"[3]
"Was there anything so absurd as to believe that a number of atoms, by
falling together of their own accord, could make a sprig of moss, a
microbe, a living animal? ... It is utterly absurd.... Here scientific
thought is compelled to accept the idea of creative power. Forty years
ago I asked Liebig ... if he believed that the grass and flowers, which
we saw around us, grew by mere mechanical force. He answered, 'No more
than I could believe that a book of botany describing them could grow by
mere chemical force.'"[4]
"Let them not imagine that any hocus-pocus of electricity or viscous
fluids would make a living cell.... Nothing approaching to a cell of
living creature has ever yet been made.... No artificial process
whatever could make living matter out of dead."[5]
[Footnote 3: P.C. Mitchell, in Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. III, p.
952.]
[Footnote 4: Lord Kelvin in the London _Times_, May 4, 1903.]
[Footnote 5: Lord Kelvin, to a class of Medical Students, October 28,
1904.]
I
Ever since Rene Descartes, in his Holland laboratory, dissected the
heads of great numbers of animals in order to discover the processes of
imagination and memory, men have been seeking a physical or
materialistic answer to such questions as, What is life? What is it to
be alive? How shall we distinguish the living from the not-living?
No one of to-day, in the light of the correlation of vital processes
with the general law of the conservation of energy, believes that life
in plants and animals is a separate entity which may exist outside of
and apart from matter.
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