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of Life 



JOSEPH McCABE 

(AUTHOR OF " HAECKEL'S 
CRITICS ANSWERED ") 



LONDON : 
WATTS & CO., 

17, JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.G. 
1906 



Central University Library 

University of California, San Diego 
Please Note: This item is subject to recall. 

Date Due 



MAR 08 1994 



MAR 1 7 1994 



UN ERS T OF CALIFORNIA SAN DIEGO 



31822017139429 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



A REPLY TO SIR OLIVER LODGE 



JOSEPH jMcCABE 

(Author offfaeckel's Critics Answered" etc.) 



[ISSUED FOR THE RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, LIMITED] 



WATTS & CO., 

17, JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, LONDON, E.G. 
1906 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

PREFACE 7 

CHAPTER I. 
THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM - 13 

CHAPTER II. 

THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 29 

CHAPTER III. 
THE NATURE OF MATTER - 43 

CHAPTER IV. 
IN THE BEGINNING - 59 

CHAPTER V. 

THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND - - 74 



PREFACE 



A LITTLE work that has been recently issued by Sir Oliver 
Lodge, one of the most gifted physicists in this country, 
affords an instructive commentary on the opinion that 
the conflict between science and theology is over. The 
thoughtful reader cannot but see that such an opinion is a 
very superficial estimate of the relation of these two great 
branches of thought. That theologians contrive to per- 
suade themselves of so desirable a consummation is not a 
matter of surprise ; nor can we wonder that even Agnostic 
men of science, eager to save their valuable special research 
from the hampering complication of this conflict, frequently 
express, though on very different grounds, a somewhat 
similar opinion. 

The discerning observer who stands outside both camps 
cannot fail to see that the truce is a hollow one. If the 
fundamental doctrines of theology are to be held in any 
other than a figurative sense, they demand for their base a 
spiritual universe that is not an evolution or an outcome of 
visible nature. If the principle of life and thought in man 
can be conceived as an especially elaborate synthesis of the 

7 



8 PREFACE 

energies or movements associated with the basic forms of 
matter, the belief in its immortality, already attenuated into 
a wistful hope, thins away into nothingness. Since the 
expert of either physical or biological science has, as such, 
no concern with the nature of the human mind, there is 
some apparent reason in his petulant insistence that he 
cannot come into conflict with any rational scheme of 
theology. But the ground is only apparent. And the 
attempt of Sir Oliver Lodge to spiritualise the principle of 
life, an attempt that has brought him into sharp conflict 
with our biologists, puts the situation in an admirably clear 
light. 

For some such demonstration as that essayed by Sir 
Oliver Lodge is absolutely necessary if the distinct spiritual 
world, on which theology builds in its teaching as regards 
man, is to be maintained. It was thought by the late 
Professor Mivart and by Dr. A. Russel Wallace that a stand 
might be made against what is called " Materialism " at 
the frontier of human history. The " whole cosmological 
domain" might be yielded to the exactions of Tyndall, 
provided we could mark off the human soul as something 
essentially distinct from it and not involved in its ceaseless 
dissolutions. Unfortunately for this position, the light that 
has now been thrown on prehistoric man entirely prevents 
us from accepting it. We shall see presently that the 



PREFACE 9 

evidence for the evolution of man's soul from that of a 
lower animal is as cogent as that for the evolution of his 
body. The mind of man differs only in degree from the 
mind of the lower animal : it is the same vital principle in 
a higher phase of development. The spiritualist is, there- 
fore, compelled to claim that all life is immaterial in its 
nature. The vital principle that first unfolds its powers in 
the tiniest and simplest living things, and advances by a 
continuous evolution up to its most splendid manifestation 
in the brain of man, is distinct at the very root from the 
familiar agencies in nature. It belongs to a different world 
of being, and merely manifests itself through material frames, 
for some inscrutable reason, when the proper conditions are 
given. It is a kind of spiritual reservoir, existing apart from 
the cosmic fund of material energies. Little bits detach 
themselves from the " big lump " (in Sir Oliver Lodge's 
words) and animate material bodies. When the frames 
decay they go back into the immaterial world. 

This is the theory now advanced by Sir Oliver Lodge as 
a basis on which theology may be rationally reconstructed. 
The fact that his large scientific attainments lie entirely 
outside the domain of biology (the science of life), and that 
his views have met with a very hostile reception on the part 
of the biologists of this country, must indeed induce us to 
examine his theory in the critical mood in which, for instance, 



10 PREFACE 

we scrutinise Professor Haeckel's excursions into eccle- 
siastical history, but should influence us no further. The 
speculations of a trained thinker and widely informed student 
are always entitled to respect. I propose, therefore, in the 
following essay to give in readable form the actual condition 
of our knowledge of the origin and nature of life, and to see 
how far Sir Oliver Lodge's theory is consistent with it. 

The task is rendered somewhat difficult from a variety of 
reasons that the reader will appreciate as we proceed. The 
theory is put forward in language which is neither clear nor 
consistent. It is throughout stated as the alternative to a 
" Materialistic " conception of life which exists mainly in 
Sir Oliver Lodge's imagination and a few dusty and forgotten 
controversial works. It is contrasted all through Sir Oliver's 
work, Life and Matter, with the theory of Professor Haeckel; 
but this is quite erroneously stated and most unfairly 
misrepresented. When, in addition, the reader finds 
Haeckel's system assailed with a shower of such painfully 
familiar missiles as " miserable and degraded Monism," 
"extravagant pretensions," "free-and-easy dogmatism," 
"rather fly-blown production," "jubilant but uninstructed 
and comparatively ignorant amateur materialist," and when 
he remembers that these come from the Principal of an 
English University and one of the most religious thinkers of 
our time, he feels a sort of compulsion to accept what is set 



PREFACE ii 

forth as the alternative. And, finally, there is the difficulty 
that all the considerations advanced by Sir Oliver Lodge are 
little more than false buttresses of his system. All the 
tantalising analogies that we are begged on every page " not 
to press too far," all the imposing technicalities of physics 
that the average reader must take on trust to have some 
important bearing on the nature of life all these things do 
but distract attention from the real ground of Sir Oliver 
Lodge's theory of life. That real ground is found in the 
spiritist interpretation of uncommon psychic phenomena. 
I suggested this in the Hibbert Journal for July, 1905. 
Among others Professor Hyslop, of Columbia University, 
wrote me : " It has always struck me that Sir Oliver Lodge 
had come to his conclusion about a theistic view of things 
from one set of facts, and tried to prove it by another set 
which in fact do not prove it." Mr. Mallock and other 
writers have made the same point. 

In view of these difficulties I propose to rely mainly on a 
constructive presentment of the facts bearing on the nature 
of life. We may, as we proceed, deal with the chief fallacies 
in Sir Oliver Lodge's elusive speculation, in so far as he gives 
them expression. 

J. M. 

London, December, 1905, 



CHAPTER I. 
THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 

SOME time in the remote past, in the remote corner of space 
that our solar system then occupied, a huge fragment was 
torn from the glowing central mass and began to press and 
squeeze into the form of our planet. How it was detached 
from the contracting fiery cloud, whether as a ring at the 
surface or a projected mass, we cannot say with confidence. 
When it was detached is equally a matter of conjecture. 
We can only say that the limitations which Lord Kelvin so 
long imposed on geological estimates have been discredited 
by the discovery of radio-activity, and the vista of the past 
stretches out endlessly before the calculating mind. The 
present President of the British Association invites us to think 
of it in terms of 1,000 or even 2,000 million years. Those 
are problems of the future. It is germane to my inquiry 
merely to state that at some inconceivably remote epoch 
our planet was a fiery offspring of the sun, a formless 
chaotic mass, millions of miles in diameter. When we 
remember that the sun is now 150 times as luminous as the 
incandescent lime in the optic lantern, and has a tempera- 
ture expressed in several thousands of degrees, we realise 
that the little sun our earth then was had no living things 
upon or within it. 

13 



14 THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 

Then came the normal sinking of the heavier elements to 
the centre; the flinging out of the red-hot gases to the 
circumference; the tentative encrusting of the central 
molten mass, broken by the ceaseless volcanic spurts of 
liquid fire, until the monster's energy was partly spent. 
Then was formed the continuous solid crust, thinly encasing 
the molten globe. Thicker and thicker it grew, as the heat 
poured out into space. The combination of oxygen and 
hydrogen gas, which we have learned to call water, con- 
densed in the cooling atmosphere, as it does in the cloud 
to-day, and fell on the crust. How long it fell only to be 
shot back in hissing rushes of steam ; how long it foamed 
and tossed, a boiling flood, on the heated surface, we cannot 
say. The time came when a warm and placid ocean 
clothed the whole surface of the globe. Probably from the 
first the solid crust of the earth was uneven. Certainly at a 
very early geological age comparatively small continents 
were lifted above the water. But over the broad earth the 
distant astronomer would have seen little but the steaming 
mass of water. And somewhere in the depths or the 
shallows it is not clear which of this vast primitive ocean 
the first terrestrial living things appeared. Whence did 
they come ? What were they like ? That is the problem 
of the origin of life. 

It is important to remember that the only problem 
discussed under this title by Professor Haeckel in the work 
which Sir Oliver Lodge attacks is the problem of the origin 
of life a hundred or a thousand million years ago ; the first 
appearance of life on our planet. Sir Oliver says (p. 41) : 



THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 15 

The experimental facts of biogenesis he discards in 
favour of a hypothetical and at present undiscovered kind 
of spontaneous generation. 

When we recollect that this is the third formulation under 
the severe strictures of Professor Ray-Lankester of Sir 
Oliver's opinion, it has a singular complexion. The " facts 
of biogenesis " have, as Sir W. Turner pointed out long ago 
in his presidential speech, no bearing on the problem. 
They are not discarded in the least degree by Haeckel; 
they are irrelevant. The positive facts merely amount to a 
proof that certain species of microscopic organisms, which 
no one to-day would dream of as arising by spontaneous 
generation such as the infusoria are born of living parents. 
Beyond this we can only say that the great majority of 
biologists acknowledge no present instance of living things 
arising by spontaneous generation. I say the great majority 
because there are biologists of distinction (Dr. Bastian, 
Professor Naegeli, and others, as well as Professor Haeckel) 
who believe, partly on experimental grounds, that things are 
born to-day by spontaneous generation. Moreover, at the 
very time when Sir Oliver Lodge was penning his dogmatic 
phrase, the claim of two competent students (Mr. Burke 
and M. Dubois) to have produced living things without 
living parentage was under the serious consideration of 
science, as he knew. 

Indeed, it is really quite meaningless to quote " the facts 
of biogenesis " in connection with the matter, though it 
impresses the uninformed. Biogenesis means that a living 
thing is born, by seed, by budding, by spores, or by 



i6 THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 

cleavage, from a previous living organism. Now, the first 
living things cannot possibly, from the force of the terms, 
have arisen by biogenesis. They must have had no living 
parent. Sir Oliver Lodge sees this clearly enough at a later 
stage. He notices (p. 197) the recent attempts to create 
life in the laboratory : 

Suppose it was successful [he says], what then? We 
should then be reproducing in the laboratory a process 
that must at some past age have occurred on the earth ; 
for at one time the earth was certainly hot and molten and 
inorganic, whereas now it swarms with life. 

That is to say, Sir Oliver Lodge on one page tells us that 
a fact of abiogenesis or spontaneous generation would be a 
repetition of the process by which the life-story began ages 
ago ; and on another page he tries to discredit Professor 
Haeckel for " discarding the facts of biogenesis " and enter- 
taining the hypothesis of abiogenesis. 

Then Sir Oliver endeavours to extricate himself by a 
remarkable procedure. It is well to remember that 
Professor Ray-Lankester had already sharply reprimanded 
him for his inaccuracy on this very point, and I had pointed 
out his confusion in the Hibbert. Now, in his mature 
deliverance, he says that he would be "quite content" if 
it " could be universally recognised that it is expressly as a 
hypothesis that Haeckel formulates his conjecture as to the 
manner of the origin of life." These were my words in the 
Hibbert. Sir Oliver Lodge replies that Haeckel does not 
formulate it hypothetically, but dogmatically. On the very 
page where he makes the point (p. 42) he quotes Haeckel 



THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 17 

himself speaking of his " hypothesis of spontaneous genera- 
tion." He even plays with the word " hypothesis," and 
says "it can hardly be maintained that a 'hypothesis' is 
able to ' decide' any dispute." 1 In the very next paragraph 
he charges Haeckel with failing to state it as a mere hypo- 
thesis : 

An unscientific reader could hardly imagine that the 
apparently detailed account given in the next sentence of 
the automatic origin of life, as it may have arisen on 
other planes [planets], and must have arisen on this, is of 
the nature of hypothesis. 

He immediately subjoins, as sentences taken from the 
Riddle of the Universe, the following : 

First simple monera are formed by spontaneous genera- 
tion, and from these arise unicellular protists From 

these unicellular protists arise, in the further course of 
evolution, first social cell-communities, and subsequently 
tissue-forming plants and animals (p. 131). 

These sentences surely have a dogmatic ring, and lend 
serious authority to Sir Oliver Lodge's persistent and weari- 
some cry of "dogmatism." There are worse things than 
dogmatism. I open my Riddle of the Universe at the page 
quoted (131). To my amazement I find that they are 
taken from a purely hypothetical account, in a series of 
theses, of the probable course of life-development on other 
planets. Every single sentence begins with, " It is very 
probable that," or " It is very questionable whether." Sir 
Oliver Lodge has struck out the words, " It is very probable 



1 Haeckel, of course, said nothing of the kind. He 
thesis was important to us " in deciding " the dispute. 



said the hypo- 



i8 THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 

that," and then assured his readers that one would " hardly 
imagine " the theses were hypothetical. He may say that 
the words are conjectural as regards other planets, but 
dogmatic as regards our own. But where Haeckel deals 
with the genesis of life on earth he repeats over and over 
again that it is a " hypothesis," and the excision of the 
words, " It is very probable," must be seriously misleading. 



From this perplexing polemic let us return to the 
constructive problem. The "facts of biogenesis," such as 
they are, shed no light on the primeval origin of life. As 
Sir Oliver Lodge himself holds (p. 197) that even a proved 
fact of abiogenesis (as in Mr. Burke's experiments) would 
not support Haeckel's theory, it seems a pity he referred 
at all to the question of actual biogenesis or abiogenesis. 
His own hypothesis of the origin of life is wholly inde- 
pendent of such experiments : so, on his reasoning, is the 
hypothesis of Professor Haeckel. The question is : Whence 
came the tiny living things that made their appearance in 
the primeval ocean ? Did they come, in the form of germs, 
from another planet? Were they suddenly brought into 
existence by a creative fiat? Were they formed by the 
wedding of principles or particles from an immaterial 
universe with material frames ? Did an eternal and distinct 
vital spirit then introduce itself into an equally eternal but 
hitherto inanimate matter ? Or were these living things a 
natural evolution of the matter and energy we are familiar 
with? 



THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 19 

It cannot be said that biology has formulated any answer 
to these questions. Indeed, it is ridiculous to suppose that 
any biologist or paleontologist could use any other than 
purely conjectural language in attempting to describe the 
origin of life. The reason is a very simple one. We have 
no direct knowledge whatever of the first life-forms, or of 
the species that were evolved from them for millions of years. 
They had no hard parts that could be preserved in the mud 
that would one day form our rocks. They were bits of a 
soft gelatinous matter that melted away as soon as the life- 
energy ceased to hold it together. We can only conjecture 
what they were like from the analogy of the lower living 
organisms, and from the earlier phases of embryonic 
development. But we do not suppose we have no reason 
for supposing that even the most primitive organisms now 
living, even the simplest phase of the individual-germ in the 
ovary of an infant, tells us what the first living things were 
like. They may have been far simpler than anything now 
known to us in the world of life. If the principle of 
evolution held good in their origin, they must have been. 
In any case, the question what they were like is one for the 
constructive imagination, for informed conjecture. Even if 
the evolutionist omits to say, " It is probable that," at every 
step in his construction, the conditions of the problem, the 
complete blank in the earlier chapters of the story of life, 
are now so generally known that no one is likely to be 
misled. 

In view of this lack of positive data, most of our biologists 
hesitate to pen their speculations on the subject at all. 



20 THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 

They pursue the prevailing and very useful ideal of " exact " 
science. They accumulate facts with which some later and 
larger mind may build, or with which they themselves may 
build when they think the material complete. This is the 
only difference between Professor Haeckel and most of his 
great biological colleagues on the subject of the origin of 
life. They think that a hypothesis framed in the present 
state of our knowledge is bound to be insecure. If, indeed, 
Haeckel advanced his speculation as the positive teaching 
of biology, they would differ from him. No biologist in 
this country has done so ; and I have shown that Sir Oliver 
Lodge's charge of dogmatism has a basis which we must at 
once repudiate. On the other hand, few, if any, biologists 
would dispute that Haeckel is, from the scientific point of 
view, one of the best-equipped in the world for such specu- 
lations. This is an estimate of his qualifications by one of 
the first biologists in England (in a recent letter to me) : 

Haeckel is one of the first living biologists. There are 
not any others who have the same wide knowledge and 
experience, and consequent " point of view." He knows 
his zoology, botany, physiology, and pathology, also 
geology, and has travelled, and has a keen interest in 
and knowledge of no small degree of philology, archaeo- 
logy, and ethnography. 

It would be difficult to conceive a higher technical equip- 
ment for speculating on the origin and nature of life. I do 
not wish to press the contrast to the purely physical attain- 
ments of Sir Oliver Lodge, but he compels me to protest 
that Haeckel is something more than " a learned biologist 
who introduced Darwinism into Germany." Curiously 



THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 21 

enough, Haeckel approached the subject, in 1857, with a 
strong bias against spontaneous generation. Among the 
theses he defended on taking his degree was one that stoutly 
attacked the possibility of abiogenesis. He knew little 
about it in those days : few scholars did. In the half 
century since then he has amassed an extraordinary wealth 
of biological lore. He has made special research into 
several large groups of animals (radiolarians, sponges, 
medusae, siphonophores, etc.). He has written forty volumes, 
some of which have been translated into fifteen languages. 
He holds four of the highest gold medals available for 
biological research, and some eighty diplomas from univer- 
sities and learned bodies all the world over. If we are to 
have speculation at all on the nature of life, here surely is 
an impressive equipment for it. Since every reader must 
know that the whole question of the origin of life is conjec- 
tural, and since Haeckel repeatedly recalls the fact (when 
he is read in the original, and not in Sir Oliver Lodge's 
quotations), we need not wonder that the general public 
have failed to be impressed by the sectarian carping of his 
critics on this point. 

But is it worth while to frame these hypotheses at all ? 
Should we not forego the luxury of speculations that are in 
advance of, even though they are firmly grounded on, the 
actual evidence ? One might reply that, provided we 
remember always that they are speculations, there is no 
reason whatever why we should renounce the interest of 
theories that are sketched for us by competent students of 
biology. But, in truth, a matter of much more serious 



22 THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 

import is involved. Speculation on the origin of life is 
vitally connected with speculation on the nature of life ; and 
this in turn is most intimately bound up with a large and 
important religious controversy. If Lodge is right and 
Haeckel wrong, the theologian has found a magnificent 
ground in the real world for the reconstruction of his theory 
of man. In this aspect the question is assuredly of the first 
importance. We must speculate. We must examine care- 
fully the whole available evidence, and see whether it lends 
any colour to this remarkable theory of Sir Oliver Lodge's, 
that life is an eternal, self-existing principle, and that our 
individual life-principles (or souls) persist when the body 
decays. In this respect the problem of the origin of life is 
invested with an importance that must overrule the reluc- 
tance of the specialist. Haeckel's positive speculations on 
the actual mode of the origin of life are much simpler than 
one would gather from Sir Oliver Lodge's high talk about 
"extravagant pretensions." They are also expressly pro- 
visional and temporary. It is Sir Oliver's dogmatic nega- 
tion that calls for the closest attention. He denies that 
life was evolved from inorganic energy, because it is not 
inorganic energy or any synthesis or development of 
inorganic energies. This would be a discovery of tremendous 
and far-reaching importance, and we must see whether it is 
justified by the facts of biological science, or whether it is 
not an aerial structure framed in ignorance of a large and 
essential part of them. 

Thus we get a definition of our problem in terms that 



THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 23 

give it more than a mere scientific interest. We take our 
primitive living things, making their appearance in the 
primordial ocean, and ask : Were these simple organisms 
built up entirely out of elements already existing in our 
planet ? Or are we compelled to think that a third persistent 
factor (besides matter and energy) now came upon the 
scene of nature from the obscure recesses of a spirit- 
world ? 

In approaching such a problem as this we have first to 
remember two great and established laws. One is a law of 
things ; the other a law of thought. One is established by 
science, and is claimed to be one of its very broadest induc- 
tions ; the other is established by logicians, and is claimed 
to be one of the essential conditions of all thinking that seeks 
to attain the truth. The first is the law of evolution ; the 
second the law of parsimony. 

We have to explain the origin of a number of things, 
living organisms, that make their appearance for the first 
time on our planet. How do we usually approach such 
problems to-day ? In the old days people were quite accus- 
tomed to imagine things shooting suddenly into existence 
without any natural preparation. Not only religion and 
morality, but agriculture, the use of metals, speech, and a 
hundred other human possessions, were believed to have 
been suddenly thrust into our sphere from a sphere beyond. 
People had lost all account of their slow and laborious 
development, and attributed them to a beneficent revelation 
from the gods. We have altered all that. We have grown 
instinctively to look for gradual development, and greatly to 



24 THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 

distrust theories of sudden appearance. No ethnographer 
now admits any other origin but evolution for religion, 
morality, social organisation, industry, agriculture, clothing, 
language, art, science, or letters. In some cases, such as 
language, we have little or no analogy to guide us, because 
every savage tribe has articulate speech ; yet we do not 
doubt the fact of the evolution of language, because it is 
not clearly beyond the range of evolution. Thus we look 
round on the whole rich inheritance of modern civilised 
man, and say that every part of it was evolved. It seems 
very far, indeed, from the life of the brute, but we know 
that only the untrained imagination finds any difficulty in 
that. The historical period is so short in comparison with 
the whole life of humanity (which some experts put at 
700,000 years, and very few put at less than 100,000 years) 
that a thousand rudimentary stages may have preceded. 

It is the same with the origin of man himself. For a 
long time the old theory of a sudden appearance was stub- 
bornly maintained. To-day every anthropologist of dis- 
tinction in the world holds the evolution of man, and 
Church leaders (such as the Bishop of London and the 
Dean of Westminster) urge their laity to resist no longer. 
A few experts still raise difficulties about the evolution of 
man's mind from that of the lower animals. We shall see 
that the science of prehistoric man has swept these away. 
Sir Oliver Lodge says "it is probably true that our life and 
that of the animals are branches of one fundamental vitality." 
In any case, the one great difficulty alleged is that man's 
mind could not have been evolved from that of a lower 



THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 25 

animal. The law of evolution is respected as a law. What- 
ever could be evolved was evolved. Most theologians 
to-day take that as "a law of the Divine action." For all 
the other species of animals and the plants evolution is 
generally accepted. The palm or the elephant is immea- 
surably removed from the microbe, but we know they were 
evolved, ultimately, from microbes. Then we take the 
atmosphere and the solid globe, the glowing sun and its 
circling planets, and find that all were evolved out of pre- 
existing elements in nature. The astronomer tells us that, 
when he sweeps the heavens for a thousand billion miles, 
he finds the same law of evolution everywhere. Now the 
physicist tells us we have every reason to believe that the 
elements themselves are a product of evolution. We are 
rapidly tracing the whole complexity of the universe down 
to a simple form of matter and a simple form of energy. 

Sir Oliver Lodge wants us to admit one exception to this 
law of evolution, based on this enormous experience of 
facts. He holds that the principle of life was not evolved ; 
that its first appearance on our planet was due to an invasion 
from without, just as the Chinaman says of the art of agri- 
culture or of architecture. Certainly, everything cannot 
have been evolved. At the base of the scheme there must 
be an agency, or some agencies, that are simple and eternal. 
It is a fair speculation whether life is one of these. But we 
must remember that it is reasoning that compels us to say 
there are ultimate elements which were not evolved. When 
any particular phenomenon is put before us as such we do 
not at present claim the distinction for ether or electricity, 



26 THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 

the simplest things we know it must be carefully scruti- 
nised. We may be making the same mistake as the China- 
man. The law of evolution runs from end to end of the 
universe. 1 From the primitive nebula upward we find the 
whole contents of our solar system growing into shape. We 
find the pre-existing elements entering into more and more 
complex combinations, and so forming objects that seem 
infinitely removed from them. Midway in this scheme of 
cosmic development the first living things appear. All before 
them was evolution. Ever since they have been subject to 
evolution. Have we not an immense presumption, from 
analogy, that they, too, were only a re-arrangement of pre- 
existing elements ? Shall we not require very rigorous proof 
from the man who says they cannot have been evolved, and 
that we must leave our familiar agencies and turn to a 
mystic, immaterial world for the explanation? We shall 
see how lightly Sir Oliver Lodge meets this stringent obli- 
gation. 

The law of parsimony, one of the first laws of thought, 
compels us to the same attitude. Once more, a law of 

1 For a few readers it may be necessary to point out that we speak 
of "law " by analogy. A " law " of science is only a summing-up of 
the way in which things are done, not a force compelling them to obey. 
I have not yet met the thoughtful man or woman who has any illusion 
on the matter, but I see that religious writers are fond of assuring their 
readers that Rationalists are commonly guilty of this ridiculous con- 
fusion. When we talk of an " iron " (as Goethe did) or " inexorable " 
law of evolution, we mean that our experience of things coming about 
in this way is so vast and so uniform that exceptions must arouse 
suspicion. Especially as the loose old habit of imagining things to 
appear ready-made, like Minerva springing from the brain of Jupiter, 
still lingers among our neighbours. 



THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 27 

thought is not some sacred and mystic norm that has to be 
obeyed for transcendental reasons. The logician observes 
the thought-processes, as the physicist observes natural 
processes, and draws up a list of the right tracks of reason- 
ing the paths the mind follows when it reaches true 
conclusions. One of these " laws," based on a very wide 
experience, is that " things are not to be multiplied without 
need." It is not a new discovery. It was well known to 
the medieval schoolmen, though they paid a masterly in- 
attention to it in practice. All logicians insist on it to-day. 
You may violate it in your speculations, but you may pay for 
the violations, as in the case of any other law. If you seek 
truth, you will observe it ; that is what logicians mean when 
they use imperious language. How does it apply to our 
present subject ? 

There is no discussion to which it is more pertinent. I 
have said that there must be some or one ultimate and 
eternal element that was not evolved. It is the ambition of 
science to reduce the contents of our solar system to two 
such elements, matter and energy, possibly to one further 
element in which the two are associated. That would be 
an ideal Monism, and, as Sir Oliver Lodge says, "all 
philosophy aims at being monistic " (p. 10). He is, in fact, 
so sensible of this that he claims to be a Monist. We shall 
see that he is a Dualist of a very pronounced type. He 
says that we have our material frame of things on the one 
hand, and there is a quite distinct spiritual world or 
" reservoir " on the other, which reveals itself to us through 
the living organism. When the cat dies its vital "power" 



28 THE NATURE OF THE PROBLEM 

returns to the " reservoir," and is not dissolved into inorganic 
energies. The first living things were, it is true, an arrange- 
ment of pre-existing matter and energies, but an arrangement 
by a different kind of entity altogether, which would one 
day return to its spirit-world. 

That is just where the law of parsimony steps in. You 
must not multiply things "without necessity." Matter and 
energy exist, we all know (except a few metaphysicians, who 
are not sure). You must not add a third irreducible element, 
life, unless you are quite clear that it cannot be a further 
development of inorganic energy. You must not assume 
that some mystic " reservoir " of spiritual " power " exists 
besides visible nature, unless you have very strong proof. 
You must not say the first living organisms cannot have been 
evolved, like everything else before and since, unless you 
can point to very clear characters of the vital " power " that 
make this impossible. The only "necessity "for multiplying 
fundamental factors is when you have a phenomenon that 
demonstratively cannot be reduced to the familiar terms of 
matter and energy. Our temporary inability to reduce it to 
those terms is not a reason for regarding it as irreducible. 

Sir Oliver Lodge claims that life is a phenomenon of this 
character. Let us see where he discovers the features of the 
vital principle that give it this unique position. 



CHAPTER II. 
THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 

To approach the problem with any confidence we must 
study an organism at the very lowest grade of the animal 
scale. I have pointed out that we have no direct evidence 
whatever of the nature of those primitive beings with whose 
origin we are concerned. As has often been said, the first 
chapters of the story of life have been torn out. The first 
fossil impressions of living things are found in the Cambrian 
rocks, at the base of the stratified series. They seem to be 
the relics or imprints of comparatively large sea-weed or of 
hydrozoa and similar animals. The story of life must have 
proceeded for ages before these relatively advanced organisms 
were enclosed in the mud and sand at the floor of the 
Cambrian and Silurian oceans. Animals and plants at that 
stage of development are far removed from the bottom of 
the organic scale to-day. They must have been preceded 
by a long procession of softer forms that dissolved in the 
primitive ocean after death, or were burned up or ground up 
in the rocks as they formed. 

We turn, therefore, from the paleontologist to the biologist, 
from fossil to living types of organisms. Here we at once 
sink far below the level of the hydrozoa and the large 
multicellular algae. We find a thousand species of bacteria 

29 



30 THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 

alone at a much lower level of organisation ; and nearly a 
thousand species of vegetal organisms that equally consist 
of a single cell or something less than a cell. It is the dis- 
covery of this vast world of simple microscopic beings that 
has made spontaneous generation more conceivable. The 
famous experiments of Pasteur, which uninformed writers 
still confusedly quote in this connection, related to organisms 
with a locomotor apparatus and a degree of sensitiveness 
that lift them to a much higher place in the animal hierarchy. 
If the first living things to appear on our earth had been 
infusoria, we might more reasonably entertain Lord Kelvin's 
idea of the arrival of germs from other planets, or the theo- 
logical theory of creation ; though even then it is not clear 
how Sir Oliver Lodge's theory would help us. But we have 
hundreds of species below the level of the infusoria, and we 
may be quite confident that when we regard these we are 
nearer to the original inhabitants of our oceans. 

Why may we be so confident, when we acknowledge that 
we have no remains preserved of these primitive organisms ? 
There is no dispute about the point in biology, but it is 
worth while pointing out the grounds. One reason is in the 
general law of evolution. Apart from a comparatively small 
number of degenerate parasites (especially among worm-like 
creatures), the story of life runs from the simpler forms to the 
more complex. Since this has been the absolute rule among 
the preserved specimens, we have a right to suppose it held 
good before the fossil stage began. Further though all 
biologists would not use this argument all animals and plants 
now begin their existence in the form of a simple microscopic 



THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 31 

particle of plasm. As the embryonic development roughly 
reproduces the past history of a species, we take it that the 
initial stage represents a very early ancestor of all species. 
In any case, no biologist conceives the first living things to 
have been more advanced than the lowest organisms we 
have to-day. 

We must, therefore, take one of the simplest of living 
organisms and carefully examine its life. And here I must 
emphasise once more, for the sake of the inexpert reader, 
that no evolutionist supposes the first living things were even 
so far advanced in organisation as the tiniest and simplest 
things that now live. No one supposes that one fine day an 
alga or a bacillus made its appearance suddenly in the 
primitive ocean. In that event we should indeed have a 
very difficult problem to face in the origin of life. We 
assume that a vast number of stages preceded that linked 
the living particle of plasm to the natural compounds of the 
inorganic world. It is a matter of assumption, remember, 
on any hypothesis. The theologian, Sir Oliver Lodge, and 
all the rest of us have to assume our starting-point. Life 
began in some form unknown to us, but certainly not in a 
form more complex than the simpler forms we know. For 
the moment, I merely want to insist that the early forms 
may have been even simpler, infinitely simpler. Very much 
simpler forms would have little stability, like Mr. Burke's 
radiobes, and would disappear. But some biologists hold 
that they are being reproduced daily. 

Let us take, to begin with, one of the simpler forms of 
life known to us and analyse its structure and life. You will 



32 THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 

often have noticed a thin green or blueish-green deposit on 
damp rocks. This consists of millions of minute living 
things, which may run down to the five-thousandth of an 
inch in diameter. Others float in our ponds, others in the 
sea. There are hundreds of species of these tiny beings, 
and millions of them in a small visible clump of floating 
matter. They are the lowest forms of life that we know 
to-day; though, of course, improved microscopes may reveal 
still simpler forms in time. Little more than half a century 
ago they themselves were unknown. We may take one of 
these tiny creatures, magnify it a thousand times, and 
observe the movements in which its life consists. 

This is, surely, the correct way to attack our problem. 
If the earliest living things were at least not more complex 
than they, we must certainly choose the lowest of them for 
study. Sir Oliver Lodge does not follow that method. The 
lowest form of life he ever mentions is the amoeba or an 
amoeboid cell. The lowest organisms are much simpler 
than this. The amoeba has a very characteristic system of 
locomotion and a fair degree of sensitiveness. It thrusts 
out parts of its jelly-like substance, and uses them as arms 
or legs in case of need. It wraps these temporary projec- 
tions round particles of food, and it pulls itself along by 
means of them. Further, the amoeba seems to perceive 
that the particles of food are near it when it thrusts out 
these arms to enclose them ; and if a drop of irritant acid is 
put in its water-bath, the amoeba curls up, or literally rolls 
up, into a tiny ball. It is not conscious, of course, but it is 
sensitive. Moreover, in its very structure the amoeba 



THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 33 

reveals that it is a comparatively advanced organism. In 
the centre of its round body there is a special and charac- 
teristic firmer spot called the " nucleus " or kernel. It is 
generally believed, on experimental grounds, that this 
implies a most important growth in (or towards) organisa- 
tion. The nucleus is believed to have the function of 
reproducing the species, while the rest of the body pro- 
miscuously attends to the wants of the individual. Finally, the 
amceba is an animal organism, and feeds on organic matter. 

The earliest organisms in our primitive ocean cannot have 
been like the amoeba. This first division of labour must 
have taken a vast period for its accomplishment. The 
germ-stuff clearly cut off from the rest of the body, and set 
in the centre for protection, implies a long line of evolution. 
The locomotive system similarly points to a long develop- 
ment, especially as we have plenty of living things that have 
not yet evolved so far. The distinct sensitiveness of the 
amceba has the same story to tell; and our first organisms 
cannot have been animal, as they would not have organic 
matter to feed on. 

Why does Sir Oliver Lodge make no attempt to tell his 
readers what the first living things are likely to have been ? 
He says they cannot have been evolved taking them body 
and "soul" from inorganic matter and energy. Are we 
to say this without making a most careful study of them ? 
Some light seems to be thrown on his procedure by a note 
at the conclusion of his second chapter : 

I am using the term " life" in a quite general sense, as is 
obvious, for if it be limited to certain metabolic processes 

D 



34 THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 

in protoplasm which is the narrowest of its legitimate 
meanings what I have said about its possible existence 
apart from matter would be absurd. It may be conve- 
nient to employ the word "vitality" for this limited sense. 

The point of this curious passage will be apparent when 
the reader learns that the life of the really simplest organisms 
consists only of " metabolic processes in protoplasm." They 
feed (passively), grow, and split into two, like an overgrown 
nebula, or a large drop of oil. Their life has a remarkably 
mechanical look. So they are to have " vitality " instead of 
" life " the former term being the abstract Latin word for 
the latter and it is admitted that they have no vital 
" power " that needed to come from the spiritual reservoir. 
Sir Oliver Lodge probably did not realise the bearing of this 
concession. It means, in the first place, that the earliest 
living things to appear on our planet had no share of his 
imagined immaterial power. There is no reason why they 
may not have evolved from the inorganic world, and, if that 
is so, the analogy of the origin of all other complex things 
in the universe bids us conceive them as the outcome of 
spontaneous generation. It means, in the second place, 
that we can beat him back step by step, as we ascend the 
animal scale, and defy him to point out any stage where 
the possible range of evolution fails and we must fall back 
on an immaterial world. If all living things are " branches 
of one fundamental vitality," the "souls" of the higher 
organisms are an evolution of the soul of the lowest, and that 
is merely a plexus of "metabolic processes in protoplasm." 
In order to make this clear we may return to our really 



THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 35 

lowly organism, instead of dallying with amoebae. Magnify 
the speck of gray or greenish matter a hundred times, and 
it breaks up into tiny dots or granules, possibly lying in a 
common slimy bed. Take one of them, magnify it a 
thousand times, and its simple frame stands out clearly 
enough. No nucleus is to be seen. In scores of species 
the most eager investigators, with the most powerful micro- 
scopes, have discovered no differentiation into germ-matter 
and body-matter, though many claim they have found the 
beginnings of one. The only definite details you see in the 
tiny transparent globule are the specks or grains of its 
plasm, or its food forming into plasm. It has no organs 
whatever. It is a minute particle of the thick, viscous 
matter known as plasm or protoplasm. Take a drop of the 
white of an egg, and divide it if you can into a thousand 
parts, and you will have some notion of this little creature's 
structure, or lack of one. 

Its "life," or "vitality," is proportionately simple. From 
the surrounding water it absorbs particles of matter, organic 
or inorganic, assimilable or inassimilable. Put finely ground 
paint into the water, and it will absorb granules of it. They 
pass laboriously in and out of the viscid little mass. There 
is no pursuit of food, no choice of useful and declining of 
useless matter. It is absurd to seek any mystic entity here. 
We cannot explain the whole metabolism as the intake 
and output of matter is called because the structure of the 
plasm is not yet understood. But we do know that the 
molecular structure is enormously complex, and we shall 
expect a correspondingly complex play of energy. We find 



36 THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 

this; and we go no further for the explanation, but wait 
until organic chemistry has given us an adequate conception 
of plasm. 

Our microbe increases in size, as it takes matter unceas- 
ingly into its little bulk. The fresh atoms or molecules are 
built up into the plasm by chemical affinity Sir Oliver 
Lodge gives an admirable account of this in his last chapter 
and the circumference of the tiny globule swells out from 
its centre. When a certain size is reached the body slowly 
changes its shape from round to oval. The old centre 
seems unable to hold the little mass together. A new 
centre is formed (an invisible centre of attraction) in each 
half of the oval. It lengthens slowly, sinks in a little round 
the thick centre, like a drop of oil or ink that divides into 
two, grows more and more constricted in the middle. At 
last the two halves hang together by a thin cord of plasm. 
They slowly fall away, the last connection disappears, and 
there are two microbes instead of one. Each begins the 
life-story da capo. 

This is the typical life of the lowest living things. They 
absorb matter, swell, and fall into two. Must we at once 
abandon all hope of a natural explanation of such beings, 
and appeal to an immaterial world ? It would surely be a 
very poor repetition of the old fallacy that saw invisible 
spirits at work in every storm and every crash of thunder. 
We have learned by a thousand disillusions that it is a 
fallacy to discard natural agencies the moment we are faced 
with phenomena that are in any degree mysterious. Already 
competent students claim to have made artificially in the 



THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 37 

laboratory little beings that feed and grow and multiply in 
this way; but I would not press these experiments until 
they have been more widely confirmed. Sir Oliver Lodge 
admits that it would be "absurd" to claim a spiritual 
principle in a plexus of metabolic processes. Why does 
he coin the new word (in the sense in which he uses 
it) "vitality"? Is this something mid-way between the 
material and the immaterial, like the long-discarded fiction 
of Cudworth's ? It is utterly unscientific to claim any other 
than familiar energies in these tiny microbes. The particle 
of plasm that makes their body consists of millions of atoms 
in a very complex and very unstable combination. The 
physical and chemical and electric energies associated 
with this intricate molecular structure will be corres- 
pondingly characteristic. It is absurd to say that they 
are inadequate to produce the life of a Chroococcus or a 
Procytella. 

I will deal with this point more fully when we have seen 
something about the constitution of the atom and the 
molecule, especially the molecule of protoplasm. For the 
moment we may assume that Sir Oliver Lodge does not 
insist on the immaterial character of the vital "power" in 
these lowest and earliest organisms. We turn, therefore, to 
our second point. Where does the "necessity" come in 
for multiplying fundamental cosmic agencies ? At what 
point are we compelled to admit that physical and 
chemical energies clearly fail to explain " life," and to fall 
back on the suspicious and mystical resource of an imma- 
terial world ? 



38 THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 

Since the earlier chapters of the story of life have been 
destroyed we have no direct knowledge of the forms that 
immediately succeeded these simple forms. Many of them, 
however, have survived to this day, so that we can arrange 
them in an evolutionary series. We have thousands of 
species of organisms that consist of a single cell, a single 
particle of plasm. We have others that consist of a number 
of cells loosely associated the beginning of the multi- 
cellular animal. In a word, we have a fairly gradual series 
of organisms leading up from the microbe to the shark-like 
ancestors of man, large fishes with brain and excellent sense- 
organs, that make their appearance at the close of the 
Silurian period. From these onward the story of evolution 
is clear enough. At what point does Sir Oliver Lodge's 
spirit-world break in ? 

We may take the amoeba, which he seems to present as 
an instance. It is unfortunate that he baffles the critic so 
much by the vagueness of his indications. The amoeba is 
a much larger particle of protoplasm. It is particularly 
important for our purpose, because in it we find all the 
vital functions in a rudimentary form. It splits into two, 
like the simpler microbes, for reproduction ; but it has the 
germ-stuff apart in a central nucleus. It absorbs food- 
particles into its soft, slimy body at any point ; but it may 
send out projections to wrap round the approaching 
particle. Touch it with a needle, or put a drop of acid in 
its bath, and it rolls into a ball. Remove the stimulus, and 
it thrusts out its projections, and crawls along in search of 
food. Here we have the fundamental functions of nutrition, 



THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 39 

reproduction, movement, and sensation. Are we to sup- 
pose that inorganic forces could effect the life of the 
chroococcus or the bacillus, but not that of the amoeba ? 
Even if we had no intermediate species, it would be 
a very large demand. We have scores of intermediate 
beings. 

As far as nutrition is concerned, there can be no difficulty. 
It is a physical and chemical process from first to last. 
From Sir Oliver Lodge's excellent paragraphs on the 
chemical nature of plasm (in his last chapter) the difference 
in growth between the crystalloid and the colloid (jelly-like) 
substance is intelligible. As for the nucleus of the amoeba, 
we can hardly be asked to see a supernatural action in the 
concentration of the chromatin or hereditary matter (which 
has nothing to do with the external world) in the centre of 
the body, thus leaving the superficial matter to get and digest 
food. Natural selection would obviously tend to effect this. 
And though the question taxes the present resources of 
the microscopist we seem to find many stages in the 
formation of nuclei in organisms below the level of the 
amoeba. In many cases, in fact, the presence of a nucleus 
is warmly disputed. That is all the evolutionist needs. 
The faculty of locomotion is equally within the range of 
natural selection. The tense struggle for existence would 
soon set in among the myriads of primitive microbes. 
Study a drop of water or ink growing on a table. See 
how at certain points it reaches out, as it were, towards 
a larger grain of matter just beyond its rim. The 
infinitely subtler composition of plasm would make this 



40 THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 

easier for the microbe. It is no great leap to the forma- 
tion and selection of the pseudopodia of the amoeba; 
in fact, we find the same projections in much lower 
organisms that have no nucleus (like the Protamctba and 
others). 

There remains the very important function of sensitiveness 
in the amoeba. It must be clearly understood that there is 
no question of consciousness, in any degree. We have not 
the least proof of any such possession, and the structureless 
character of the organism forbids it. It is quite reckless to 
ascribe to the amoeba perception or voluntary movement 
that imply the least degree of consciousness. The amoeba 
acts as if it felt certain stimuli. In a mechanical, unconscious 
way it must feel them. In plain English, it reacts on the 
application of these stimuli. That is by no means beyond 
the natural range of a complex inorganic body. A strip of 
gelatine will show the utmost sensitiveness to moisture on 
the palm of the hand. The film on the photographic plate 
may be extraordinarily sensitive. The chemist finds many 
elements to be extremely sensitive to the presence of others; 
and it is well known how sensitive many bodies are to the 
action of light, heat, or electricity. Sensitiveness irritability, 
as it is called in plasm is by no means an immaterial 
function. In a very elaborate and loose compound like the 
protoplasm of the amoeba or the infusorian, we may well 
expect to find a high manifestation of it. We need not yet 
fly in despair to a spirit-world. 

And if we cannot say that the vital principle of the amoeba 
or the infusorian is clearly "more than a plexus of inorganic 



THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 41 

energies, it becomes difficult to draw the line. When a man 
is convinced on other grounds that there is a spiritual 
principle in living things, he can, no doubt, make capital 
of the temporary gaps in the biological scheme. It is not 
logical, though it may be impressive. But one would like 
to hear of the competent biologist who would admit the 
mechanical nature of thousands of the earliest species of 
living things, and then postulate a spiritual principle for the 
rest. Defective as our knowledge is, it makes such a 
suggestion seem ridiculous. We have so nearly complete 
an evolutionary scheme that there are few biologists living 
who doubt that all the actual animals and plants have been 
developed from the primitive unicellular organisms. The 
next chief stage is a cluster of cells, each of which lives its 
own life, and may even detach itself and live like an amoeba. 
One would hardly say that it needed an immaterial principle 
to bring in the obvious advantage of sticking together. The 
next chief stage (as in the Pemmatodiscus) is that the cluster 
which is hollow, each cell having to be at the surface to 
get its nourishment doubles in on itself, like an india-rubber 
ball. The inner cells then confine themselves to digestion 
and reproduction ; the outer to locomotion and reaction on 
stimuli. This is well within the range of natural selection. 
The simple worm-like body is a natural development from 
this ; and we have an illuminating series of forms between 
that and the fish, the fish and the mammal, the lower 
mammal and man. 

But, before we press the subject any further, it will be well 
to invade Sir Oliver Lodge's own science, and ask the 



42 THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 

physicist for a clearer knowledge of what matter and energy 
are. Only when we have done this shall we be in a posi- 
tion to speculate with any wisdom on what matter and 
energy can or cannot do. 



CHAPTER III. 
THE NATURE OF MATTER 

WE have seen how the progressive improvement of the 
microscope has tended to simplify the problem of the origin 
of life. A century ago insects and small worms and crus- 
taceans (like fleas) were counted among the lowest repre- 
sentatives of the animal world, and science itself had only 
just surrendered a belief in their spontaneous generation. 
Then the microscope began to reveal whole worlds of 
living things at a far lower level. Scientists still made the 
mistake at times of taking provisional determinations for 
final truths. One of the leading microscopists in Europe 
fifty years ago, Ehrenberg, wrote a work to show that the 
infusoria he detected in a drop of stagnant water were 
"perfect organisms." The dim markings his poor micro- 
scope discovered in them were shaped by his imagination 
into the outlines of complete organs. Other scientists, 
such as Joly and Pouchet, Pasteur's great adversaries, 
claimed that the infusoria were rudimentary enough to be 
born by spontaneous generation. Both extremes were 
wrong. But the microscope went on to reveal to us the 
hundreds of species of minute, structureless beings we 
described in the last chapter, and so brought us within sight 
of the frontiers of the inorganic world. 

43 



44 THE NATURE OF MATTER 

While biology was thus narrowing the issue with regard 
to the origin of life on its side, chemistry was advancing to 
meet it from the other side. Let me illustrate the matter 
by a personal experience. Ten years ago I was the pro- 
fessor of philosophy in a Catholic (monastic) seminary at 
London, and it fell within my province to deal with this 
problem. According to the most recent works put at my 
disposal works written by learned Jesuits and Dominicans, 
who still lead a large part of the Catholic world the solu- 
tion was very simple. Not only could the scientist not 
produce living things in the laboratory, but he could not 
even produce dead organic substances. There are a number 
of substances formed by living organisms indigo, alcohol, 
uric acid, formic acid, lactic acid, etc. that are not other- 
wise found in nature. I dutifully taught my clerical pupils, 
ten years ago, that these organic substances baffled the 
artificial synthesis of the chemist. The living matter itself 
was, therefore, immeasurably beyond his reach, and clearly 
due to an immaterial principle. I know to-day that every 
one of the organic substances I enumerated was being 
actually produced in laboratories not many miles away from 
my college. Such is the irony of the Index Expurgatorius. 

But within the last five years an even more important 
revolution has taken place in the science of inorganic nature. 
The atom has yielded at last to analysis, and our eighty 
chemical elements are in a fair way to be dissolved in a 
homogeneous ocean of electricity or ether. Whether the 
ether is the long-sought materia prima of the universe or 
not, we are well within sight of that golden dream of science- 



THE NATURE OF MATTER 45 

Unification, the reduction of the complex to the simple, is 
the scientific ideal. The last advance of physics brings us 
at a bound much nearer to its realisation. 

Ill-informed writers have frequently assured worse-informed 
readers of late that this new analysis of matter has made an 
end of that precious fiction of the religious controversialist, 
the Materialist. I will say a few words on Materialism later, 
but it must be stated once for all that the new conception of 
matter is most welcome and helpful to the writers who are 
dubbed (though they disclaim the name) Materialists. No 
writer of the Naturalist school for many decades has talked 
of the "solid atom," or built on it in any way. It is true 
that you will find occasional phrases such as : "A simple 
elemental atom is really an immortal being." But the 
quotation is from a religious physicist, Balfour Stewart; 
and the " Materialist " who quotes it, L. Biichner (Force and 
Matter)^ goes on to point out that the atom is not really 
indivisible, and that " the so-called atoms therefore consist 
of units of a higher grade, as the molecule does of atoms " 
(p. 49). So wrote the arch-Materialist twenty years ago. 
Haeckel, writing ten years later, was not less explicit. " The 
empirical elements we now know are not really simple, 
ultimate, and unchangeable forms," and ether is probably 
the materia prima (Riddle, p. 79). 

How it comes about that religious writers have so loudly 
proclaimed the new discoveries to be fatal to "Materialism," 
when these discoveries were confidently anticipated by the 
very men to whom they apply the epithet, I leave it to the 
reader to conjecture. No doubt Sir Oliver Lodge was 



46 THE NATURE OF MATTER 

expected to sustain this contention, and in the first version 
of his attack on Haeckel (in the Hibbert, January, 1905) he 
said : " It is singular that even during Haeckel's lifetime 
the atom shows signs of breaking up into stuff which is not 
ordinary matter." If he had meant that it was a singular 
joy for Haeckel to see his amateur physical speculation 
fulfilled during his lifetime, this would be admirable. 
Unfortunately, he meant the reverse. It is still more per- 
plexing to find that Sir Oliver wrote these words apropos of 
Haeckel's insistence on the conservation of matter ; whereas 
he now tells us in his work (p. 29) that " the constancy of 
fundamental material still holds good, even though the 
atoms are resolved into electric charges." Nor is his 
misrepresentation of Haeckel relieved when he describes him 
as a " Materialistic-Monist, with a limitation of the term 
'matter' to the terrestrial chemical elements and their com- 
binations i.e., to that form of substance to which the human 
race has grown accustomed a sense which tends to exclude 
ethereal [italics mine] and other generalisations and unknown 
possibilities such as would occur to a philosophic Monist of 
the widest kind "(p. in). Seeing that Haeckel devotes 
several pages (78-81) to ether, which he regards as the 
fundamental entity, in the very book which Sir Oliver 
professes to be criticising, this is strange work. 

Let us finish with this sorry story of Sir Oliver Lodge's 
physical criticisms of Haeckel before we proceed to 
construct. None but a fool would expect a chapter on 
physics, written by a biologist several years before the dis- 
covery of radium, to be free from error. A Sir Oliver Lodge 



THE NATURE OF MATTER 47 

should be able to find many inaccuracies in it. Curiously 
enough, his criticism of it is only impressive where he quite 
misrepresents Haeckel. We have seen this as regards the 
atom and the element. He is hardly more just with 
Haeckel's ascription of " souls " to atoms. He speaks of 
his "grotesque assertion" that atoms are moved by "internal 
likes and desires." He " refrains from characterising the 
sentence as a physicist should." The word "desire "is a 
subtle importation of his own. On the next page (48) he 
makes Haeckel ascribe "life and mind and consciousness" 
[italics mine] to the atoms. If that were so, there would be 
some ground for his disdain. But turn to Haeckel once 
more. On p. 64 of the Riddle he expressly and vehemently 
repudiates the theory that the atoms are endowed with con- 
sciousness. He has a long passage on the subject, and 
makes it frequently clear that, when he ascribes " will " and 
" sensation " to the atoms, it is " unconscious " (he italicises 
the word) will and sensation. His whole theory of " likes 
and dislikes " and " passion " in the atom, which Sir Oliver 
Lodge so contemptuously spurns on the ground ,'that it 
is literal, is a figure of speech taken from Goethe's 
beautiful Wahlvenvandtschaften, as Haeckel himself indi- 
cates. To borrow Sir Oliver's convenient phrase : " I 
refrain from characterising the procedure as a humane critic 
should." 

Finally, there is the only physical theorem in the Riddle 
with which Sir Oliver Lodge was really called upon to deal. 
This is " the law of substance " a combination of the 
inductive laws of the conservation of matter and the 



48 THE NATURE OF MATTER 

conservation of energy. Some of Haeckel's clerical critics 
have recklessly tried to discredit this in itself, but Sir Oliver 
Lodge knows better. The laws of the constancy of matter 
and energy are based on so broad an experience that no 
physicist will allow doubt to be thrown on them. They are, 
says the latest writer on physics, Mr. W. C. D. Whetham, 
" two of the most important generalisations ever reached by 
physical science." Sir Oliver Lodge himself says we have 
just seen that the recent discoveries leave " the constancy 
of fundamental matter " intact, and that physicists will not 
tolerate " any the least departure from the law of the con- 
servation of energy, when all forms of energy are taken into 
account " (p. 155). What can he find to say in the way of 
criticism ? 

We have seen that his unconscious resources are many 
and peculiar. 1 He has two objections to raise. The first 
is that Haeckel has not been content with the empirical 
grounds of these laws, but has represented the laws as 
"almost axiomatic and self-evident." Haeckel nowhere 
does anything of the kind. He constantly reminds the 
reader that they are empirical. In fact, he would make 
little use of them if they were not. On the other hand, 
take phrases such as the following : " Whatever really and 
fundamentally exists must, so far as bare existence is con- 
cerned, be independent of time can hardly be thought of 

as either going out of existence, or as coming into existence, 

1 It need hardly be said that I am only imputing to him a remarkable 
negligence and hastiness in studying the distinguished foreign biologist 
he has set out to attack. 



THE NATURE OF MATTER 49 

at any given period." Is it Haeckel who gives this "almost 
axiomatic and self-evident " form to the law of " the per- 
sistence of being"? No, it is Sir Oliver Lodge (p. 101), 
with another object in view (the immortality of the soul). 
It is the same Sir Oliver Lodge who, when Haeckel presses 
the law of substance, tells us that " there is a certain 
plausibility in the idea, pure guess or assumption though it 
be "(p. 34). 

Then Sir Oliver Lodge complains that Haeckel draws 
illegitimate conclusions from his law of substance. He 
considers " that they solve the main problem of the 
universe, and that they suffice to replace the Deity himself." 
On the first point I will only quote a sentence from Haeckel's 
work: "Can we affirm to-day that the marvellous progress 
of modern cosmology has solved this 'problem of substance,' 

or at least that it has brought us nearer to the solution? 

We grant at once that the innermost character of nature is 
just as little understood by us as it was by Anaximander and 
Empedocles 2,400 years ago" (p. 134). On the second 
point I need only say that Haeckel does not " replace the 
Deity " at all. In quoting Haeckel's words about " the 
godless world-system of the modern scientist," Sir Oliver 
Lodge unfortunately leaves out the brief antecedent sentence, 
which explains that by atheism he means the denial of "a 
personal, extra-mundane Deity." If that is a shocking 
conclusion, many of our theologians even are in a bad case. 
Does Sir Oliver Lodge repudiate it ? " One may reverently 
say that the Deity is not to be considered apart from the 
universe, but rather and I will not say a part of the 

E 



50 THE NATURE OF MATTER 

universe either " (Science and Religion^ p. 2). Qui potest 
capere, capiat? 



Let us take our primitive microbe and study it from a 
different point of view. It is a tiny thing, immeasurably 
below the range of unaided vision. The mature human 
ovum, about T ^ of an inch in diameter, fairly marks the 
range of visibility to the trained eye. We may take a living 
thing say the Procytella primordialis that may not reach 
a diameter of the 5,oooth of an inch. Magnified a thousand 
times, it is not much larger than a pin's head ; and it shows 
no sign of structure or mechanism that might accomplish its 
lowly vital functions. 

But where the microscope ends, the work of the physicist 
begins. The little particle of plasm, far smaller than the tiniest 
grain of salt that you can pick out with the naked eye, is a 
mechanism of baffling intricacy. The configuration of our 
stellar universe is hardly a more perplexing problem. By a 
process of reasoning that is as safe as microscopic analysis, we 



1 The only other criticism I have to make at this point is on Sir 
Oliver Lodge's cheerful statement (p. 47) that " we find Haeckel 
ignoring the elementary axiom that action and reaction are equal and 
opposite i.e., that internal forces can have no motive power on a body 
as a whole." This must sound delightfully crushing to the religious 
reader, though how far he will understand it is another matter. . Per- 
sonally I regard it as a piece of bluff, and was confirmed when I 
submitted it to a student of physics. Sir Oliver Lodge might as well 
tell a motor-car that the Newtonian law forbids it to run. However, it 
seems to refer to his wrong idea that Haeckel endows the atom with a 
conscious soul. 



THE NATURE OF MATTER 51 

break it up into hundreds of thousands of molecules of plasm. 
The merciless analysis then dissolves each molecule into 
some hundreds of atoms, that had clung together in a 
structure which still defies the investigation of the chemist. 
And the physicist now tells us that each atom is a still more 
complex system of far smaller points, which he calls electrons. 
To conceive it in the terms which are at present most 
accepted, the electron is an apparently permanent strain- 
centre in an ocean of ether. More than a thousand of these 
strain-centres have aggregated somehow, adjusted their 
respective motions as planets do round a central sun, and 
formed a comparatively stable system. Within its limits, of 
the proportionate size of flies in a theatre, they spin in their 
complicated orbits. Yet 200,000,000 of these systems, end 
to end, would not measure an inch. There are trillions of 
them in a table-spoon full of water. Some hundreds of 
these systems, of varying size, have joined together to form 
a molecule of protoplasm, the smallest particle of living 
matter that we can take without destroying its nature. And 
some hundreds of thousands, if not a few million, of these 
large systems (the molecules) are subtly connected to form 
the tiny Procytella. It is a structure so intricate as to fill 
the most powerful mathematician with despair. 

We must bear this structure in mind when we say that 
"ordinary matter" is incapable of discharging vital functions 
unless it is directed or controlled by some immaterial agency. 
We are not dealing with " ordinary matter " at all. We are 
dealing with a substance of the most astounding subtlety 
and complexity. Nor are the intricacy of structure and the 



52 THE NATURE OF MATTER 

number of constituent elements the only features to be noted. 
One of the most characteristic elements in the substance 
is carbon, and it also contains a high proportion of water. 
Each of these has an extraordinary power of linking other 
atoms or molecules to itself, when they approach, in a loose, 
labile connection that allows a vast amount of breaking-away 
and recombining. A particle of plasm is, therefore, a thing 
of wonderful and indeterminable potentialities. The most 
advanced chemistry of our time could not attempt to deduce 
the properties that would result from this unstable and 
complicated system of millions of atoms. 

"Such a grouping is likely to have properties differing not 
only in degree, but in kind, from the properties of simple 
substances." The proposition seems to promise a basis for 
a mechanical conception of life. As a fact, the particle of 
plasm (our microbe) does show properties that differ very 
considerably from the properties of ordinary matter, though 
they seem to differ only in degree from the crystal's properties 
of growth and reproduction. The analogy with the crystal 
must not, however, be pressed too far. The crystal and 
plasm lie on very different tracks of molecular development. 
The crystal is a comparatively rigid system, growing by the 
addition or accretion at the fringe of new particles. The 
colloid substance is unstable, and allows particles to pass in 
and out of its system of atoms it feeds by intussusception. 
Hence, if even in the crystal we have remarkable powers of 
growth and reproduction and multiplication, we shall certainly 
not be surprised to find them in a subtler form in a substance 
like plasm. We may or may not expect to find properties 



THE NATURE OF MATTER 53 

differing " in kind," but at all events we shall expect remark- 
able and unique properties. 

It is, perhaps, one of the most curious features of Sir 
Oliver Lodge's book that it is he who expects properties 
differing "in kind" to emerge from these complex 
groupings of atoms. The proposition I quote at the 
beginning of the last paragraph is his (p. 186). He insists 
that " fresh qualities altogether are liable to be introduced 

or to make their appearance at certain stages in the 

building up of a complex mass." I will not go through his 
arguments from analogy, which are largely unsound; but his 
conclusion is sound enough. It does not require a pro- 
found knowledge of physics or chemistry to see that, as the 
properties of matter change with its combinations, this 
wonderful complex that we call plasm will exhibit remark- 
able and characteristic properties. But every admirer of 
our distinguished physicist must be puzzled by the sequel. 
After the fine analysis of protoplasm that leads him to the 
expectation I have quoted, he turns round, when he finds 
protoplasm actually exhibiting characteristic movements, 
and says we must call in an immaterial principle to explain 
them. He has practically explained the vital functions of 
the lowest organisms to us in mechanical terms, and then 
he tells us he thinks it erroneous to say that " the complex 
aggregate generated the life." When hydrogen and oxygen 
unite, or chlorine and sodium combine, we admit that "the 
complex aggregate " generated, or made up by transfer, the 
properties of the resultant water or salt. When the 
chemist combines three or four elements to produce the 



54 THE NATURE OF MATTER 

higher compounds that are known as organic (as until lately 
they were only produced by organisms), no one raises the 
least doubt that the complex aggregate has generated the 
new qualities or combined the elemental energies into them. 
But when oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, and sulphur 
unite in a supremely complex aggregate, and certain very 
distinctive properties appear, we are told they did not 
generate the new properties, but some mystic entity came in 
from another world and guided their movements. And 
if Mr. Burke's radiobes prove to be genuine abiogenetic 
living things, Sir Oliver Lodge holds that he has only pre- 
pared " a vehicle " for the manifestation of life. 

This is a clear departure from scientific reasoning in the 
interest of a spiritist theory that has been set up on other 
grounds. I do not say, as Mr. Mallock does, on " unscien- 
tific grounds "; but, after all, those other grounds are not indi- 
cated in this work, and we must ignore them. The scientific 
procedure is plain. Seeing that, as Sir Oliver Lodge so 
finely indicates, we are to expect " fresh properties " in the 
new aggregate, and seeing that the "fresh properties " really 
emerge, it is idle to imagine the sudden appearance of a 
mystic principle. It is not in the least required that we 
show, step by step, how the linking and fusing of the old 
properties generated the new. Until some feature in the 
new properties is pointed out that clearly could not be due 
to the combination itself and that will be a Sisyphean task 
for the man who thinks an aggregate may produce pro- 
perties different " in kind, not merely in degree," from the 
old we are content with our material factors. 



THE NATURE OF MATTER 55 

That is, in point of fact, the prevailing attitude among our 
authorities. I have given elsewhere (HaeckeVs Critics 
Answered, p. 43) a sufficient array of quotations to show 
this. Not only our leading biologists, Professor Ray- 
Lankester, Sir J. Burdon-Sanderson, and Sir W. T. 
Thiselton-Dyer, argue in this way, but two of Sir Oliver 
Lodge's most distinguished colleagues in physics, Sir A. 
Riicker and Sir J. Dewar, have insisted on it from the 
presidential chair of the British Association. Professor 
Lionel Beale, the only prominent biologist in this country 
who more or less agrees with Sir Oliver Lodge, bewails 
repeatedly the "materialism" of all his colleagues. One of 
our first psychologists, Professor J. Ward, says that " the 

old theory of a special vital force has for the most part 

been abandoned as superfluous." I drew the attention of 
Sir Oliver Lodge to all these statements in the Hibbert 
(July, 1905). He replies by ignoring all my quotations 
save one (from America), and representing my summary of 
them as an eccentric and ignorant opinion of my own 
(p. 131). Nowhere in his work does he even hint to the 
reader that his opinion has been drastically condemned by 
the leading biologists of this country; on the other hand, he 
persistently represents Haeckel as "abandoned by the 
retreating ranks of his colleagues." That is one way of 
setting right the " misleading statements " of Professor 
Haeckel. 

However, Sir Oliver Lodge has two things to say for him- 
self at this point. In the first place, when I represent him 
as holding that the "vital force" needs guidance, he 



56 THE NATURE OF MATTER 

courteously says it is " nonsense "; that he nowhere used 
the phrase " vital force." It is, I believe, literally true that 
he did not. " Vital force " is a phrase that has suffered so 
much contempt from both physicists and biologists that it 
would need the courage of a Haeckel to champion it. But 
what is the nature of this immaterial something of Sir 
Oliver's that directs the energies of living things ? It is 
neither matter, nor force, nor energy, nor substance, he says. 
In a formal statement in his preface he calls it a " power." 
What is a " power"? He defines it in a footnote on p. 165. 
" A force in motion is a power," and, as a former professor 
of logic, I feel entitled to reverse the definition, and say 
that " a power is & force in motion" It would appear, then, 
that when Sir Oliver Lodge does come formally to define 
his intangible something, he uses a phrase that might 
have spared the strain on his courtesy had he remem- 
bered it. 

The second point is more material, and the language of 
Sir Oliver Lodge even more forcible. Speaking of the 
inorganic energies that must be associated with the 
atoms of protoplasm, as they are associated with all 
atoms, I said that " science always finds these inor- 
ganic energies to reappear on the dissolution of life." 
This sentence Sir Oliver Lodge mercilessly italicises 
and reserves for his grand attack. It draws from him 
the only positive argument in his book (apart from con- 
sciousness, which I will deal with later) in favour of his 
theory. 

Premising that Haeckel " must surely know better " than 



57 

to endorse this utterance of "his disciple," 1 he wishes "to 
oppose the fallacy in the strongest terms." Let me briefly 
repeat " the fallacy." As, in the current language of physics, 
energy is associated with all particles of matter (many hold 
that matter is composed of energy), we must admit that there 
is a remarkable plexus of inorganic energies in the living 
protoplasm. Sir Oliver Lodge holds that there is something 
else, and that this continues to exist after death. Haeckel 
says (like most of our biologists) that what we call life is 
only the synthesis of physical and chemical forces in the 
living matter, and, when the material combination breaks up, 
this synthesis of energies correspondingly breaks up, and 
the dissociated inorganic energies appear. The reader will 
see that this alone is implied in my statement. I was 
correcting Sir Oliver Lodge's erroneous assertion that 
Haeckel said the principle of life was "resolved into 
nothingness." There is not the slightest doubt that 
Haeckel would endorse my statement. 

Sir Oliver opens his attack upon it by converting it into 
the statement that " a dead body has more inorganic energy 
than a live one." A more astounding conversion, or per- 
version, I never met. My plain statement could not mean 
more, even if it were pressed to the utmost limit, than that 
the dead body has as much inorganic energy as the live one. 
And remember the essential distinction between latent and 

1 To be quite accurate, he says " these utterances." Thus he holds 
up to the ridicule of his religious readers a series of utterances in which 
I did absolutely no more than echo the words of Ray-Lankester, 
Thiselton-Dyer, Ward, Le Conte, and a. dozen other authorities. 



58 THE NATURE OF MATTER 

active energy. The latent energy of a keg of powder is 
real enough to the physicist, though the layman's imagina- 
tion cannot master it. But I did not even say there was as 
much energy in the dead body. As well make me say there 
is as much inorganic energy in the rusting old engine beside 
the line as in the new engine that flies past it with full 
p f eam up. And apart from the question of quantity, which 
I did not introduce, and which could not be determined, it 
is a mere truism to say that the inorganic energies of the 
hydrogen, oxygen, etc., that went to make the protoplasm, 
reappear in the gases and other decaying elements of the 
body. 

The critic concludes this chapter of his work with strong 
language about Haeckel's " dogmatism " and " benighted 
fools and credulous dupes." One may invite him to recon- 
sider a sentence he has written on the preceding page (134). 
" I say that, whatever life is or is not, it is certainly this : it 
is a guiding and controlling entity which interacts with our 
world according to laws that are so partially known that we 
have to say they are practically unknown." This has a dog- 
matic ring. And the most curious feature of it in view of 
its proximity to the plea for the protection of " the uncul- 
tured " is that there is hardly a prominent biologist in 
England who would endorse the substance of the statement, 
in the misleading terms which I have italicised. 



CHAPTER IV. 
IN THE BEGINNING 

WE may now return to our constructive task with more con- 
fidence. We have found that the world of life is not 
separated from the inanimate world by a yawning gulf, that 
would restrain us from thinking of the evolution of the one 
from the other. When we push out to the very frontiers of 
the living world we find tiny creatures whose life is hardly 
worth calling " life " at all, though it may merit the Latin 
title, " vitality." It consists merely of " metabolic pro- 
cesses," for which it would be " absurd " to claim an imma- 
terial principle. On the other hand, we have learned that 
"dead matter" 1 is not the helpless and unpromising thing 
it is often conceived to be. It is marvellously rich in 
potentiality. When its atomic systems with their charges 
of energy enter into higher combinations, we may expect 
" properties different in kind," at all events vastly different, 
from the properties of the elementary substances. When 
we learn that in the tiny particle of plasm we have such a 
combination of a remarkably elaborate type electrons 

1 A particularly stupid phrase for inorganic matter, that one meets in 
religious writers. " Dead" means, not devoid of life, but deprived of 
life. And the antithesis begs the whole question whether life is or is 
not an immaterial principle. 

59 



60 IN THE BEGINNING 

grouped into atoms, millions of atoms grouped into 
molecule-systems of the utmost complexity, molecules 
grouped into biogens, and biogens united in the little 
globule of plasm we do not feel surprise that certain dis- 
tinctive properties, that we call vital, make their appearance. 
But where did the plasm come from ? Let me first point 
out that we have not merely put back the problem a step. 
The empirical law that guides us in explaining the contents 
of the universe is the law of evolution. We have had so 
uniform an experience of it that we now say even 
theologians say that everything was evolved that could be 
evolved. There are a few thinkers, like Sir Oliver Lodge, 
called Vitalists, who hold, for one reason or other, that life 
could not have been evolved from inorganic energy. We 
have found that this objection has no substance whatever 
as regards our primitive microbes. There is no feature in 
their life that we can claim to be beyond the range of a 
subtle synthesis of inorganic energies. Therefore the one 
objection to evolution in their case disappears, and, on the 
analogy of the whole of the other contents of the universe, 
on one of the most powerful and broadest inductions of 
science, we assume that they were evolved. 1 Evolution is 



1 A few readers may cling to the old idea that the earliest organisms 
were created a notion left open by Darwin in his Origin of Species, 
but afterwards entirely rejected by him. The assumption brings in a 
new factor without the least rational justification, and makes the origin 
of life for ever unintelligible because no one can pretend that creation 
out of nothing is intelligible. It must be borne in mind that Sir Oliver 
Lodge does not countenance this theory for a moment. He says 
(p. 106) that its "absurdity" is "extreme." 



IN THE BEGINNING 61 

the way in which complex things come into existence art, 
science, morality, civilisation, suns, animals, plants, or 
atoms. We need something more than a few paltry analogies 
to make us think there was an exception in the case of 
life. 

We have, therefore, not put back the problem at all, but 
have stripped it of all mystic entanglements, and seen that 
it falls within the ordinary range of science. Not that 
biology as such has anything to say about the origin of life. 
A reader must be very muddle-headed who imagines that 
Haeckel, for instance, pretends to be giving him orthodox 
biology when he deals with the origin of life. He is he 
repeats it incessantly giving his own speculations, based on 
a remarkable command of the facts of biology. Whether 
this impressionable reader is less likely to be "unduly 
influenced " by the dogmatisms of Sir Oliver Lodge and his 
clerical friends is another matter. I have little acquaintance 
with such readers. 

Where, then, did our first tiny particles of living plasm 
come from ? Here we are in a province of pure conjecture. 
The biologist at large declines to indulge in such con- 
jectures at all, though he is apt to resent very rudely the 
pious layman's suggestion that they must have been created, 
or must have been put together by some spiritual particle 
from another world. However, a number of able biologists 
have given us conjectures as to the probable origin of these 
living things, and they are not without interest. They 
frankly offer them to us as conjectures. Haeckel hardly 
ever refers to his theory of the origin of life without calling 



62 IN THE BEGINNING 

it a "hypothesis." 1 When the reader remembers Haeckel's 
qualifications for dealing with the matter a close study for 
forty years of the lowest microscopic forms of life, a large 
amount of masterly original work on many classes of lower 
animals (radiolaria, calcispongise, medusae, siphonophorse, 
etc.), and a very wide command of botany, zoology, paleon- 
tology, embryology, and comparative anatomy he will 
probably feel that they are not much hurt by the boomerangs 
of physicists and theologians. However, Haeckel does not 
give his hypothesis in any detail in the Riddle. He refers 
the reader to his History of Creation and his untranslated 
chief work, the Systematische Phylogenie, neither of which 
seems to have been referred to by his critic. 2 

A curious effort has been made by a number of students, 
chiefly physicists (including Lord Kelvin), to meet the 
problem with a conjecture that life probably came from 
another planet. It is not clear to-day that this would be 

1 I have already shown how Sir Oliver Lodge omits the words, " It 
is very probable that," when he has to represent Haeckel as dogmatic. 
Again, on p. 22, he makes Haeckel hold that "the following cosmo- 
logical theorems have been ' amply demonstrated.' " He subjoins four 
out of twelve given on p. 5 of the Riddle. When you turn to the Riddle 
you find that Haeckel expressly says " most of them have been amply 
demonstrated " and most of them certainly have. 

2 The theses on the origin of life which Haeckel gives on p. 131 of 
the Riddle, and to which Sir O. Lodge contrives to give a dogmatic 
look, are taken in substance from the Systematische Phylogenie. There 
they refer directly to the birth of life on our planet. But if the critic 
had looked them up, he would have found that they begin with the 
modest words : " Theoretically we may distinguish something like the 
following stages in the hypothetical process of the origin of life." Nor 
is anything like real detail attempted. 



IN THE BEGINNING 63 

impossible. We may suppose that some small planet or 
large moon of a planet may have been violently shattered, 
and fragments, bearing germs of life, shot out into space. 
Could the germs survive the terrible cold (about-2oo C) of 
space? There are, of course, microbes that thrive in ice- 
cream and in arctic seas ; but the cold of space is a different 
matter. Intense refrigeration is regarded to-day as one of 
the best methods of killing germs. However, doubt is 
raised whether these germs from another world might not 
survive. Then the fragment would enter our atmosphere 
at a terrific speed, attracted by the earth. It would be 
raised to incandescence at its surface (a shooting star) by 
the friction, and probably shattered. Nevertheless, there 
are students who think it is not impossible for simple germs 
to survive the adventurous voyage. But the theory is a 
fantastic possibility, a la Jules Verne, at the most. It casts 
the responsibility of explaining life on the biologists of 
another planet. There is no need whatever to do this. 

Another conjecture is that life may be itself a simple and 
eternal form of energy, like electricity. This has some 
resemblance to the theory of Sir Oliver Lodge in terms, 
but it is substantially different in the sequel. It does not in 
the least lend itself to the notion of the persistence of the 
higher and more complex life-forms the immortality of the 
soul. However, like the preceding, it is merely a desperate 
attempt to get away indirectly from a problem that it regards 
as insuperable. Above all, it is entirely excluded by the 
considerations we have seen. The living particle is not a 
piece of ordinary matter with a peculiar form of energy 



64 IN THE BEGINNING 

attached to it. Its frame is an enormously intricate structure 
of millions of electrons : its " spirit " may very well be the 
synthesis of the inorganic energies of these electrons. 

There is no reason to-day why we should run desperately 
to other planets or spirit-worlds for the explanation of life. 
We cannot, of course, give a detailed account of a process 
that took place a hundred million years ago, and left no 
trace behind except the finished article. If one were 
attempted, it would be, in the phrase of the picture dealer, 
" highly speculative." Still, there does seem ground for a 
few leading ideas that have a strong provisional interest. 

If the first living things were evolved, as we have good 
logical and scientific ground for thinking, there was no 
beginning of life at all. It is necessary to put it strongly, in 
order to break down the conventional idea that a few floating 
or crawling microbes appeared one fine day in the primitive 
ocean. If even a simple thing like the Chroococcus had 
suddenly appeared in this way, we should indeed have a 
formidable problem to face. We have no right whatever to 
say that the first living things were like the Chroococcus or 
the Procytella. We have just as good a right to say that 
they were a thousand times simpler than either. But are 
these not the lowest living things in existence to-day ? We 
do not even know that. A number of competent biologists 
hold that they are not. I have described our microbe as 
consisting of some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of 
molecules of plasm. It is now generally thought in biology 
that these molecules are first grouped into smaller clusters, 
variously known as biogens, biophores, micellae, plastidules, 



IN THE BEGINNING 65 

etc., and then a number of these biogens unite to form the 
unicellular organism, or the cells of the higher animal. The 
biogen would be below the range of microscopic visibility. 
It would only come into definite view when a number 
clustered together to form a microbe. It is believed by 
several competent biologists (such as Dr. Bastian, Professor 
Naegeli, Professor Bolsche, Professor Haeckel, etc.) that 
these biogens may be forming daily in our waters, and only 
coming upon our horizon when a number of them have 
combined. Some of these students think the tiny formless 
specks which the microscopist often notices and ignores in 
his water-slide may be such biogens. 

However that may be, the evolutionist must assume that 
something like the biogens preceded the microbe in point 
of time. But the biogen is still a particle of plasm, and 
we have not in nature any series of inorganic substances 
bridging the distance between plasm and ordinary matter. 
How does the evolutionist cover the discrepancy? He may 
decline the attempt and remain agnostic. Sir W. Turner 
dealt with the subject in his presidential address to the 
British Association a few years ago, and took up that attitude. 
It is the habitual one among biologists. They are entirely 
opposed to the creationist or the spiritist solutions, as 
altogether groundless ; but at the same time they hesitate to 
frame a hypothesis in the present state of our knowledge. 
Others advance the following considerations. 

It is very difficult for us to realise the condition of the 
earth at the time definite living things appeared, and during 
the long series of chemical combinations that culminated in 

F 



66 IN THE BEGINNING 

the formation of plasm. The crust of the earth was very 
thin, and its internal heat would affect the surface to some 
unknown extent. Little land emerged from the vast ocean 
that enfolded almost the entire globe. The water of the 
ocean would be far hotter and denser than it is to-day. The 
atmosphere also would be hotter, denser, far more charged 
with carbonic acid, and infinitely more clouded than it is to- 
day. The forests that covered the emerging continents at a 
later date drew an immense amount of carbon from it. The 
electrical condition of such a globe is beyond our power of 
calculation. Further, we know to-day of the possibility of 
an immense amount of radio-activity that we cannot determine 
or reproduce. And it must be carefully borne in mind that 
Mr. Burke's radiobes are claimed to be the outcome of 
radio-action on a mixture of gelatine and beef-juice ; while 
electricity has a mysterious but certainly important relation 
to life. 

The candid student will realise that in this very different 
state of the earth chemical effects might very well be pro- 
duced that are produced no longer. In the shallows of the 
primitive ocean, especially, there would be a vast quantity 
of disintegrating matter, and, in fact, diffused through the 
whole of the primitive ocean. It is by no means pure water 
to-day, as everybody knows. Compounds of carbon and 
water with nitrogen and other elements would not in the 
least be improbable. Verworn points out that these elements 
were probably among the first to be formed, on account 
of their low atomic weights. These unstable and highly 
absorptive compounds they are well known to have a high 



IN THE BEGINNING 67 

" residual affinity," even after their primary combination 
would tend to increase in chemical complexity. It would 
be absurd to attempt to retrace all the steps, but the 
evolution of protoplasm along these lines is conceivable. 
But there is another conjecture to be taken into account. 

A German physiologist, Pfliiger, noticed that compounds 
containing cyanogen had the closest resemblance to living 
matter. Cyanogen is a compound of carbon and nitrogen 
(bicarbide of nitrogen), and a peculiar feature of it is that 
the mere mixture of these elements never produces it ; they 
must be brought together at an intense heat. Pfliiger at 
once reverted to the fact that our earth began its career in a 
state of incandescence. Why may not vast quantities of 
cyanogen, or cyanic compounds, have been produced at 
that time? Here would be a very plausible basis for the 
gradual upbuild of protoplasm. It must not be supposed 
that nature went steadily ahead in its manufacture. A 
thousand other compounds might be formed at hazard, just 
as thousands of animal forms have been produced that did 
not persist. The compounds that lay in the direction of 
plasm were the more stable and absorptive or reproductive. 
The cyanic compounds would unite easily with carbon 
compounds, and afterwards with water. At last a compound 
would be created, of which the molecules clung together in 
small groups. With their high power of imbibition they 
would grow and swell from their common centre, then split 
up, or detach fragments from themselves, when a convenient 
limit of size was reached. Metabolism would be a chemical 
and physical outcome of their texture (we have it "in the 



68 IN THE BEGINNING 

behaviour of nitric acid in the production of concentrated 
sulphuric acid," says Verworn) ; the breaking up of the group 
of molecules would mean an expansion beyond the slender 
cohering power of the group as such. The detached mole- 
cules would cling together by their individual adhesive 
power, and grow again by their power of imbibition. In 
the course of time the small cohering groups of molecules 
that we may call biogens would cluster together to form 
larger groups (still less than the five-thousandth of an inch 
in diameter), just as we know the cells came afterwards to 
cling together to form the multicellular animal. In that 
case we should have our first microbes. Each biogen 
would live its own life, as each cell does in the simpler 
multicellular body; but there would be an advantage in 
cohering an advantage quite parallel to the cohering of 
social groups. 

This is not a theory of the origin of life, but a provisional 
reply to those who profess a complete inability to conceive 
the natural evolution of plasm. It is speculative from 
beginning to end, but is entirely based on known facts. It 
starts from a fact, and it merely assumes that the methods 
we afterwards find at work in the evolution of life were, in 
proportionate form, at work from the first. The same 
methods or facts are familiar to the astronomer in cosmic 
development, and they are familiar to the sociologist as well 
as the biologist. The evolution of civilisation out of the 
chaos of the Neanderthal race is singularly parallel to it. 
The chemist finds the same struggle for life in parts of his 
world that the biologist does in organic nature. The 



IN THE BEGINNING 69 

evolution of the comparatively stable atom and of the chemical 
element is not more wonderful. You might as well claim a 
"guiding and controlling " principle in the atom of carbon, 
with its complex arrangement of electrons, as in the biogen 
or the Procytella. In each case the " soul " is the har- 
monious adjustment of the energies of the separate particles. 

Lastly, let me emphasise the fact that modern physics has 
introduced a new factor that may have been very important 
in this creation of stable groups of molecules of plasm, 
mean radio-activity. Without giving positive adhesion to 
Mr. Burke's claims, it is most instructive to examine them. 
He and other students claim that they have turned the 
battery of radium particles on tubes of organic matter, and 
after a time living things have appeared in the carefully 
sterilised solutions. This would mean that under the fierce 
rain of electrons, or particles of electricity (or particles of 
ether charged with electricity), the molecules once more 
grouped themselves into stable clusters. Now, it is quite 
impossible to say what may or may not have been the extent 
of radio-activity in the peculiar early stages of our planet, 
and so we have in it a very distinct possibility of great 
importance. 

It is along these lines that the experts who are chiefly 
engaged on the problem of the origin of life are proceeding. 
They have already formulated conjectures that dispense us 
from calling in the mystic aid of a creator. As Lord Kelvin 
insisted long ago : " If a probable solution, consistent with 
the ordinary course of nature, can be found, we must not 
invoke an act of Creative Power." With the gathering 



70 IN THE BEGINNING 

material for such a natural solution at hand, it would be 
absurd for us to say that science has exhausted its possi- 
bilities, and we must fall back on mysticism. On the con- 
trary, we are just on the eve of great scientific constructions. 
Already it is clear that they will have a bearing on this pro- 
found biological problem. 

It has been stated over and over again that the new dis- 
coveries in physics have " undermined Materialism." What 
" Materialism " is it would be difficult to say, as the writers 
who habitually use the word religious writers like Sir O. 
Lodge do not define it consistently. But if we are to take 
it that it means the view of life which resolves all things 
into matter and energy, the error is somewhat puzzling. 
Matter will probably, in the long run, be resolved into 
ether. That is exactly what " Materialists " have predicted 
for a long time. A Monist and evolutionist especially must 
be gratified to see the diverse chemical elements resolved 
into ether. Sir O. Lodge, while encouraging the loose talk 
about the discomfiture of the " Materialist," says that 
inertia is the most fundamental property of matter we 
know (p. 27), and that when the atom is resolved into 
electrons inertia will certainly " not have disappeared " 
(p. 29 italics his). As to energy, on which physical 
teaching is as yet most inconsistent, the Monist will gladly 
welcome an attempt to settle its close relation to " matter." 
And, beyond these two points, the only promise of the new 
radio-activity as yet is a strong suggestion that it may help 
us materially to explain the natural evolution of life ! 



NOTE ON MATERIALISM 71 

NOTE ON MATERIALISM. 

Sir Oliver Lodge insists on describing Haeckel's philo- 
sophy as Materialism. He at times alters it if it is an 
alteration to Materialistic-Monism, though he says this 
qualification is hardly necessary in the case of Haeckel. 
" Half-informed people," he says, have claimed Huxley as a 
Materialist, but he "was really nothing of the kind." I 
turn to the obituary notice of Huxley in our chief scientific 
journal, Nature, and find that he is there described as a 
Materialist. And the " half-informed " person who wrote it 
(unfortunately since dead) was no less a scientist than Sir 
W. T. Thiselton-Dyer, who professed to follow the same 
philosophy. 

On the main point I can only say that if by a Materialist 
(a name that Haeckel has always expressly repudiated, 
though Sir Oliver never mentions that) you mean a philo- 
sopher who takes matter to be the one fundamental reality, 
Haeckel is not and never was a Materialist. He believes 
energy to be as fundamental and even more important than 
matter. And if the man who believes matter and energy to 
be the only known fundamental agencies (or aspects of 
some one fundamental substance) is a " Materialist," the 
philosophy flourishes exceedingly among men of science 
to-day. As Professor Ray Lankester writes, in the article 
on " Zoology " in the Encyclopedia Britannica : "It is the 
aim or business of those occupied with biology to assign 
living things, in all their variety of form and activity, to the 



72 NOTE ON MATERIALISM 

one set of forces recognised by the physicist and the 
chemist." When, further, Sir Oliver Lodge airily observes 
that " why Haeckel chooses to regard matter and energy as 
one thing instead of two is not perfectly plain to me, nor, I 
venture to say is it really plain to him " (p. 35), we may 
advise him to turn to his own next page and see how he 
describes ether as the one persistent thing, or "the most 
fundamental known entity," in the material universe ; or to 
p. 103, where he tells us that the "fundamental entities" 
are " ether and motion." In other words, " energy " and 
" matter " are identified in " ether " (motion certainly not 
being an entity). He would also find, on patient inquiry, 
that Haeckel nowhere says matter and energy are the 
"same thing," but are two aspects of the fundamental 
reality, much as the physicist does. Many physicists and 
chemists say (I quote Mr. Whetham) that matter is com- 
posed of energy. Ostwald, the only living physicist that 
Sir Oliver Lodge quotes as "perhaps" agreeing with 
Haeckel, really belongs to the latter school, differs entirely 
from Haeckel, and is explicitly repudiated by Haeckel 
(p. 8). Haeckel's " monism of the inorganic world " is the 
ordinary teaching of physical science. These things, the 
reader will note, are not biological matters with which Sir 
Oliver Lodge may be presumed to be unfamiliar. 

In fine, it is most interesting to note that, if Sir O. Lodge 
is right in saying that physical science now admits only 
" ether and motion," we seem to be on the way to the 
prettiest revival of Materialism that one could conceive. 
Since the biologist will have none of Sir Oliver's immaterial 



NOTE ON MATERIALISM 73 

vital power, but will reduce vital functions " to the one set 
of forces recognised by the physicist and chemist," it would 
seem that matter and motion are in a fair way to be approved 
as the fundamental realities. Thus we should go back to 
the oldest and most real type of Materialism. And this 
after all the aristocratic scorn we have poured on that base, 
plebeian philosophy ! 



CHAPTER V. 
THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

SOMEWHERE, then, in the primitive Laurentian ocean the 
earliest definite living things make their appearance. Unless 
we arbitrarily desert the elementary methods of scientific 
inquiry, we assume that they were the outcome of a long 
evolutionary process. We are able to offer several plausible 
conjectures, even in the present very imperfect state of our 
knowledge, as to the lines of this evolution. In any case, 
we see nothing in the simple life of these tiny microbes 
that forbids us to apply scientific methods to them, and 
compels us to resign them to the mystic. Science is 
" bound by the everlasting law of honour," in Lord Kelvin's 
words, to resist these mystic claims of invasion from an 
immaterial world as long as natural development is con- 
ceivable. On that principle Lord Kelvin (then Sir W. 
Thomson) conjectured that they may have been evolved 
on some other planet, and carried to ours on a meteorite. 
That was several decades ago. To-day we realise that our 
planet may very well have been the original theatre of their 
appearance. 

The first living things were, of course, of a purely vegetal 
character. They had no rudiment of locomotory organs, 

74 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 75 

no distinction of nucleus and cell-body, and they built up 
their plasm directly out of inorganic matter by the natural 
" imbibitional energy " which was a consequence of their 
loose texture and their large proportion of carbon and water. 
Animal organisms could only appear when there were already 
vegetal organisms to feed on. In the course of time the 
hereditary matter would concentrate in security at the centre 
of the globule of plasm ; we should have nucleated cells. 
The mechanical strain outwards of the loose plasm towards 
contiguous particles of food would induce the formation of 
temporary folds or projections; we should have the first 
organs of locomotion, the first rhizopods. The mechanical 
strain on the surface particles would lead to the formation 
of a protective membrane, and the loose flow of the plasm 
into temporary arms or legs would have to be replaced by 
permanent threads or hairs or lashes (cilia), with which the 
water could be struck as with oars ; we should have the 
first infusoria. Meantime, the principle of aggregation 
would be steadily at work, and loosely individualised clusters 
of cells (of which many live to-day) would be formed. 
Each cell would live its own life ; it would be forced to the 
surface of the cluster, and the centre would be hollow. An 
intenser absorption of the food-bearing stream of water at 
one spot would make an indentation at that spot, and the 
ball would in time double upon itself (we have very strong 
proof in embryology that this was the next step). Thus we 
should have a primitive stomach and a primitive mouth. 
Motion through the water would lengthen the body, make 
it evenly bilateral, and give it a definite head and tail (as 



76 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

the evolution of the boat plainly shows). We should thus 
have a lowly worm-like organism. Continued motion 
through the water would cause folds on the back of the 
animal (which would shape into fins), and strengthen the 
central column until it became cartilage and finally bone. 
From the fish upward the evolution of life is intelligible 
enough. All the reptiles, birds, and mammals are clearly 
traced to a fish-ancestor. 

It would be ridiculous to expect science already to furnish 
a complete mechanical scheme of this million-year process 
of development. We may leave something for our children 
and grandchildren to do. But it would be equally ridiculous 
to say that, until such a scheme is forthcoming, we can be 
seriously asked to consider the spiritist theory. The logical 
alternative to mechanism is not spiritism, but agnosticism. 
Spiritist theories about life have no logical status whatever 
unless they prove that the mechanical theory is not only 
temporarily, but for ever, incompetent to explain life. The 
Vitalist can only ask us to believe in his immaterial world 
when he has pointed out some feature of life that lies clearly 
beyond any possible extension of physical and chemical 
forces. We have seen that there is nothing whatever of the 
kind in the life of the simplest organisms. At what point 
are such features claimed to appear ? 

Unfortunately, Sir O. Lodge shrinks from assigning any 
definite point for us to examine. He prefers to use the 
word " life " " in a quite general sense " (p. 40). To view 
things in a quite general sense is one of the most prolific 
sources of fallacy known to science. If we take those 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 77 

psychic phenomena, on which Sir O. Lodge ultimately 
grounds his theory, in the same general way, we are likely 
to be debarred from ever entering upon an examination of 
them, as a hole-and-corner business, marked by a remarkable 
story of fraud and hallucination. It is always more profit- 
able to rise from well-established details and facts to 
generalisations. However, Sir O. Lodge dwells so much 
on consciousness that we must single this out as par 
excellence the vital function that he believes to be 
immaterial. 1 

I am not going to attempt to give a mechanical explana- 
tion of consciousness. The only relevant thing to do is to 
show the complete futility of the reasons alleged by those 
who say it cannot be of material origin, and therefore must 
be from an immaterial world. The best way to approach 
the subject is through the evolution of mind. There are 
philosophical critics of Haeckel who fancy that to prove 
the evolution of consciousness proves nothing as to its 
nature. But I find that one of the latest German writers 
on philosophy, Dr. Otto Gramzow, declares that Haeckel's 
"criticism of Kant's philosophy from the evolutionary 

1 Here he has positive data on which to speak of Haeckel being 
"abandoned by his colleagues," or a few of them. He dwells on it 
with luxuriant rhetoric, but even here has to improve on the facts. He 
says the seceders from Haeckel have " marched in a more idealistic 
direction." Now, the chief of them was Professor Virchow, and 
Virchow declined to apply the mechanical theory to consciousness on 
the express and repeated ground that he wanted a basis for " compro- 
mise with the ruling Churches." Some of us prefer the "idealism" 
that makes no compromise where truth is concerned. 



78 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

point of view is the most important advance made in that 
science since the days of its founder" (Geschichte der 
Philosophic seit Kant, p. 497). This is a sensible estimate. 
As long as you take the fully developed consciousness of a 
modern man and set it crudely over against inorganic 
nature, it is easy to see a vast gulf between the two. But 
the procedure is about as scientific as that of the savage 
who pronounced a watch to have a soul because it was so 
different from any inanimate thing he had seen. When, on 
the other hand, we trace the mind of the European back 
through the series of prehistoric skulls to the ape-man of 
Java and the extinct ape-forms of the Tertiary period ; 
when we see the mind of the ape sinking gradually into 
that of the opossum, the duck-bill, the lizard, the salamander, 
the mud-fish, the shark, and the ostracod, until it ends 
in the feeblest glimmering of psychic force, we have taken 
a most important step towards the explanation of the mind. 
Let us proceed the inverse way, and trace the upward 
evolution of mind, and see whether at any point there is 
so new and striking a departure that we must draw on an 
" immaterial world " to explain it. 

There is a distinct psychic life in the unicellular amoebae 
and radiolaria and infusoria. The amoeba shrinks from an 
acid or from the point of a needle. The radiolarian will 
build up a most beautiful flinty structure to dwell in, that 
only a consummate sculptor could reproduce. The 
infusorian is very sensitive to an electric current, and 
differently sensitive to different currents. Is the sensitive- 
ness of the amoeba to acid or of the Paramxdum to 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 79 

electricity something so mysterious that we must rush 
beyond nature for the explanation ? When we remember 
the enormous chemical complexity of their texture, the high 
sensitiveness of much simpler compounds and of many 
plants, etc., it would not be very rational to do so. A 
beautiful radiolarian like the Lychnaspis miranda will no 
doubt impress the imagination of the inexpert. It must 
have something equivalent to memory as well as the power 
to create a most artistic structure, since it always builds as 
its progenitor did. But the whole activity of the structure- 
less speck of jelly is undoubtedly unconscious ; and we can 
arrange the four thousand species of radiolaria in an evolu- 
tionary series, and trace the utilitarian growth of the shell. 
The vegetal diatom also forms at times a wonderfully pretty 
shell. We have no ground to say that these feeble psychic 
powers are beyond the range of the intricate plexus of 
inorganic forces that we know to exist in the unicellular 
body. 

When we rise to the first stages of the multicellular 
animal there is no material change. The aggregation is 
loose, and each cell retains its general sensitiveness. At 
last division of labour sets in. Some cells confine them- 
selves to reproduction, some to digestion, some to locomo- 
tion, some to sensitiveness. Does the mere fact of division 
of labour, or the differentiation of cells for particular 
functions, demand the acquisition of an immaterial 
principle ? I And if not, there is no reason why natural 

1 Bear in mind, too, that such an admission would explain nothing. 
This applies to Sir O. Lodge's theory generally. The moment you 



8o THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

selection should not increase the " irritability " of some of 
the cells (the future sense-cells) as well as the " imbibition " 
of others (the gastric cells). In both cases we merely 
assume a local development of known and natural properties 
of protoplasm. These new sense-cells would be gathered 
by natural selection at the head of the worm-like organism, 
where they are most needed. To be of service they would 
have to connect with the rest of the frame by means of 
telegraphic fibres. We should have the primitive brain and 
nervous system. Do we need a supernatural principle to 
understand this structure, and the corresponding psychic 
life, in such organisms ? 

The number and organisation of the very valuable 
sensitive cells would be fostered by natural selection. We 

press it in detail it proves utterly useless. How does this intangible 
something (neither matter nor force nor energy nor substance) act on 
the molecules or biogens ? Sir Oliver Lodge contends that " energies" 
may be "directed" by a principle that is not an "energy." But 
elsewhere (pp. 36 and 103) he abandons "energies," and leaves onlyether- 
particles in motion in the frame of an organism, and says that material 
particles only move when they are " pushed from behind." How can 
his mystic principle, which is a "power" but not a "force," come in 
contact with them, and alter the direction of their movement ? In all 
the supposed analogies that he gives (p. 170) the real guiding forces are 
not abstract ideas or volitions, but very concrete movements in the 
nerves and brain. And even if we overlook this formidable difficulty, 
the way in which the control is exercised would be just as unintelligible. 
To argue from our conscious guidance of energies to an unconscious 
guidance of them in lower organisms is to violate all the laws of analogy. 
How does this " bit" from a big " spiritual lump " tell off some cells 
for digestion, others for sensation, etc. ? Has it a conscious plan ? 
Does it act at a distance ? We ask a hundred questions in vain. His 
theory is infinitely less intelligible than the most defective mechanical 
scheme. It is a mere flash of imagination. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 81 

find the primitive ganglion communicating by threads with 
sensitive depressions in the skin of the head (the rudiments 
of the eyes, ears, and nose-pits) ; and we find it extending 
along the back (some suggest that it crept along a discarded 
alimentary tube). While this extension grows into the 
spinal cord, the important bulb at the front, the intelligence- 
department of the animal, with its advanced sentinels, the 
sense-pits on the face, are bound to be continuously 
advanced by selection. We come as far as the brain and 
distinct eyes of the lamprey. With such excellent material 
to work upon in the lower organism, and millions of years 
to work in, who will say that natural selection could not 
have produced them ? And from the lowest fishes, in which 
the brain begins to differentiate into its five parts or vesicles, 
we trace a gradual growth without difficulty right up to the 
ape. We know to-day that intelligence is connected chiefly 
with the second vesicle. In the fishes and amphibians 
natural selection developes chiefly the third vesicle ; and they 
exhibit a limited intelligence. In the reptiles and birds it 
developes the first vesicle ; and there are corresponding limits 
to their mental development. In the mammals it developes 
the second vesicle, the cerebrum ; and the higher mind 
begins to appear. In the opossum the convolutions 
commence, showing the growth of the cerebral matter. 
They increase in complexity right up to the orang. The 
psychic life advances in exactly the same proportion. 
Which is the more rational and scientific : to say that this 
advancing intelligence is the function of the brain, improving 
as the organ improves, or to say that at some point or other 

G 



82 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

the natural function of the brain disappears, and all its 
wonderfully intricate structure is only a means of letting in 
some visitant from another world? 

But man does not descend from the anthropoid ape, and, 
if he did, we should still have to recognise a great mental 
distance between the two. Anthropologists are almost 
unanimous to-day in saying that man descends from an 
extinct lemur or ape-like form of the Tertiary period. We 
find skulls of such in France and elsewhere. The next chief 
stage is believed to have been similar to that of the gibbon. 
But the lowest savage brains to-day are immensely superior 
to the anthropoid ape. Have we a chance of interpolating 
our visitant from another world somewhere between the ape- 
stage and the human ? We have not the least chance of it. 
We have discovered an intermediate form between the 
ape and man (the pithecanthropus of Java, now generally 
admitted), with a low simian skull (just half way in cranial 
capacity between the orang and the lowest human skull), 
simian teeth, and curved thigh-bones. We have half-a-dozen 
accredited skulls or jaws of the first race of prehistoric men 
(Neanderthal, Spy, Krapina, Schipka, La Naulette, and 
Arcy, with other probable ones), and they tell absolutely of 
gradual development. The Neanderthal-Spy man had a low 
forehead, prominent eye-ridges, powerful receding jaws, no 
faculty of articulate speech, curved thighs, and a short, hairy, 
muscular frame. The implements he has left tell exactly 
the same story of gradual mental development. The whole 
science of prehistoric man, starting at what Sir J. Evans (a 
conservative expert) calls an " immensely remote epoch," is 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 83 

a consistent proof of the gradual advance of intelligence. 
From the amoeba to man there is no startling break that 
would justify us in deserting natural agencies. 

We began with the gathering of a few sensitive cells in the 
fore part of a lowly worm. We end with a brain of in- 
conceivable complexity. The sensitive cell in the lower 
organism differs little from the others : the ganglionic cell in 
the human brain is a microcosm in itself. It is one of the 
largest cells in the body, has a structure of astonishing 
intricacy, and is connected with its neighbours by an 
elaborate network of fibrils. Millions upon millions of these 
cells are woven into the gray bed or cortex of the brain, 
with which intelligence is associated. To say that all this 
complexity is only for the purpose of letting in a spiritual 
principle from another world is gratuitous in the extreme. 
It is more scientific to suppose that the sensitive cells and 
their function have advanced in a normal and natural fashion. 

Sir O. Lodge nowhere alludes to this vast and significant 
array of facts that seem to point to consciousness as a 
function of the brain. He prefers to dub it " Materialism," 
and quote Huxley as a warning to " would-be Materialists"; 
while he makes it perfectly clear in other parts (such as p. 75 
and p. 1 08) that he does not himself accept those idealist 
principles which lie at the root of Huxley's strictures, and 
which are accepted by few men of science to-day. Later, 
however, he offers us a few considerations which purport to 
convince us that mind may, after all this evolution (of which 
he says nothing), not be a function of the brain at all. 
These are mostly in the form of analogies. 



84 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

The first is the analogy of the eye as " the organ of vision." 
He labours to show that light would remain whether the 
eye were destroyed or not. I pointed out to him in the 
Hibbert that light is not the function of the eye, and so 
there is not the remotest parallel. When he can tell us of 
a case where vision has remained when the eye was des- 
troyed, there will be a pertinent and instructive analogy ; 
or when he finds Haeckel, or some more foolish person, 
saying that when the brain is destroyed the things that 
stimulated it also cease to exist. He seems to think this 
curious fallacy is mended by adding that, in the event of 
our eyes ceasing to act, " a term like ' vision ' might still be 
employed to signify our mode of perceiving and experiencing 
the agency which now manifests itself to our eyes " (p. no). 
It certainly might, but " vision " would then be a function 
of a different material organ altogether. The function of 
the eye would not have persisted at all as a disembodied 
something, and so again there is not the remotest analogy 
to his theory of the survival of the disembodied mind. Sir 
O. Lodge's expertness in revising the terms of Christian 
theology seems to have its disadvantages. 

His second analogy is a slightly new variation on that 
worn musical metaphor of brain being the " organ " of the 
mind. The old, familiar version was that the soul was the 
musician. Sir Oliver Lodge puts it that the organ is "an 
instrument for the incarnation of music." He asks us to 
believe that music say " the ideas of Sir Edward Elgar " 
would still exist if all the organs in the world were destroyed. 
This is a strange confusion of three totally different things, to 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 85 

which we give the same name by metaphor. There is 
music as a harmony of acoustic sensations, music as a 
series of aerial waves, and music as a conception in the 
artist's mind. The organ of each is totally different, and it 
is mere conjuring to point out that the musician's ideas 
remain (in his brain, remember, not disembodied, as far as 
experience goes) when the organ of musical sounds has been 
destroyed. Incidentally, Sir Oliver Lodge speaks with 
respect of the medieval idea that the cosmic system might 
be the "brain of some transcendent Mind" (p. 112). He 
goes on to speak of this as " a lofty kind of pantheism," 
beside which " the miserable degraded monism " of Haeckel 
is " not likely to survive as a system of perennial truth." 
In this case I need only state his position. 

The third analogy is equally unfortunate. The writing 
or the speaking of a sentence is "an incarnation of its 
meaning." Sentences may perish, but the meaning " may 
exist as an eternal ' now.' " A medieval theologian would 
subscribe to that. A modern critic would probably point 
out that " incarnation " is a pure metaphor, and that the 
meaning of the sentence cannot exist except in a living mind 
and, as far as experience goes, brain. 

He concludes this series of arguments with the remark 
that philosophers like Haeckel " must be content with an 
audience of uneducated persons," and must be prepared to 
meet " other men of science "who "perceive possibilities 
to which the said narrow and over-definite philosophers are 
blind." 

He then plunges into a sea of metaphors where one can 



86 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

but distantly follow his bold swimming. " I would not too 
blatantly assert that even a doll on which much affection 
had been lavished was wholly inert and material in the 
inorganic sense." " I have reason to believe that a trace of 
individuality can cling about terrestrial objects in a vague 
and almost inperceptible fashion, but to a degree sufficient 
to enable those traces to be detected by persons with 
suitable faculties " (p. 122). Here we get just a momentary 
glimpse of the real foundations of his philosophy ; all the 
rest are false buttresses. Parliament and the Army are 
offered us as analogues of " entities " that may exist disem- 
bodied, when their constituent elements are dissolved. 
Magnetism is finely developed as an analogy to life (most 
" Materialists " will sympathise with that) until the critical 
point is reached, when just as we are beginning to wonder 
what the precise analogy is to an " immaterial " principle 
it is discarded as " useful no longer." But when he adds 
that if one conceived magnetism as " brought into relation 
with the world of matter by certain acts," controlling it for 
a time, and then "disappearing to the immaterial region 
whence it came " when he says this " no physicist would 
think it worth while to object to, and many indeed might 
agree with," we are moved with pity for the " uneducated 
reader." Sir O. Lodge has already assured us that ether is 
matter (p. 29), and has discarded the idea of separate 
inorganic energy in the name of " physical science " 
(P- 



For such considerations we are asked to resist the natural 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 87 

scientific inference from the parallelism of mind and brain, 
and think the brain is merely an elaborate grand piano on 
which a ghostly visitant plays mysterious music. It is a 
strange issue for a man of science who holds that a very 
complex grouping of atoms " is likely to have properties 
differing not only in degree but in kind from the properties 
of simple substances" (p. 186). When we do offer him a 
grouping of atoms of the most inconceivable complexity 
the human brain he will not even allow that it has 
developed properties differing in degree from those of the 
lowly animal ganglion. Its energies have had to be over- 
ruled by an intangible something from another world, which 
forbids science ever^to hope to analyse consciousness in 
this world. In the old unscientific way, life and mind are 
set aside with the mysterious label, " spirit," on them, and 
the biologist and psychologist are told that their central 
objects of interest lie in a hazy world to which they have no 
possible access until their brains their organs of thought 
and reason are paralysed by death. One must judge 
leniently the hard language in which they have characterised 
these airy speculations of our distinguished physicist. 

Sir Oliver Lodge might reply that it is the place of the 
biologist to deal with the phenomena of life, and of the 
psychologist to describe and classify the phenomena of mind; 
that they are not concerned with the substance or essence 
of either. It must be confessed that many men of science 
have expressed their function in these terms, and so 
provided some ground for the distinction. On such a 
theory it could very plausibly be contended that while a 



88 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

Professor Ray-Lankester retained a commanding authority 
on the phenomena of life, or a Professor Sully on the 
phenomena of mind, it was still open for a thinker, who 
was expert in neither branch of science, seriously to oppose 
them in regard to the essence of life and mind. The 
language which still lingers in certain schools of metaphysics 
encourages the idea, and the influence of Hume on English 
science has been almost equally mischievous. Professor 
Karl Pearson's Grammar of Science still supports the 
distinction, and a quite recent and competent writer on 
physics, Mr. Whetham, repeats confidently that the science 
deals only with the " phenomena " of matter, and reaches 
the outrageous conclusion that the ultimate form of matter is 
11 immaterial," the ultimate ground of nature " supernatural." 
In his important address to the British Association in 
1901 Sir Arthur Riicker, one of our ablest physicists, made 
it perfectly clear that this is a false conception of scientific 
work. He claimed, in the name of physics, that his science 
dealt with objective realities when it spoke of " atoms " and 
" ether," and was giving us real and minute information 
about them. Few scientific men now imagine that the 
" essences " of things are shrouded from our gaze by a 
surrounding veil of " phenomena "; or that, as Plato taught 
2,000 years ago, our senses perceive the outer shell of 
phenomena, and our intuitive and purely spiritual faculties 
pierce to the kernel or "essence." All this is getting 
antiquated. " Phenomenon " means " appearing." We are 
slowly but surely recognising that to talk of " appearances " 
divorced from " realities " is nonsense. It is the realities 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 89 

that "appear" to us, or are sensed by us. That is the 
literal and the only intelligible meaning of the term " pheno- 
mena," which has been so useful to the theologian in his 
modern conflict with science. Odour, pressure, colour, 
etc. (I am not, of course, speaking of the sensations these 
produce in us), are not a mysterious metaphysical peel of 
the "real" orange. They are the matter of the orange 
shooting at our olfactory nerve, reflecting the ethereal waves 
to our retina, and so forth. 

It is the same with biology and psychology. It has been 
very convenient for certain reactionary schools of thought 
to assume that the "phenomena" of life and mind are 
something separate from the realities. The naturalist could 
then be left to deal with the former, while the supernaturalist 
still extended his mystic theories to the latter. The distinc- 
tion is a mere survival of the older superficial way of look- 
ing at things. Modern science knows nothing of "qualities" 
so distinct from objects that as the Catholic believes to be 
the case in the Mass the substance (of the bread or wine) 
can be annihilated and the qualities remain intact. This 
is a childish conception in science to-day. Life and mind, 
in the concrete, have no qualities or phenomena distinct 
from themselves, in the sense that biology and psychology 
can deal extensively with the former, yet leave the latter 
under the veil. Such a work as Haeckel's Wonders of Life 
tells you a vast amount about life, not about the pheno- 
mena of life (in the distinct sense). Such a work as Sully's 
Psychology gives you a mass of information about the mind 
itself. 



90 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

Thus Sir Oliver Lodge comes into direct conflict with our 
biologists and psychologists. They may not think their 
research is as yet complete enough to justify them in 
defining life and mind as mechanical, but they are not at 
all willing to see those realities airily thrust into a spectral 
world beyond their reach. What, indeed, would the average 
reader, who has no system to defend, gain by the adoption 
of Sir Oliver Lodge's desperate resource ? Nothing what- 
ever. He may find Haeckel's theories of life and mind 
inadequate, but assuredly he will get little intellectual satis- 
faction in admitting that they are " spirit." What is 
" spirit " ? No spiritist will give you any consistent defini- 
tion. In earlier days there was a very clear distinction 
drawn between matter and spirit. Matter was extended or 
quantitative substance substance occupying space; spirit 
was substance without parts or spatial extension. Sir Oliver 
Lodge ridicules this old antithesis (p, 129, where a know- 
ledge of the historical distinction would again have spared 
him the strain on his courtesy), but nowhere suggests a 
better. He says that the fundamental property of matter is 
inertia. The " immaterial," which is the essence of his 
theory, he nowhere attempts to define. If it is to be some- 
thing devoid of even the quality of inertia, it becomes 
totally unthinkable a far more profound enigma than any 
of those biological difficulties which it is brought in to 
unravel. In one place Sir Oliver Lodge seems to look to 
"ether" for an intelligible idea of spirit (p. in), as many 
spiritists do. But he has elsewhere explained that ether 
retains inertia, and that therefore to speak of it as immaterial 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 91 

(as Mr. Whetham does) is absurd. We are thus left 
without the slenderest definition of what spirit is. It is the 
mere shadow of an ancient name. 

And this is only one of the difficulties that beset Sir 
Oliver Lodge's theory the moment you examine it closely. 
A hundred difficulties arise as to the manner in which this 
immaterial entity acts on the matter of the animal's frame. 
If it be true that, as he says, modern physics sees only 
ether-particles in motion in the universe, the question how 
the immaterial can act on the ether-particles and "direct" 
their movements is a serious one. Against his biological 
critics he makes, or tries to make, one point of importance 
in the name of physics : 

My contention is and in this contention I am practi- 
cally speaking for my brother physicists that whereas life 
or mind can neither generate energy nor directly exert 
force, yet it can cause matter to exert force on matter, and 
so can exercise guidance and control : it can so prepare 
any scene of activity, by arranging the position of existing 
material, and timing the liberation of existing energy, as 
to produce results concordant with an idea or scheme or 
intention (p. 164). 

Now, if in this vague statement Sir Oliver Lodge is 
making a claim for " life or mind " that is not admitted 
by the biologists he sets out to attack, he has no warrant 
whatever for speaking in the name of his " brother physi- 
cists." His words are more misleading for the " uncultured 
reader," for whom he is so concerned, than any that 
Haeckel has penned. One or two physicists like Lord 
Kelvin or Sir W. Crookes might agree with him, but they 



92 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

would not do so on physical grounds, and more of his 
" brother physicists " would emphatically dissent (such as 
Sir A. Riicker and Sir J. Dewar and others). It is not a 
concern of physics at all. 

If, on the other hand, we do not press too hard the vague 
closing words of the passage I have quoted, not only 
physicists, but Haeckel and others, will admit it. This is 
clear from the instances given, such as guiding a falling 
rock so as to fire a detonator, guiding a pen so as to produce 
intelligible characters, or pulling a hair-trigger or opening 
the throttle-valve of an engine. Certainly here we have 
guidance of energies with a definite purpose. But, as in 
the case of most of Sir Oliver Lodge's " analogues," there is 
no real analogy at all. In each case, he admits, a nerve- 
process initiates the action, and this in turn is originated by 
" some chemical process." He suggests that the latter was 
set going by some immaterial power called will. This is 
wholly gratuitous, and wholly unintelligible. Modern 
psychology sees no spiritual initiation of volitions at all. 
There is a constant current of ganglionic processes pouring 
through the brain from the nerves that communicate with 
the outer world, and these shape the desires or plans or 
volitions. At all events, Sir Oliver Lodge is begging the 
whole question when he assumes an immaterial starting- 
point. We know only nerve-processes, with the psychic 
reflection of them in consciousness. Sir Oliver Lodge can 
give us no instance whatever of the guidance of inorganic 
matter or energy by something that is clearly not material. 

Thus the difficulty remains in full force. To " guide " 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 93 

material energies means to move material particles. Of 
disembodied energies we know nothing I have shown how- 
Sir Oliver Lodge discards "energy" altogether when he is 
asked for the fundamental factors in physics, and recognises 
only moving particles of ether. How does the immaterial 
move particles of matter ? And when this difficulty is fully 
realised, another awaits us. To build up the frame of a 
single organism and direct its energies for the common life- 
purposes, his immaterial principle would have to be as con- 
scious, as deliberate, as much guided by a plan, as the man 
who puts the stones together to form a house. Who will 
admit this for the lower type of animals or for the plants ? 
From every point of view, it is far more satisfactory to look 
to the unconscious, elaborate mechanism of the organism, 
which science is gradually mastering. 

How comes it that a man like Sir Oliver Lodge so clearly 
deserts ordinary scientific procedure in his speculations on 
life, and makes these desperate efforts to introduce the 
immaterial ? His position can only be understood when we 
remember that he is convinced of the immateriality of 
mind from a totally different set of considerations from 
psychical research. As these considerations are not men- 
tioned in his book, I cannot deal with them. It is, however, 
only just to him to point out that the arguments I have 
analysed the analogies and speculations and conjectures 
that crumble into dust the moment you seriously test them 
are not the real grounds of his conviction. I will only say 
that those real grounds have nothing to do with his compe- 
tence as a man of science, and that they only bring him 



94 THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 

to a point which is, comparatively, not much nearer to 
orthodox theology than is the position of Professor Haeckel. 
The Churches of our time have reeled under the blows of 
men of science like Darwin, Huxley, Tyndall, Spencer, 
Clifford, Maudsley, and Haeckel. Apart from the more 
scholarly and liberal divines, the Churches still expose them- 
selves to the force of those blows. The mass of believers 
are kept in ignorance of the real opinions of their own most 
learned divines, and the official teaching of all the Churches 
is such as not a single eminent scholar in Europe (apart 
from the clergy) can endorse to-day. In face of these 
attacks the Churches look in vain for allies among men of 
science. It is a profound mistake to imagine that Sir 
Oliver Lodge is presenting himself as a champion of the 
creeds against Professor Haeckel. 

What is his final position on the familiar religious 
issues? It is true that he tells us "a soul is always 
immortal where a soul can be discerned" (p. 116), and 
he speaks of a " transcendent mind " and the " Sustainer 
and Comprehender " of the universe, though why the 
universe needs a "Sustainer" when Sir Oliver thinks 

anything "which really and fundamentally exists can 

be trusted not suddenly to go out of existence," is not 
clear. As the point is interesting, and as Sir Oliver Lodge 
is widely claimed as a supporter of our Churches, I close 
with a few observations on his theological position. I find 
them fairly clearly expressed in an address on Science and 
Religion that he delivered at the City Temple (November 
2nd, 1905), and has since published. 



THE EVOLUTION OF LIFE AND MIND 95 

Sir Oliver Lodge believes in God, but not in a Father 
" Almighty," nor in a " Creator of heaven and earth." 

"The struggle and effort towards progress extends even 

to the Deity " (p. 5) ; "I do not believe in things jumping 
into existence and jumping out of existence " (p. 4) ; " What 
may be the conditions of an Infinite Being we can never 
tell " (p. 8). Is God distinct from nature ? At one point 
(p. 3) he begins to deny it, and then dramatically breaks 
his sentence ; later he says : " Nature, man, God, all in a 
sense one." He claims constantly to be a Monist, but 
thinks there may be a number of totally distinct fundamental 
entities. He also thinks that " it is scientific," though " it 
may not be entirely philosophical," to accept a thing 
" although you may not be able to reconcile it fully with 
some other things which also you may hold to " (p. 8). He 
does not seem to think that God is a " pure spirit," since he 
suggests that the cosmic bodies may make up his brain. 
These are the ideas about the Deity which Christian 
believers fondly imagine coincide with their own. 

His views of the human " soul " are not less profoundly 
heretical and interesting. His basic principle is " the 
persistence of being." if he took this as a purely empirical 
principle, it would help him very little towards a belief in 
the survival of the soul. He therefore naively ignoring 
his unmerited stricture on Haeckel gives it an axiomatic 
and self-evident character. Life is an ultimate entity, and 
must persist. Does that mean that the soul of the beetle or 
the cat survives, as well as the human soul ? The awkward 
conclusion is met by the framing of a fresh axiomatic 



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