The Dominion. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1912. THE RIDDLE OF LIFE.

Dominion, Volume 6, Issue 1569, 12 October 1912, Page 4

The Dominion. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1912. THE RIDDLE OF LIFE.

The fascinating problem of life has occupied the attention of the greatest minds in all ages and places, and never has a solution been sought with more determination by the keenest intellects than at the present time. It is not therefore surprising that Professor Schaefer's British Association address on the origin and nature of life (the full text of which has now reached this part of the world) has given rise to much controversy, and has been awaited with very considerable interest' in New Zealand. Professor Schaefer and his fellow workers have good reason to be proud of the marvellous advance which has been made in recent years in the path of knowledge of living organisms; but the final answer to the riddle is probably as far off as ever. Every new discovery opens up. new vistas to the scientific imagination, and for every mystery solyed a score of others even more mysterious make their appearance. Professor Sohaefer, it may be said at once, has settled nothing, and those who have been waiting ior the full report of his address in the hope of finding therein a record of some decisive experiment? or epoch-making discovery which would remove the problem of the origin of life from the region of theory to that of scientific fact will be disappointed. Nevertheless the address is a very able and striking one, and the case for the mechanical explanation of life and the. evolution of living from nonliving matter is presented with great force and clearness. It is, however, still true that if we are to take our stand rigidly on actual fact and experiment, the scientific dictum that all life comes from pre-existing life continues to hold good. Nevertheless progressive minds will never rest content until tho' gap between the organic and the inorganic is bridged, or finally proved to be unbridgable. The latter alternative is naturally a distasteful one. Indeed, the scientific imagination can already conceive in dim outline the steps by which the connection has been, and probably is still being, made; but it must always be remembered that the discovery of spontaneous generation would not solve tho mystery of life, nor would it prove that all wo mean by living is purely a matter of mechanism. Wo would still have to explain where .matter got these marvellous potentialities from, and the still more marvellous fact of consciousness would have to be accounted for It is unfortunate that Professor Schaefer has not given a more preciso definition of what he means by life. If ho is only dealing with tho physiological aspect of tho problem, he is probably right in saying that tho phenomena of life can only be investigated by tho same mothods as all other phenomena of maltor; but it should bo clearlv understood that no explanation of this sort can cover tho wiiolo ground. "To the psychologist," as an eminent authority (Mr. Whetham) tells us, "nerve, impulse is explained in terms of thought, to the physicist by physical changes. The fact that a thought is accompanied by movement of matter or electricity does not mako the thought less a fundamental conception. The object of scicnoo is to find connections between phenomena, and thus to correlate them. At present a greater simplification may be reached by reducing all possible phenomena to moelianical conceptions than in any othor way; but that only shows Hint the mechanical aspect of Nature gives us a fuller view than any other at presont known, not that mechanics is philosophically the most fundamental science." Professor Sokaefku certainly does seem to regard tho task of physiology as the working out of purely mechanical explanations for nil tho processes of living organismsbut Mr. M'Douoali,, the Header iii Mental Philosophy in Oxford, points out with groat force that, "to accept this conception of physiology is to base the science on a vast assumption, namely, that all tho processes of living organisms arc capable of being mechanically explained. This is a gratuitous assumption which finds no justification in facts. For no single organic function has yet boon found oxplicablo in purely mechanical terms: even auch relative-

ly simple processes as the secretion of a tear or the exudation of a drop of sweat continue to elude all attempts at complete explanation in terms of physical and chemical science." Many of Professor Schaefer's positions have been very effectively asailed by the vitnlist school, which includes some of the foremost living scientists, and are also challenged by the psychologists, who hold that life has many aspects which are entirely different from anything which can be found in so-called dead matter and the sphere of purely mechanical causation. The exact bearing of Professor bCHAEFER's address on the fundamental problem as to whether the umverse ( as a whole is to be interpreted in terms of matter or of spirit is not quite clear. The Times states that when he declares that tne problems of life are essentially Problems # of matter," he means that

"science is limited to that field. It can deal with life only as manifested in matter, and investigate it by the same methods of other phenomena of matter, because these are the only methods it has. At the same time he guards himself against the crude and obsolete materialism once in vogue by carefully distinguishing between 'life' and 'soul.' " The general trend of the address, however, is in a materialistic direction. This at any rate is the opinion of such a competent critic as Dr. Haldane. Professor Schaefer tells us, for instance, that man's achievements

are but the result of the acquisition by a few cells in a remote ancestor of e. slightly greater tendency to react to an external stimulus, so that these cells wore brought into closer touch with the outer worldwhile on the other hand, by extending beyond the circumscribed area to which their neighbours remained restricted, they .gradually acquired a dominating influence over the rest. These dominating cells became nerve cells; and now not only furnish the means for transmission of impressions from one port of the organism to another, but in the progress of time have become the seat ot perception and conscious sensation, of the formation and association of ideas, of memory, volition, and all the manifestations of tie mind! Such a statement of the relations between mind and matter, standing without qualifications, comes very close to materialism, for it seems to regard matter the ultimate reality and looks upon mind as a mere byproduct—a kind of phosphorescent glow (to borrow the expressive words of a recent writer) generated by the working of certain parts of the machine. This point of view is selfdestructive and undermines the whole fabric of the sciences, which are fundamentally mental constructions; for, to quote Mr. Whetham once more, "we can only study Nature through our senses—that is, wo can only study the model of Nature that our senses enable our minds to construct; we cannot decide whether that model, consistent though it be, represents truly the real structure of Nature; whether, indeed, there be any Nature as an ultimate reality behind its phenomena." This means that the whole of our scheme of natural science depends upon the reliability of the mental picture which .our minds have constructed of ihe external world, and therefore to deny the freedom and independence of mind is to undermine the validity of all reasoning, for the mind is after all the only instrument we have wherewith to direct and control scientific investigation and the logical presentment of its results. Materialism can give no satisfying explanation of knowledge itself. As Mb. Balfour pointed out in his British Association address in 1904, it "must ever regard knowledge as the product of'irrational conditions, for in the last resort it knows no others. It must always regard knowledge as rational or else science itself disappears." It is, he goes on to say, "confronted with the difficulty' of harmonising the pedigree of our beliefs with their title to authority. The more successful we are in oxplaining their origin [on naturalistic principles] the more we cast doubt upon their validity. The more imposing seems the scheme of what we know; the more difficult it is to discover by what ultimate criteria we claim to know it." The only escape from the riddle is by recognition of the autonomy of mind or spirit. Mind, can at least partly explain matter, - but matter can never explain mind. Mn. Balfour says he does not think that there is any escape from_ theso perplexities unless the world is regarded as the work of a rational Being, who made it intelligible, and at the same time made us able, in however feeble a fashion, to understand it.