The Breath of Life

According to the latest scientific views held on the question by such men as Professor Loeb, theappearance of life on the globe was a purely accidental circumstance. The proper elements justhappened to come together at the right time in the right proportions and under the right conditions, and life was the result. It was an accident in the thermal history of the globe. Professor Loeb haslately published a volume of essays and addresses called "The Mechanistic Conception of Life,"enforcing and illustrating this view. He makes war on what he terms the metaphysical conception ofa "life-principle" as the key to the problem, and urges the scientific conception of the adequacy ofmechanico-chemical forces. In his view, we are only chemical mechanisms; and all our activities, mental and physical alike, are only automatic responses to the play of the blind, material forces ofexternal nature. All forms of life, with all their wonderful adaptations, are only the chancehappenings of the blind gropings and clashings of dead matter: "We eat, drink, and reproduce and, of course, think and speculate and write books on the problems of life], not because mankind hasreached an agreement that this is desirable, but because, machine-like, we are compelled to do so "He reaches the conclusion that all our inner subjective life is amenable to physico-chemicalanalysis, because many cases of simple animal instinct and will can be explained on this basis-thebasis of animal tropism. Certain animals creep or fly to the light, others to the dark, because theycannot help it. This is tropism. He believes that the origin of life can be traced to the same physicochemical activities, because, in his laboratory experiments, he has been able to dispense with themale principle, and to fertilize the eggs of certain low forms of marine life by chemical compoundsalone. "The problem of the beginning and end of individual life is physico-chemically clear"-muchclearer than the first beginnings of life. All individual life begins with the egg, but where did we getthe egg? When chemical synthesis will give us this, the problem is solved. We can analyze thematerial elements of an organism, but we cannot synthesize them and produce the least spark ofliving matter. That all forms of life have a mechanical and chemical basis is beyond question, butwhen we apply our analysis to them, life evaporates, vanishes, the vital processes cease. But applythe same analysis to inert matter, and only the form is chang