Picture - Cosmic Polymath

KANT'S AND SPENCER'S VIEWS OF MATTER AND FORCE 223
large wings of the insect, flying reptile, bird, and bat. The travelling organs and surfaces of all animals are
specially designed, and constructed for specific purposes. They are also (and this is important) constructed in
advance and before they are required. The wings would be ineffective for land transit, and the small feet for
navigating the air. In like manner, the tail of the fish would be ill adapted for progression either on the land
or in the air.
The modifications and changes effected by environment are at best insignificant. They certainly do not
produce the various types of plants and animals ; neither do they produce the sense organs and organs of locomo-
tion. It is inconceivable that extraneous dead matter could create sense organs and organs of locomotion, how-
ever long the time allowed. There is in and behind living things a self-moving, self-modifying, and self-regulating
power, which is superior to environment, and which enables them, within limits, to adapt themselves to their sur-
roundings and work out their destinies. Plants and animals have their objectives on which they act, but the
objectives, although they slightly influence, do not make the subjectives. There is the thing acting and the thing
acted upon ; and the thing acting is, for the wisest of purposes, made superior to the thing acted upon. Wherever
there are means to ends a distinction must be drawn between the means and the ends.
The subject of vitality crops up here. It is admitted that plants and animals derive their substance and
part of their force from the inorganic kingdom, and some aver that there is no such thing as vital force. They
strive to show that there is only one land of matter and only one kind of force, and that both are fixed quantities
and indestructible. They seek to identify inorganic and organic matter, and physical and vital force. This
generalisation is not warranted by facts. Organic matter can readily be distinguished from inorganic matter, and
vital force from physical force. Organic matter lives or has lived ; inorganic matter is invariably dead. Vital
force can control and alter the shape of inorganic matter ; it can also change the direction in which physical force
acts ; it is superior to both. This superiority implies reserve power, as one power can only be overcome by another
which exercises a directive influence or is greater. The question comes to be. Can hfe control inorganic matter
and physical force without trenching upon the modern belief that matter and force are fixed quantities which can
neither be increased, diminished, nor destroyed ? The vital force, if superior to physical force, must act outside
the latter—must, in fact, be an added quantity, of which no cognisance is taken by modern physicists. This view
can very well be maintained by those who believe in a First Cause which originated all kinds of matter and all kinds
of force. The potter is superior to the clay he manipulates ; he is also superior to the potter's wheel which he
directs and controls. The distinction between dead and living matter and physical and vital force is wide and
deep. Only an all-powerful, all-embracing First Cause can supply a connecting fink between them. Granted an
all-powerful First Cause, there is no difficulty. Without a First Cause many and insurmountable obstacles present
themselves.
The attempt at unification and simplification here referred to has long been extended to matter as matter,
organic and inorganic. Inorganic, dead matter is said to consist originally of only one kind, and the same is said
of organic living matter. We are asked to beheve that all the known elements (some seventy-five in number) ^
spring from and have a common origin which is homogeneous in its nature, and that all the plant and animal tissues,
however numerous and compUcated, are the lineal descendants of protoplasm, which is averred to be a simple homogeneous
substance resembling the white of egg. The heterogeneous substances in the organic and inorganic kingdoms
are said to proceed from the homogeneous ones by condensation, rarefaction, attraction, repulsion, &c., by infinite
permutations in infmite time. The simple substances are held to be the parents or progenitors of the complex
ones. All the varieties of chemical substances, all plant and animal tissues, are referred to a single original.
Similar remarks are made of force.
§ 37. Kant's and Herbert Spencer's Views of Matter and Force.
Immanuel Kant in his "General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies" (1775) "pictures to
himself the universe as once an infinite expansion of formless and diffused matter. At one point of this he sup-
poses a single centre of attraction set up, and shows how this must result in the development of a prodigious central
body, surrounded by systems of solar and planetary worlds in all stages of development. In vivid language
he depicts the great world-maelstrom, widening the margins of its prodigious eddy in the slow progress of miUions
of ages, gradually reclaiming more and more of the molecular waste, and converting chaos into cosmos. But what
is gained at the margin is lost in the centre ;
the attractions of the central systems bring their constituents together,
which then, by the heat evolved, are converted once more into molecular chaos. Thus the worlds that are he
1 A list of the elements, so far as at present discovered, is given at pp. 194 and 195.