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VI

Professor Soddy, in discussing the relation of life to energy, does not commit himself to the theory of the vitalistic or non-mechanical origin of life, but makes the significant statement that there is a consensus of opinion that the life processes are not bound by the second law of thermo-dynamics, namely, the law of the non-availability of the energy latent in low temperatures, or in the chaotic movements of molecules everywhere around us. To get energy, one must have a fall or an incline of some sort, as of water from a higher to a lower level, or of temperature from a higher to a lower degree, or of electricity from one condition of high stress to another less so. But the living machine seems able to dispense with this break or incline, or else has the secret of creating one for itself.

In the living body the chemical energy of food is directly transformed into work, without first being converted into heat. Why a horse can do more work than a one-horse-power engine is probably because his living cells can and do draw upon this molecular energy. Molecules of matter outside the living body all obey the law of probability, or the law of chance; but inside the living body they at least seem to obey some other law–the law of design, or of dice that are loaded, as Soddy says. They are more likely always to act in a particular way. Life supplies a directing agency. Soddy asks if the physical distinction between living and dead matter begins in the jostling molecular crowd–begins by the crowd being directed and governed in a particular way. If so, by what? Ah! that is the question. Science will have none of it, because science would have to go outside of matter for such an agent, and that science cannot do. Such a theory implies intelligence apart from matter, or working in matter. Is that a hard proposition? Intelligence clearly works in our bodies and brains, and in those of all the animals–a controlled and directed activity in matter that seems to be life. The cell which builds up all living bodies behaves not like a machine, but like a living being; its activities, so far as we can judge, are spontaneous, its motions and all its other processes are self-prompted. But, of course, in it the mechanical, the chemical, and the vital are so blended, so interdependent, that we may never hope to separate them; but without the activity called vital, there would be no cell, and hence no body.

It were unreasonable to expect that scientific analysis should show that the physics and chemistry of a living body differs from that of the non-living. What is new and beyond the reach of science to explain is the kind of activity of these elements. They enter into new compounds; they build up bodies that have new powers and properties; they people the seas and the air and the earth with living creatures, they build the body and brain of man. The secret of the activity in matter that we call vital is certainly beyond the power of science to tell us. It is like expecting that the paint and oil used in a great picture must differ from those in a daub. The great artist mixed his paint with brains, and the universal elements in a living body are mixed with something that science cannot disclose. Organic chemistry does not differ intrinsically from inorganic; the difference between the two lies in the purposive activity of the elements that build up a living body.

Or is life, as a New England college professor claims, “an x-entity, additional to matter and energy, but of the same cosmic rank as they,” and “manifesting itself to our senses only through its power to keep a certain quantity of matter and energy in the continuous orderly ferment we call life”?