60 PRIMITIVE FORMS OF LIFE 



It must be admitted that though the remarkable 

 experimental researches of Pasteur opened up unforeseen 

 perspectives to medicine and surgery and provided curative 

 art with a new kind of precision and new methods with 

 inexhaustible possibilities, they were, at the same time, the 

 source of endless difficulties for the scientific philosophy of the 

 day. One unquestionably correct idea prevailed — that every 

 phenomenon was preceded by causes which definitely and 

 inevitably determined it. Claude Bernard had introduced 

 into physiology the notion of determinism in living phenomena, 

 and had thus destroyed the older doctrine of vitalism, which 

 excluded such phenomena from the working of the ordinary 

 laws of physical chemistry. Vitalism once discarded, the 

 phenomena of life had perforce to be attributed to these normal 

 natural forces. It was readily admitted that living matter, 

 composed as it is of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and 

 traces of various other simple elements might well have arisen 

 and could be reconstructed in the same way as other simpler 

 chemical compositions. Huxley, we know, even believed in the 

 existence of one single substance, the physical basis of life, 

 and to this he gave the name of protoplasm, a name which 

 has managed to survive. The German dreamer, Oken, founder 

 of a so-called Philosophy of Nature, which, in the early nineteenth 

 century created quite a stir on the other side of the Rhine, had 

 already postulated the existence of a primordial slime, in which 

 all life had its origin. Huxley at one time thought that he had 

 really discovered it in the slime of the oceanic depths ; he 

 called it Bathybius haeckeli, and, in spite of Huxley's sub- 

 sequent abandonment of the notion, the impenitent naturalist 

 of Jena continued to insist on the real existence of this spiritual 

 god-child of his, 1 though Huxley himself recognized it as being 

 only a mineral precipitate of gelatinous appearance, which 

 arises when distilled alcohol is poured into sea-water containing 

 organic matter in suspension. 



Thus the new thinkers argued that if protoplasm really 

 existed, and if it was only an especially complex chemical 

 compound possessing special properties by reason of its 

 complexity, it might be obtained artificially by appropriate 

 chemical processes. The ill-success of chemists in their 

 attempts to reconstruct even a nitrogenous substance like 



1 XV, 165. 



