THE SIMPLEST FORMS OF LIFE 37 



laboratory little beings that feed and grow and multiply in 

 this way; but I would not press these experiments until 

 they have been more widely confirmed. Sir Oliver Lodge 

 admits that it would be "absurd" to claim a spiritual 

 principle in a plexus of metabolic processes. Why does 

 he coin the new word (in the sense in which he uses 

 it) "vitality"? Is this something mid-way between the 

 material and the immaterial, like the long-discarded fiction 

 of Cudworth's ? It is utterly unscientific to claim any other 

 than familiar energies in these tiny microbes. The particle 

 of plasm that makes their body consists of millions of atoms 

 in a very complex and very unstable combination. The 

 physical and chemical and electric energies associated 

 with this intricate molecular structure will be corres- 

 pondingly characteristic. It is absurd to say that they 

 are inadequate to produce the life of a Chroococcus or a 

 Procytella. 



I will deal with this point more fully when we have seen 

 something about the constitution of the atom and the 

 molecule, especially the molecule of protoplasm. For the 

 moment we may assume that Sir Oliver Lodge does not 

 insist on the immaterial character of the vital "power" in 

 these lowest and earliest organisms. We turn, therefore, to 

 our second point. Where does the "necessity" come in 

 for multiplying fundamental cosmic agencies ? At what 

 point are we compelled to admit that physical and 

 chemical energies clearly fail to explain " life," and to fall 

 back on the suspicious and mystical resource of an imma- 

 terial world ? 



