THE LIVING WAVE 



physical elements; neither does he feel at ease with 

 the thought that he is the result of any break or dis- 

 continuity in natural law. He likes to see himself 

 as vitally and inevitably related to the physical or- 

 der as is the fruit to the tree that bore it, or the 

 child to the mother that carried it in her womb, and 

 yet, if only mechanical and chemical forces entered 

 into his genesis, he does not feel himself well fath- 

 ered and mothered. 



One may evade the difficulty, as Helmholtz did, 

 by regarding life as eternal — that it had no begin- 

 ning in time; or, as some other German biologists 

 have done, that the entire cosmos is alive and the 

 earth a living organism. 



If biogenesis is true, and always has been true, — 

 no life without antecedent life, — then the question 

 of a beginning is unthinkable. It is just as easy to 

 think of a stick with only one end. 



Such stanch materialists and mechanists as 

 Haeckel and Verworn seem to have felt compelled, 

 as a last resort, to postulate a psychic principle in 

 nature, though of a low order. Haeckel says that 

 most chemists and physicists will not hear a word 

 about a "soul" in the atom. "In my opinion, how- 

 ever," he says, "in order to explain the simplest 

 physical and chemical processes, we must necessarily 

 assume a low order of psychical activity among the 

 homogeneous particles of plasm, rising a very little 

 above that of the crystal." In crystallization he 



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