THE MECHANISTIC CONCEPT 75 



formed the opinion that " among the inorganic bodies " there 

 must have developed " extremely small, half-liquid bodies of 

 a very diffuse consistency ". Then " these small, half-liquid 

 bodies developed further into cellular bodies having an outer 

 envelope with liquid contained in it and acquiring the first 

 rudiments of organisation . . ." 



There was also a broad development of dialectical methods 

 of thought in classical German Naturphilosophie at the 

 beginning of the nineteenth century. Although, as we have 

 seen in Chapter I, most of the representatives of this school of 

 thought supported the theory of spontaneous generation, we 

 find in the works of L. Oken*^ a fairly well ^vorked out form 

 of the idea of the gradual evolution of carbon compounds, 

 leading up to the formation of the primaeval slime from 

 which all living things later developed. 



In his works Charles Darwin hardly ever made direct 

 reference to the development of the first living things which 

 were to become the first ancestors of everything living on the 

 Earth. It was only in one of his letters to Wallace (written 

 in 1872), in which he was criticising Bastian's experiments 

 and considering them to be completely unconvincing, that 

 he stated that spontaneous generation was quite unproven. 

 Nevertheless he continued, ' On the whole it seems to me 

 probable that Archebiosis is true.* I should like to live to 

 see Archebiosis proved true, for it would be a discovery of 

 transcendent importance.' In Darwin's opinion life must 

 have arisen sometime and somehow but we are still com- 

 pletely unaware of the manner in which this took place. '^ 



However, these isolated utterances of Darwin are not so 

 important for the solution of our problem as the fact that 

 he applied evolutionary principles to explain the develop- 

 ment of higher organisms from lower ones and showed that 

 it was impossible to conceive of living things coming into 

 being without evolutionary development.* Mechanistic con- 

 cepts of the essential nature of life were, however, still so 

 firmly entrenched in the minds of the scientists of the second 



* " Perhaps the words archebiosis. or archegenesis, should be reserved for 

 the theory that protoplasm in the remote past has developed from non- 

 living matter by a series of steps. ..." Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 1. 

 p. 48. London, 1956. — Translator. 



