THE MECHANISTIC CONCEPTION OF LIFE 161 



the blood) " follows as necessarily from the very arrangement 

 of the parts which may be observed in the heart by the eye 

 alone, and from the heat which may be felt with the fingers, 

 and from the nature of the blood as learned from experience, 

 as does the motion of a clock from the power, the situation, and 

 shape of the counterweights and wheels." But to the nineteenth- 

 century biologists there seemed to be no activities in the plant 

 or animal body except those of physical and chemical reactions. 

 What happened in the processes of animal and vegetable meta- 

 bolism was the result of the chemical constitution of the sub 

 stances that compose the living organism. 



Here we must go back to Descartes' cosmogony. In the 

 extreme generality of his hypotheses, in prophetic anticipation, 

 and in sheer dynamic mentality no one has excelled the great 

 French philosopher. " His imagination," says Clerk Maxwell, 

 himself a man highly gifted with just the same qualities, " knew 

 no "bounds." He made not only a cosmogony, but a cosmic 

 evolutionary process. There was nothing, he said, but matter 

 in motion, but matter itself was only extension. Figure and 

 solidity were not essential to a material body, for the latter 

 could be melted or dissolved or broken down without ceasing 

 to be material, and its colour and smell and other qualities that 

 make appeal to our senses were clearly not essential to its 

 materiality. Nothing was essential but the condition that it 

 occupied space. (This anticipates the theory of relativity.) 

 There could be no void, or vacuum, he said, because empty space 

 could only be conceived in terms of matter, which is extension. 

 There could not be action at a distance (here he anticipated 

 Newton), and the whole universe consisted of the same kind of 

 matter (anticipating modern spectroscopic research). The 

 universe was full, and was a continuum (thus anticipating our 

 modern concept of the ether). 



Matter originally lay together in closely fitting, angular blocks, 

 but it was set in motion (by God), and so these blocks suffered 

 mutual attrition, grinding each other down and becoming 

 spherical. An exceedingly fine dust or material resulted from 

 this attrition, and this was relatively inert and formed the 

 Cartesian " first element." The rounded particles, which were 

 very small and were in active motion, made the "second element," 

 while there was a " third element " consisting of particula striata 

 that is, particles which had acquired a spiral shape by passing 



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