INTRODUCTION 



The question of the emergence of Ufe, of the origin on the 

 Earth of the first hving things, raises a number of important 

 and fundamental problems of natural philosophy. Every 

 man, whatever his stage of development, has, consciously or 

 unconsciously, put this question to himself and found some 

 sort of answer to it, for without some such answer one cannot 

 form even the most primitive picture of the world. 



History shows that the problem of the emergence of life 

 has fascinated the human mind from time immemorial. 

 There has been no religious or philosophic system and no 

 great thinker that has not devoted serious attention to this 

 problem. In different epochs and at different stages of cul- 

 tural development the question of the origin of life has 

 been answered in different ways. This problem has however 

 always been the focus of a bitter conflict of ideas between 

 two irreconcilable schools of philosophy — the conflict between 

 idealism and materialism. 



At the beginning of our century this conflict did not merely 

 fail to abate but took on a special bitterness because, although 

 science had already achieved glittering and dizzy successes in 

 many fields, it seerned unable to give a rational, scientifically 

 based answer to the question of the origin of life. It appeared 

 that a dead end had been reached as far as this problem was 

 concerned. 



Such a state of affairs was by no means fortuitous. It may 

 be explained as follows. About a century ago almost every- 

 body held that the principle of spontaneous generation 

 prevailed so far as the origin of life was concerned. They 

 were convinced that living things could originate, not only 

 from others like themselves, but that they could also come 

 into being spontaneously, appearing all at once, fully formed 

 and organised, among inanimate objects. 



Both idealists and materialists held this point of view. 

 The only point of dispute was : what was the cause and what 

 the nature of the forces determining this coming into being. 



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