LIFE AND MATTER.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1342, 20 January 1912, Page 14

LIFE AND MATTER.

• SIR 0. LODGE AND THE VIEWS OF ' MR. BALFOUR AND M, BERGSON. ;1 Sir Oliver Lodge, tho Principal of the r 'Umversity of Birmingham, in an address V at Birmingham on November 29, dealt i with the articles upon "Life and Matter - by Mi-. Balfour and M. Bergson in the r "Hibbert Journal." 0 Sir Oliver said that the crux, the essen--1 tial puzzle to be faced, came out very :- clearly in Mr. Balfour's article. As Mr. y Bergson had truly said, life utilised solar g energy' to store organic chemical sub- - stances which might be called "explof sives," and then it pulled a trigger, a - frictionless oasy trigger, that required 1 only a nearly infinitesimal force, lhat [i was, indeed, a not unusual way of fortnur lating its function, except among those e who tried to consider that life was itself r a form of energy. But, said I\lr. Balfour, to pull even a..hair trigger some force o was required, no matter how small, llow y was lifo or mind to exert force on rnatt tor? By what process was a mental idea ! translated into terms of physical motion? s It was not enough that in organic life >• accumulated energy was released. "What s is really essential," said Mr. -Balfour ;, truly, "is the manner oi tho release. If o the release is effected by pure mechanism e fate still reigns supreme.'' M. Bergson o said that life was elasticity in matter— w slight in amount as this probably is—and t turns it to the profit of liberty by stealing a into whatever infinitesimal fraction ofin- - determination that inert matter may pre:l sent." He (Sir Oliver) was not prepared 0 to admit' this mode of statement exactly, ■- but ho fully admitted that in try- - ing to understand tho working of life 1 and consciousness we were constie tutionally hampered by our own o purely motile conception of power and f activity. Wo ourselves wero limited to , movement of objects, so far as tho exo ternal wor,ld was concerned; wo put - tilings together and trusted to their in--5 lierent properties, but life was working v the inherent properties themselves. Wo 0 placcd an' e»g in an incubator and a r chicken resulted. !- Nature or life worked in a totally different way from us; it did not directly f move things at all, though it might euuse 1 them to move each other, and it achiovs cd portentous results. What ho wanted 0 to suggest was that the special changes 1 produced in matter by will and inteuis gence were explicable 1 by a process of ? timing, a process adapted to the tlireotJ ing of energy quite independent of any j alteration in its amount, and without ' any interference with—indeed with full • assistance from—the laws of physics. Tlin J cells of the brain were presumably not 1 stagnant until the wilt acted upon them; ; the cells of a living body must be as active as atoms of radium. Withdraw tho controlling influence of life, and they speedily worked havoc and devastation. 5 Consciousness conspicuously entered into J relation with matter and suffered ac- . cordingly. Why should it do this asked " Mr. Balfour. Let them consider what it l was that consciousness was striving for. t If it wero thought that its aim was to t inoculate matter with its own freedom, t and that it was smitten with failure in so far as "a huge mass of matter remains . what it has always been, the undisputed ; realm of lifeless determinism," an entire , misunderstanding was exhibited. M. J Bergson's contention Was that tho aim ; of life and consciousness was self-develop- . meat, not the development of matter. . Tho aim was to bring into full activity [ every fibre of our being. Matter was a ; means to that end; it was used in thepro- • cess and discarded, and remained what it was before. Matter had provoked effort ■ and rendered it possible. Force could not be exerted when thoro was no resisti auco. So the very inertia and obstructiveness of matter, tho resistance which it offered to the realisation of ideals, contributed to the development of incarnate consciousness and enabled it to rise in the scale of existence. "The thought which is only thought," said M. Bergson, "the work of art which is only in the conceptual state, the poem which is only a dream costs as yet no effort; what requires an effort is the material realisation of the poem in words, of the artistic conception in a statue or picture. This effort is painful, it may be very painfid, and yet whilst making it wo feel, that it is as precious as, and perhaps more precious than, the work it results in because, tliauks to it, wo have drawn from ourselves not only all that there was there but more than was tliero; ivo have raised ourselves above process, and that was how matter, by its very inertness, could contribute to the result. Its very necessity made of organised niatIcr ail instrument of liberty, and tho fact tnat there had been a real aim all tho time was proved by tho sense of joy which followed its accomplishment. Such efforts were surely not aimless. There was no_ ignorance or uncertainty as to tho desirod gxxil, though, there was a. ©ontmgoncy as to its being reached in any attempted direction, Evolutionary progress was not like a river bed flowing in a predestined channel, nor was it like the .march of the land crabs in inexorable straight lines over and through every obstacle and danger; no, but it was like an Anabasis. Lach marching day so many parasiings, so many stadia, halts of given duration by the way, natives questioned, hostilities avoided, difficulties overcome, and at length tho sea which-washed the shores of the homoland was sighted with the bursting forth of shouts of joy.