Picture - Cosmic Polymath

A CREATOR AND DESIGNER NECESSARY TO UNIVERSE 351
They boast a mechanical system which Uterally bristles with law and order, but they curiously and with strange
inconsistency exclude the great Lawgiver and Arch- Artificer. The existence of Ufe on the earth is a stumbling-
block and pitfall to the mechanical school. They cannot produce life—neither can they explain it. No Physicist,
Chemist, or Physiologist, with all the resources of the most admirably equipped modern laboratory at his disposal,
has ever produced anything which remotely resembles life even in its simplest forms. The best they can do is
to say that they have artificially produced substances resembling starch, albumen, and some other products, which
have hitherto been regarded as organic in their nature. They do not—they cannot—claim to have produced
a hving plant or animal.
As yet no bridge has been devised to directly connect the hving with the dead, or to convert physical force
into vital force. No doubt inorganic and organic matter and physical and vital force have much in common :
the organic proceeds from and returns to the inorganic, and the same elements are found in both. In like manner
the elements which build up plants and animals transfer to the plants and animals a proportion of the force which
inheres in them. Further, the same laws, up to a point, regulate inorganic matter and physical force and organic
matter and vital force : still the subtle and mysterious something, known as hfe, which cannot be artificially pro-
duced or imitated, intervenes and prevents the unification and identification of matter and force so eagerly desired
by the mechanical school. That school is obUged to fall back on the theory of spontaneous generation, which has
again and again been proved impossible by direct experiments. The mechanical school have to make extraordinary
assumptions in support of its theory. They have, among other things, to assign sensation, volition, and a soul
to the atom, and souls and memory to the cells and tissues. They have also to attribute a chemical sense-activity
and perception to the male and female sexual elements of animals. Thus, according to J. C. Vogt, " The minute
parts of the universal substance, the centres of condensation, which might be called pyknatoms, correspond in
general to the ultimate separate atoms of the kinetic theory ; they differ, however, very considerably in that they
are credited with sensation and inchnation (or will-movement of the simplest form), ivith souls, in a certain sense
—in harmony with the old theory of Empedocles of the ' love and hatred of the elements.' Moreover, these ' atoms
with souls ' do
not float in empty space, but in the continuous, extremely attenuated intermediate substance, which
represents the uncondensed portion of the primitive matter."
According to Ewald Hering, " Memory is a general property of organised matter." According to Professor
Ernst Haeckel, " Unconscious memory is a universal and very important function of all plastidules ; that is, of
those hypothetical molecules, or groups of molecules, which Naegeli has called micellm, others bioplasts, and so forth.
Only living plastidules, as individual molecules of the active protoplasm, are reproductive, and so gifted with
memory ; that is the chief difference between the organic and inorganic worlds. . . . The elementary memory
of the unicellular protist is made up of the molecular memory of the plastidules or micella}, of which its living cellbody
is constructed. . . Equally interesting examples of the second stage of memory, the unconscious memory
of tissues, are found in the heredity of the individual organs of plants and the lower, nerveless animals (sponges, &c.).
... In the same way we must regard the third stage, the unconscious memory of those animals which have a
nervous system, as a reproduction of the corresponding ' unconscious presentations ' which are stored up in certain
ganglionic cells. In most of the lower animals all memory is unconscious. .
. . Conscious memory, which is the
work of certain brain-cells in man and the higher animals, is an ' internal mirroring ' of very late development,
the highest outcome of the same psychic reproduction of presentations which were mere unconscious processes in
the gangUonic cells of our lower animal ancestors."
Professor Haeckel continues : " The theory of a cell-soul is completely established by an accurate study of
the unicellular protozoa, and the psychic phenomena of the protistae form the bridge which unites the chemical
The tissue-soul [he designates] histo-
processes of inorganic nature with the mental life of the highest animals. .
psyche. In all multicellular, tissue-forming plants {metaphyta), and in the lowest, nerveless classes of tissue-forming
animals (metazoa), we have to distinguish two different forms of psychic activity—namely, (1) the psyche of the
individual cells which compose the tissue, and (2) the psyche of the tissue itself, or of the ' cell-state ' which is made
up of the tissues. This ' tissue-soul ' is the higher psychological function which gives physiological individuahty
to the compound multicellular organism as a true ' cell-commonwealth.' It controls all the separate ' cell-souls '
of the social cells. . . . The
plant-soul [named by him] phytopsyche is [in his opinion] the summary of the entire
psychic activity of the tissue-forming, multicellular plant (the metaphyton, as distinct from the unicellular proto-
phyton). . . . The
soul of the nerveless metazoa [is according to him] of very special interest for comparative
psychology in general, and for the phylogeny of the animal soul in particular, it being the psychic activity of those
lower metazoa which have tissues, and sometimes differentiated organs, but no nerves or specific organs of sense.
. . . The
nerve-soul [he has designated] neuropsyche. The psychic Ufe of all the higher animals [he avers] is
conducted, as in man, by means of a more or less comphcated ' psychic apparatus.' This apparatus is always