TEE MECHANISTIC CONCEPTION OF LIFE 7 



body temperature sufficiently to allow the maintenance of life are the 

 so-called ferments of oxidation. 



The work of Lavoisier and Laplace not only marks the beginning 

 of scientific biology, it also touches the core of the problem of life; 

 for it seems that oxidations form a part, if not the basis, of all life 

 phenomena in higher organisms. 



3. The " Eiddle of Life " 



By the " riddle of life " not everybody will understand the same 

 thing. We all, however, desire to know how life originates and what 

 death is, since our ethics must be influenced to a large extent through 

 the answer to this question. We are not yet able to give an answer to 

 the question as to how life originated on the earth. We know that 

 every living being is able to transform food-stuffs into living matter; 

 and we also know that not only the compounds which are formed in 

 the animal body can be produced artificially, but that chemical reac- 

 tions which take place in living organisms can also be repeated at the 

 same rate and temperature in the laboratory. The gap in our knowl- 

 edge which we feel most keenly is the fact that the chemical character 

 of the catalyzers (the enzymes or ferments) is still unknown. Nothing 

 indicates, however, at present that the artificial production of living 

 matter is beyond the possibilities of science. 



This view does not stand in opposition to the idea of Arrhenius 

 that germs of sufficiently small dimensions are driven by radiation- 

 pressure through space; and that these germs if they fall upon new 

 cosmic bodies possessing water, salts and oxygen and the proper tem- 

 perature, give rise to a new evolution of organisms. Biology will cer- 

 tainly retain this idea, but I believe that we must also follow out the 

 other problem : namely, either succeed in producing living matter arti- 

 ficially, or find the reasons why this should be impossible. 



4. The Activation of the Ego 



Although we are not yet able to state how life originated in general, 

 another, more modest problem has been solved, that is, how the egg is 

 caused by the sperm to develop into a new individual. Every animal 

 originates from an egg and in the majority of animals a new individual 

 can only then develop if a male sex-cell, a spermatozoon, enters into thfi 

 egg. The question as to how a spermatozoon can cause an egg to 

 develop into a new individual was twelve years ago still shrouded in 

 that mystery which to-day surrounds the origin of life in general. But 

 to-day we are able to state that the problem of the activation of the 

 egg is for the most part reduced to physico-chemical terms. The egg 

 is in the unfertilized condition a single cell with only one nucleus. 



