Tyndall was one of the most eloquent exponents of the materialistic theory of the origin of life, and were he living now would probably feel little or no sympathy with the Bergsonian view of a primordial life impulse.  He found the key to all life phenomena in the hidden world of molecular attraction and repulsion.  He says:  “Molecular forces determine the form which the solar energy will assume. [What a world of mystery lies in that determinism of the hidden molecular forces!] In the separation of the carbon and oxygen this energy may be so conditioned as to result in one case in the formation of a cabbage and in another case in the formation of an oak.  So also as regards the reunion of the carbon and the oxygen [in the animal organism] the molecular machinery through which the combining energy acts may in one case weave the texture of a frog, while in another it may weave the texture of a man.”

But is not this molecular force itself a form of solar energy, and can it differ in kind from any other form of physical force?  If molecular forces determine whether the solar energy shall weave a head of a cabbage or a head of a Plato or a Shakespeare, does it not meet all the requirements of our conception of creative will?

Tyndall thinks that a living man—­Socrates, Aristotle, Goethe, Darwin, I suppose—­could be produced directly from inorganic nature in the laboratory if (and note what a momentous “if” this is) we could put together the elements of such a man in the same relative positions as those which they occupy in his body, “with the selfsame forces and distribution of forces, the selfsame motions and distribution of motions.”  Do this and you have a St. Paul or a Luther or a Lincoln.  Dr. Verworn said essentially the same thing in a lecture before one of our colleges while in this country a few years ago—­easy enough to manufacture a living being of any order of intellect if you can reproduce in the laboratory his “internal and external vital conditions.” (The italics are mine.) To produce those vital conditions is where the rub comes.  Those vital conditions, as regards the minutest bit of protoplasm, science, with all her tremendous resources, has not yet been able to produce.  The raising of Lazarus from the dead seems no more a miracle than evoking vital conditions in dead matter.  External and internal vital conditions are no doubt inseparably correlated, and when we can produce them we shall have life.  Life, says Verworn, is like fire, and “is a phenomenon of nature which appears as soon as the complex of its conditions is fulfilled.”  We can easily produce fire by mechanical and chemical means, but not life.  Fire is a chemical process, it is rapid oxidation, and oxidation is a disintegrating process, while life is an integrating process, or a balance maintained between the two by what we call the vital force.  Life is evidently a much higher form of molecular activity than combustion.  The old Greek Heraclitus saw, and the modern scientist sees, very superficially in comparing the two.