After we have mastered the chemistry of life, laid bare all its processes, named all its transformations and transmutations, analyzed the living cell, seen the inorganic pass into the organic, and beheld chemical reaction, the chief priestess of this hidden rite, we shall have to ask ourselves, Is chemistry the creator of life, or does life create or use chemistry?  These “chemical reaction complexes” in living cells, as the biochemists call them, are they the cause of life, or only the effect of life?  We shall decide according to our temperaments or our habits of thought.

IX

THE JOURNEYING ATOMS

I

Emerson confessed in his “Journal” that he could not read the physicists; their works did not appeal to him.  He was probably repelled by their formulas and their mathematics.  But add a touch of chemistry, and he was interested.  Chemistry leads up to life.  He said he did not think he would feel threatened or insulted if a chemist should take his protoplasm, or mix his hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon, and make an animalcule incontestably swimming and jumping before his eyes.  It would be only evidence of a new degree of power over matter which man had attained to.  It would all finally redound to the glory of matter itself, which, it appears, “is impregnated with thought and heaven, and is really of God, and not of the Devil, as we had too hastily believed.”  This conception of matter underlies the new materialism of such men as Huxley and Tyndall.  But there is much in the new physics apart from its chemical aspects that ought to appeal to the Emersonian type of mind.  Did not Emerson in his first poem, “The Sphinx,” sing of

    Journeying atoms,
    Primordial wholes?

In those ever-moving and indivisible atoms he touches the very corner-stone of the modern scientific conception of matter.  It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in this conception we are brought into contact with a kind of transcendental physics.  A new world for the imagination is open—­a world where the laws and necessities of ponderable bodies do not apply.  The world of gross matter disappears, and in its place we see matter dematerialized, and escaping from the bondage of the world of tangible bodies; we see a world where friction is abolished, where perpetual motion is no longer impossible; where two bodies may occupy the same space at the same time; where collisions and disruptions take place without loss of energy; where subtraction often means more—­as when the poison of a substance is rendered more virulent by the removal of one or more atoms of one of the elements; and where addition often means less—­as when three parts of the gases of oxygen and hydrogen unite and form only two parts of watery vapor; where mass and form, centre and circumference, size and structure, exist without any of the qualities ordinarily