112 The Bible of Nature 



insignia of livlngness. Some apprehension or 

 appreciation of these always colors our picture of 

 Nature, though the dominant tone always depends 

 on what we make of man himself. Let us first 

 take a brief historical survey. Perhaps it is well to 

 speak of the problem as the origin of living organ- 

 isms, rather than of life. Life is an ambiguous 

 and mysterious term. We do not know what life 

 in its essence really implies. We may be begging 

 the question in asking how "life" began. Life may 

 be a particular mode of motion as old as other 

 modes of motion — such as heat or elasticity or 

 matter. Or "life" may be in its essence insepa- 

 rable from what we call "spirit." Therefore, to 

 inquire into the origin of life may be like inquiring 

 into the origin of motion or the origin of conscious- 

 ness. But it is still too soon to say so. 



Various Suggestions. — The first possible answer 

 is that living organisms began after a fashion 

 which we can never form any scientific conception 

 of, that the origin of life is for science a quite in- 

 soluble problem. This answer saves a lot of 

 trouble, but the objection to it is that it is prema- 

 turely dogmatic, closing the door on legitimate 

 scientific inquiry. 



Secondly, Preyer and others have suggested 

 that germs of life, confessedly unlike any we now 

 know, may have existed from the beginning even 

 in nebulous masses. It was not, indeed, the pro- 



