Professor Soddy says, “Natural philosophy may explain a rainbow but not a rabbit.”  There is no secret about a rainbow; we can produce it at will out of perfectly colorless beginnings.  “But nothing but rabbits will or can produce a rabbit, a proof again that we cannot say what a rabbit is, though we may have a perfect knowledge of every anatomical and microscopic detail.”

To regard life as of non-natural origin puts it beyond the sphere of legitimate inquiry; to look upon it as of natural origin, or as bound in a chain of chemical sequences, as so many late biochemists do, is still to put it where our science cannot unlock the mystery.  If we should ever succeed in producing living matter in our laboratories, it would not lessen the mystery any more than the birth of a baby in the household lessens the mystery of generation.  It only brings it nearer home.

V

What is peculiar to organic nature is the living cell.  Inside the cell, doubtless, the same old chemistry and physics go on—­the same universal law of the transformation of energy is operative.  In its minute compass the transmutation of the inorganic into the organic, which constitutes what Tyndall called “the miracle and the mystery of vitality,” is perpetually enacted.  But what is the secret of the cell itself?  Science is powerless to tell us.  You may point out to your heart’s content that only chemical and physical forces are discoverable in living matter; that there is no element or force in a plant that is not in the stone beside which it grew, or in the soil in which it takes root; and yet, until your chemistry and your physics will enable you to produce the living cell, or account for its mysterious self-directed activities, your science avails not.  “Living cells,” says a late European authority, “possess most effective means to accelerate reactions and to cause surprising chemical results.”

Behold the four principal elements forming stones and soils and water and air for whole geologic or astronomic ages, and then behold them forming plants and animals, and finally forming the brains that give us art and literature and philosophy and modern civilization.  What prompted the elements to this new and extraordinary behavior?  Science is dumb before such a question.

Living bodies are immersed in physical conditions as in a sea.  External agencies—­light, moisture, air, gravity, mechanical and chemical influences—­cause great changes in them; but their power to adapt themselves to these changes, and profit by them, remains unexplained.  Are morphological processes identical with chemical ones?

In the inorganic world we everywhere see mechanical adjustment, repose, stability, equilibrium, through the action and interaction of outward physical forces; a natural bridge is a striking example of the action of blind mechanical forces among the rocks.  In the organic world we see living adaptation which involves a non-mechanical principle.  An adjustment is an outward fitting together of parts; an adaptation implies something flowing, unstable, plastic, compromising; it is a moulding process; passivity on one side, and activity on the other.  Living things struggle; they struggle up as well as down; they struggle all round the circle, while the pull of dead matter is down only.