and potency of all life? May it not be that thus were produced your savage and his balanced spear? You would say that a man holding such views ought to be sent to the lunatic wards. No may be is good for anything in science, unless it may be an is. But how about your actually living night-hawk, flying there above the prairie in the edge of the evening? How about your savage there miraculously alive, and poising his spear? Although you believe this rude earthwork tracery of the night-hawk and the savage cannot possibly have originated in any complexity of merely physical forces in a cooling planet, you will allow a man, if he is full enough of scientific authority, to come before you, and seriously puzzle you, as Strauss, Huxley, Virchow, and Häckel attempt to do, with the assertion that the bioplast-which stands at the head of the development of your living night-hawk, and which had in it all that has followed of life on this globe-came into existence in some Drift period by a fortuitous concourse of atoms. You ought for this to be sent to the lunatic wards. The reply to all reasoning of that sort is simply this, that merely physical forces do not act so. As Agassiz used to say, "The products of merely physical forces are the same in all quarters of the globe, and during all time known to man; but the products of the forces that produce life are varied under the same circumstances. Between two such sets of forces there can be no causal or genetic connection." 1 The results of the forces that produce organisms differ in different periods, and therefore we cannot account for them by these invisible, blind, mechanical laws. If, on the prairie, the figure of your night-hawk was not traced by a complication of these forces, assuredly, in the name of all clear ideas, the first bioplast that came into existence, and the bioplasts that weave the night-hawk and savage, were not constructed by any such complication of physical forces, acting without design or choice.

Does death end all? The answer to that question depends on the reply to another: Is life the cause of organisation, or organisation the cause of life? Is the relation of the soul to the body that of harmony to the harp, or that of the harper to the harp?

What are the strategic points in the discussion of the origin of life? 1. Tyndall, Huxley, Bain, Drysdale, and Spencer himself, all admit that the actions of bioplasts cannot be explained by merely chemical properties or forces.

If I succeed in showing you that this concession is made by the materialistic school, you will be relieved from much distress cast on you by popular irresponsible scribblers and declaimers. In November 1875, Professor Tyndall quoted and adopted these words of DuBois Reymond, "It is absolutely and for ever inconceivable that a number of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms should be otherwise than indifferent as to their own position and motion, past, present, or future."2 Tyndall adds in his own words, that "the con

1 Agassiz, Essay on Classification.

2 See Preface to Tyndall's Fragments of Science. Also his article in the Fortnightly Review, November, 1875, P. 585. Also Dr. Charles Elam's art. on Automatism and Evolution," Contemporary Review, September 1876, p. 539.

tinuity between molecular processes and the phenomena of consciousness is the rock upon which materialism must inevitably split whenever it pretends to be a complete philosophy of the human mind." That is Tyndall, if you please, in 1875, writing a preface to the Belfast address, which needed much explanation after its errors had been searchingly pointed out by general public discussion.

There is inertia everywhere in all that we call matter. What is inertia? The incapacity to originate force or motion. Inertia is a property of the matter in bioplasm as surely as of that in any other part of the universe. This is the substance of DuBois Reymond's famous concession, that it is for ever inconceivable that a mass of physical atoms-past, present, or to come-should be outside the range of the law of inertia. "There is," says Faraday,1 one wonderful condition of matter, perhaps its only true indication, namely, inertia."

Even Herbert Spencer, who would be very glad to prove the opposite, says in his "Biology" (vol. i. p. 182), "The proximate chemical principles, or chemical units,-albumen, fibrine, gelatine, or the hypothetical proteine substance,-cannot possess the property of forming the endlessly varied structures of animal forms." This is Herbert Spencer in 1864. "Nor," continues he, "can any such power be given to the cell as a morphological unit, even if it had a right to that title." It is the bioplast that is the morphological unit, and not the cell. "Therefore," concludes Spencer, "there is no alternative but to suppose that the chemical units combine into units immensely more complex than themselves, and that, in each organism, the physiological units produced by this further compounding of highly compound atoms have a more or less distinctive character. must conclude, that, in each case, some slight difference of composition in these units, leading to some slight difference in their natural play of forces, produces a difference in the form which the aggregate of them assumes." Spencer's "Biology" is now an outgrown book, so rapid has been the progress of biological knowledge since its publication.

We

But the reply to this precious theory is, that involution and evolu tion are a fixed equation. If these multiplex molecules and their merely mechanical actions, which Spencer says build the body, have no life behind them, you will get no life out of them. If the smaller units out of which he makes up his larger units have no life in them, you will obtain from the latter only what was in the former.

Let us be for ever sure that the law of the persistence of force requires that evolution and involution should be equal to each other. You will get out of your molecular units what you put into them, and nothing more. But, according to Spencer himself, the chemical and physical forces and properties of atoms cannot build an organism. Larger molecular masses made up of these units, he says, may do so. Not unless there can be more evolved from, than is involved in, these units. If involution and evolution are not an eternal equation, there

1 Correlation and Conservation of Forces, p. 24.

may be an effect without a cause. You cannot evolve_anything which you have not first involved. Huxley, Spencer, Bain, and Drysdale, all admit that, if you make up your compounds from all the ascertained molecular activities, you involve nothing that will account for the weaving of these complex tissues. That admission is fatal to their further pretence, that a combination can be made which will evolve what has not been involved.

But Dr. Drysdale, who is a candid Scotch writer, makes a most distinct admission, that, even after we have built up these complicated molecular units, the matter in them must be inert. Hear the authority of a man who opposes Beale's opinion, that the action of the bioplasts cannot be accounted for except by a higher than physical cause, and who seriously undertakes, while admitting Beale's facts, to persuade the world that this matter in the bioplasts is of an infinitely peculiar sort, and that all it needs is "stimulus" to set it at work in all this miraculous weaving and inweaving and co-ordination of tissues. Dr. Drysdale says in so many words,1 "No matter how complex the protoplasmic molecule may be, its atoms are still nothing but matter, and must share its properties for good or evil, and among the rest inertia. Hence it cannot change its state of motion nor rest without the influence of some force from without. True spontaneity of movement is, therefore, just as impossible to it as to what we call dead matter.

So we are compelled to admit the existence of an exciting cause in the form of some force from without to give the initial impulse in all vital actions. This is the-What? The soul? We expect him to say that; but what he says is, "This is the stimulus," whatever that may

mean.

It is very surprising, in view of the school of thought to which Professor Alexander Bain of Aberdeen belongs, that, in his work on "The Senses and the Intellect" (p. 64), he should go so far as to uphold the doctrine of the spontaneity of vital actions, and to maintain that a spontaneous energy resides in the nerve-centres which gives them the power of initiating molecular movements without any antecedent sensation from without, or emotion from within, or any antecedent state of feeling whatever, or any stimulus extraneous to the moving apparatus itself. This fact of spontaneous energy he regards as the essential prelude to voluntary power.

So much, gentlemen, for the latest concessions of materialists; but I hold in my hand here the best, or certainly the freshest, book in the world on the "Cellular Theory;" and what are its opening words? All medical students in this audience will know that Professor Heinrich Frey of Zurich is a great authority on the celltheory, and that this book of his has had an enormous sale between the Alps and the Baltic. Frey's work on "Microscopic Technology" is placed side by side with Stricker's "Histology" in the reading recommended to the two hundred young men in the Harvard Medical School yonder; but fresher than either of these books is this new volume published by Frey in 1875.

1 Protoplasmic Theory of Life, p. 199.

Rufus Choate, as you remember, used sometimes to lay out a course of study in the classics perfectly parallel with that of the young men in Harvard University, and, in his breathless profession, would keep pace with them year after year. What if a student of religious science, who has no right to know anything about physiology, should look at the text-books in use in Harvard Medical School on physiology and other topics, and by this means, and by considerable conversation with men of science, assuring himself that he is not reading rubbish, and with a professional medical library at his command, should follow side by side the investigations those highly privileged young men are pursuing yonder, and occasionally stand with them in their dissecting-rooms? I know at least one student of religious science who does precisely that, and is fascinated with his work. Biology is now quite as interesting as the classics. In your Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, studies are elective; and about ninety out of one hundred of the students there elect biology as one of their subjects.

Professor Frey of Zurich, in this work, which is hardly dry from the press, prints, face to face with the world, these as his very first sentences: "A deep abyss separates the inorganic from the organic, the inanimate from the animate. The rock-crystal on the one side, vegetable and animal on the other: how infinitely different the image! Is it, then, possible to bridge over this gulf? We answer, Not at the present time." We turn on in this volume, and find that reference is made to the theory that vital transformations are much like crystallisation, and that then these remarks are made, with a very apparent and not undeserved sly smile :

66

Schwann, the founder of modern histology, taught, What the crystal is in regard to the inorganic, that the cell is in the sphere of life. As the former shoots from the mother lye, so, also, in a suitable animal fluid, are developed the constituents of the cell, nucleolus, nucleus, covering, and cell contents. This view was embraced during many years, it explained everything so conveniently. This was, however, over-hasty. The cell arises from the cell. A spontaneous origin does not occur." All this is in accord with what Huxley says in his article in "The Encyclopædia Britannica,” “There is no parallel between the actions of matter in the mineral world and in living tissues."

" 1

2. After the unanimity of experts, there is no higher authority on any scientific doctrine than to find it taught in standard text-books in schools of the first rank; but you may easily ascertain that the very latest standard text-books oppose the mechanical or materialistic theory of life.

Dr. Tyson's book on "The Cell Doctrine" is in use side by side with Frey in your Harvard Medical School; but Tyson opens with diagrams from Beale, and closes with Beale; and where is there anything in him that is regarded as invulnerable, that he did not

1 Professor Heinrich Frey, Compendium of Histology, Twenty-four lectures. Translated by Dr. G. R. Cutter. New York: Putnam's Sons, 1876. Pp. 1, 14.

obtain from Beale? Over and over, in the latter half of the book, as he closes the history of the thirty-nine years since the cell-theory was promulgated, he cites Beale; and, in spite of all the sneers from Huxley and others about "aquosity and horologity," he sums up established science thus, " We believe that the proper shaping, arrangement, and function of these elementary parts, is not a process identical or analogous to crystallisation, taking place through merely physical laws, but that there is a presiding agency which controls such arrangement to a definite end." 1 This is a statement out of a text-book mentioned officially in the catalogue of Harvard University as in use in the best medical school of your nation; and here is the best German book; and I have just read to you out of the best Scotch book; and Beale's is the best English Book; and they are all explicitly agreed in the assertion, that it is life, not mechanism, which weaves us and all things that live.

3. I affirm that we have under the microscope ocular demonstration that it is life which causes organisation, and not organisation which causes life. What is the first thing that appears in the formation of an organisation? A mass of germinal matter that has life but no organisation. You know what a naked bioplast is,—a little speck of glue-like matter, transparent, colourless, and, under the highest powers of the microscope and every other test known to man, showing no organisation, but yet capable of multiplex movements, all these in a minute [referring to coloured diagrams on the platform]. "We fail," Huxley says, to detect any organisation in the bioplasmic mass; •" but there are movements in it and life. We see the movements: they must have a cause. The cause of the movements must exist before the movements. The life is there before organisation. But, if life may exist before organisation, it may do so after it, or outside it.

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If, according to custom in some rude games of sailors, we were to put a man in a canvas bag, and throw him in the bag upon this platform; and if that bag were to begin to cast out a promontory here, and a promontory there, and assume scores of shapes, and move to and fro, and pick up, now this object, and now that, we should have no unfit representation of a portion of the movements of a naked bioplasmic mass. Your astonishing bag here picks up this chair, which cannot move of itself; and to make the parallel complete, it must have the power of absorbing this inanimate object, and of changing it into something just like itself, or alive. Suddenly this man in the bag may, if the parallel is to be made perfect, throw off a small sack from the bag, and that instantly begins to move on this platform: it forthwith commences to pick up lifeless matter, and to transform it into living matter like itself. It, too, throws off other little sacks, which go through the same motions again. We should say that sacks of that sort had very complicated machinery in them. But this is by no means the chief marvel.

You know, gentlemen, that in India it is a play of the children

1 Dr. James Tyson, The Cell Doctrine, pp. 112 and 113. Lindsay & Blakiston, 1870.