience of universal man, and in all animate nature as well. My body grows weary; I strengthen it by putting food into it: it changes in shape according to circumstances, it differs absolutely from a stone, a house, or any other manufactured article. What is it that causes the difference between inorganic, and organic being? The Materialist is ready with an answer: The one is non-living matter, and the other living matter. It is all in the arrangement and motion of particles of matter, a difference in degree and not in kind. The difficulty about this explanation is twofold: (1) it is based on the existence and potency of matter, an undecided question, and (2) when all the positions and motions of matter are pointed out, they offer no explanation of themselves, only show more clearly what we want to have explained. Leaving the materialists, let us apply to the best biologists of England, France, and Germany, and ask for the substantial result of their researches in this field. Dr. Lionel S. Beale, than whom there is no greater biological authority, tells us there is an absolute difference between inorganic and organic nature. The united testimony of continental biologists of note endorses his judgment. That the matter in them is reducible to the same element, that much of the chemical operations are alike, is of no account in face of the fact that the forces which build up the organism of a tree, or the body of an animal, and carry on a constant change therein, are absolutely different from the forces which pile up into any shape the particles of non-living things; and when two forces work in radically different ways, they may be regarded as different kinds of forces. Fundamental differences in mere construction are two: living bodies grow by nourishment, and they themselves produce their kind, to grow up like themselves, while non-living bodies grow by accretion. And then amongst these organisms there are endless differences of form, involving differences of force III.] Life a Creation. 129 again, but none so absolute as those that divide living and nonliving beings. Now there are two things in regard to living beings which ask for explanation. All and each developed out of a single minute cell; whence the power in that cell, called vitality, which made it grow? Each and all develop after a certain fixed plan, essentially at least, like the being from which that first germ came: what, and whence, the building force which follows the fixed plan, by which everything—as genesis and science tell us-can and must breed true to its kind? And then a third question also arises,-What produces variation and differences in living things? Whence and what then is life? Claude Bernard, one of the greatest physiological authorities in France, says: "Life in its essence is power, or rather it is the directing idea in organic development. And if I should try to define it with a single word, I should say-Life is a Creation. Indeed for the physiologist, life can be nothing more than the first cause of the organism, which, like all first causes, always eludes our search. This cause manifests itself by the organization; as long as that lasts, the living being lies under the control of this creating vital influence, and natural death takes place when the organic creation is discontinued."-Here we have life as a creation, a something which was in the first cell and not only started the organism as first cause; but a little further on he gives another power or cause, which rules the being produced-"Life is an executive vital cause of living phenomena." Here we have then the unknown first creative cause of life itself and the executive cause of all phenomenal development. And so say in substance at least the best German biologists. As to the question of spontaneous generation of life, and life being a mere transformation of chemical forces, there is absolutely no proof, and they say 1Du progres dans les sciences physiologiques, in Revue des deux Mondes, quoted also by Ulrici in Gott und die Natur. 130 Life an Executive Cause. [LECT. there can be none given for the theory. We have seen how much logic Mr. Spencer was able to put into the subject.1 The nearest a good scientist can go, is to say that it is thinkable. But to say that a certain apparently impossible explanation is thinkable, does not bring us much nearer a solution. But these masters in biological science tell us that the problem is not solved even when you have vitality in a single germ out of which the living organism grows. They tell us that if that life, that vitality of the first cell or germ was not a creation, nobody can tell where it came from; and mere notions which all known facts belie will not go for much to establish a theory. But granting the vitality of the first cell, a larger problem still remains. How is it that out of a cell produced by an oak tree, only an oak tree is produced: that as that cell divides and subdivides, and multiplies into millions and millions, those cells that are up in the trunk produce only oak wood; those in the leaves, only oak leaves; those in the roots, only oak roots; a perfect following out of the oak-tree plan, transmitted from the parent oak? Granting the vitality of each one of the myriad cells, how is it that they work in such perfect harmony, in such infallible regularity, and never produce a pine branch or a maple leaf, or a bramble root? And here comes in Claude Bernard's "executive cause," the life-power which takes those germs and uses them according to a predetermined plan. And so with every tree and every plant. A something that lives from tip. of root to tip of branch and tiny twig, which lives on amidst the change of substance coming and going, a living unit that dwelt in the cell, and now dwells in all the tree; and which even provides for circumstances, as when the oak on mountain slope exposed to constant blasts, doubles its stays, lengthens its roots, and embraces the rocks to defy the storm. What is this 1Pages 113, 114. III.] A Coordinating Power 131 power? It having made the tree, existed therefore before the tree. Life laden with or working through an oak plan-or shall we say with Leibnitz an oak-mona? Call it what you like, it once lay enfolded in a single germ, the single only link between this oak and another older oak; it built the oak, and rules the oak, and it uses the oak to transmit to others the impress of the oak-plan in the unbroken line of its own living self. And it cannot be the mere matter of the tree nor the accidental working of mechanical laws. And so in the animal world every single animal sprang from one little germ, the one living link between it and its parents. This one little bioplast-or "piece of vitalized jelly"— divides and subdivides, and a bird, a lion, a rat, a man, is produced. So far as we know, there is no difference between the bioplasts which build a muscle, a nerve, a bone, or the brain. And no difference between the bioplasts which build a man, a horse, a rat, a lion, or a bird. And yet the forces in that one little first germ are true to the universal law that like produces like, each kind after its kind. And when the one first germ divides and becomes uncounted myriads in the body of the lion, each one is true to its original plan; never a mistake of putting a lamb's tail on a lion's body, but from tip of nose to tip of tail, from point of claw to point of hair, every germ is true to its original plan, the plan enclosed in the life of that first germ, permeating and filling and ruling the whole built up, and which it continually nourishes. is continuous, while the substance of the body comes and goes, cells are produced and die and are cast off to make way for new, and it once lay latent in that one microscopic embryo germ. body that it had That life is one, This fact is farther seen in the experience of breeders of animals. By certain selection of parents with desirable traits, an impression is made on that one fecundated embryogerm which is carried out all through the life and build and 132 What is this building Unit? [LECT. habits of the animal produced. It produces a true animal of its kind, but builds true also to the elements of variety produced by being the offspring of two lives, which united their differences upon it. Moreover, in the animal this "cause executive" not only builds and feeds and rules the bodily organs, but also impels the animal to act according to the body that it has made; teaches the cat to catch rats and mice, the lion to lay the lamb inside of him, the ox to eat straw; leads the salmon up the fresh water streams to spawn, and makes the herring breed in sea water; sends the wild fowl north in summer, and south again ere winter comes. And by what means does it act, this something which builds the organism, and rules it, and lives through its changes, and impels it to action, and permeates its whole being, superintending its everlasting change? What is this building, coördinating power which works in life, or in which life works, or which is life? Mere laws cannot do such work, mechanical forces do not explain it, mere vitality cannot solve it. Is there a something yet beyond our ken which acts as a link between the living and the dead,-a something transmitted by parents to the vitalized germ, which then built the house and expanded so as to fill it, connecting and controlling all the myriad bioplasts? Breeding and heredity and adaptation produce no new kind of matter or of bioplasts, but they do produce differences in the individual plan while preserving all true to the grand type. If we call it with Leibnitz a mona, it must be only as a shorter appellation of a 'cause executive" which we are not yet able to explain, And now in the same way man's body is built up, single bioplastic jelly spot in which lay in embryo the whole man, physical, instinctive, mental, moral. In that germ, even before it divided into two, there lay in embryo 66 man. from a 1. Life—the coördinating power which would build up the |