CHAPTER III 



ATTEMPTS AT A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH 



TO THE PROBLEM OF THE 



ORIGIN OF LIFE 



The mechanistic concept of the self-formation 

 of living things. 



As was pointed out in the previous chapters, science, during 

 the second half of the nineteenth century, was in a critical 

 situation as concerns the problem of the origin of life. The 

 old principle of spontaneous generation had been overthrown, 

 and scientists felt that they had been deprived of the possi- 

 bility of any experimental approach to the problem of the 

 origin of life on the Earth. A period of disillusionment and 

 pessimism set in, which survived from the last years of the 

 nineteenth century well into the twentieth. Very many 

 scientists tried somehow to evade the problem, either by 

 promoting the theory of the eternity of life or by becoming 

 open idealists and relegating the question from the field of 

 science to that of faith. Nevertheless, some advanced and 

 progressive scientists struggled against this kind of attitude 

 right from the beginning. They felt that their chief task, 

 amid the surge of idealism, was to defend the principle of 

 a materialistic approach to the problem of the origin of life. 

 As an example may be mentioned here the remarkable 

 statements of T. H. Huxley and J. Tyndall at the meetings 

 of the British Association held in the i86o's and 1870's. 

 These meetings served as a forum into which were brought 

 the great controversies of scientific principle of that period. 

 In his presidential address to the British Association, Huxley 

 wrote^ : 



If it were given to me to look beyond the abyss of geologically 

 recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth 

 was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it 



73 



