34 THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 



in protoplasm which is the narrowest of its legitimate 

 meanings what I have said about its possible existence 

 apart from matter would be absurd. It may be conve- 

 nient to employ the word "vitality" for this limited sense. 



The point of this curious passage will be apparent when 

 the reader learns that the life of the really simplest organisms 

 consists only of " metabolic processes in protoplasm." They 

 feed (passively), grow, and split into two, like an overgrown 

 nebula, or a large drop of oil. Their life has a remarkably 

 mechanical look. So they are to have " vitality " instead of 

 " life " the former term being the abstract Latin word for 

 the latter and it is admitted that they have no vital 

 " power " that needed to come from the spiritual reservoir. 

 Sir Oliver Lodge probably did not realise the bearing of this 

 concession. It means, in the first place, that the earliest 

 living things to appear on our planet had no share of his 

 imagined immaterial power. There is no reason why they 

 may not have evolved from the inorganic world, and, if that 

 is so, the analogy of the origin of all other complex things 

 in the universe bids us conceive them as the outcome of 

 spontaneous generation. It means, in the second place, 

 that we can beat him back step by step, as we ascend the 

 animal scale, and defy him to point out any stage where 

 the possible range of evolution fails and we must fall back 

 on an immaterial world. If all living things are " branches 

 of one fundamental vitality," the "souls" of the higher 

 organisms are an evolution of the soul of the lowest, and that 

 is merely a plexus of "metabolic processes in protoplasm." 

 In order to make this clear we may return to our really 



