6 LIFE: ITS NATURE AND ORIGIN 



One cannot resist the hope that some day, perhaps, we may dis- 

 cover that these ultra-refined energy granules are responsible for 

 the first beginning of life and for its never-ending evolution." 



But Professor Pupin offered no suggestion as to the kind of 

 mechanism whereby photons could initiate life. The most reason- 

 able view, in the light of present knowledge, is that life began 

 with the chance formation of a self-reproducing unit of molecular 

 or near-molecular complexity. 



Faith 



What most persons consider the greatest of all human problems, 

 survival after death, is one to which we have no direct experi- 

 mental approach. We treasure memories, mementoes and pic- 

 tures of those we have loved and lost; we dream of them and yearn 

 for them, recalling the poignant line of Virgil: 



Tendebant manus, ripae ulterioris amore.* 



But we face the tragic and inexorable fact so concisely stated by 

 Omar: 



Strange, is it not, that of the myriads who 

 Before us pass'd the door of Darkness through, 

 Not one returns to tell us of the Road, 

 Which to discover xce must travel too? 



It is interesting to note that Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven," 

 which depicts the torturing doubts of a bereaved husband, stimu- 

 lated Dante Gabriel Rossetti to write "The Blessed Damozel," 

 which stresses faith in reunion. 



Faith involves no compelling necessity for believing that divine 

 interposition guides every detail of mental and material activity. 

 Whatever occurs in nature was already inherently possible when 

 matter came into being. Tyndall said: "I see in matter the poten- 

 tiality and possibility of all life." This view simply pushes back 

 the mysteries of life to the creation of matter, a still more remote 

 mystery not open to experimental attack. But no one doubts the 

 existence of matter, the forces affecting it, and the fact that living, 

 thinking beings are continually emerging from it. Yet it requires 

 even more faith to believe in the reality of matter, which we know 

 of only indirectly through our senses, than it does to believe in 



* "They stretched their hands, yearning for the farther shore." (Aeneid, Book VI). 



