53 



them together ; and Huxley says, " I can find no intelligible 

 ground for refusing to say that the properties of protoplasm '' 

 — that iSj life — '' result from the nature and disposition of its 

 molecules/^* Yet he is unable to produce life from these 

 materials. Science here utterly fails him. Its field, alike of 

 potency and of knowledge, is at this point shut in by an 

 impassable barrier. Huxley confesses that pre-existing living 

 matter is necessary to the development of the phenomena of 

 life ; and he admits that its influence on the material basis 

 "^is something quite unintelligible ; "t while Pritchard affirms 

 that " no chemist, with all his wonderful art, has ever yet 

 witnessed the evolution of a living thing from those lifeless 

 molecules of matter and force.^^J 



So far, then, as Science is concerned, we are as remote aa 

 ever from the solution of the problem of the origin of life. 

 Scientists have neither been able to produce life, nor to trace 

 it ; they have only been able to observe its phenomena. They 

 can see motion and development iu the living protoplasm ; 

 but these are the effects of a life already in existence, not the 

 essence of life itself. Herbert Spencer describes life as " a 

 continuous adjustment of internal relations to external re- 

 lations " ; but this Delphian utterance, if it has any meaniug at 

 all, can only refer to the phenomena of life ; it does not touch 

 its essence, nor does it throw one ray of light upon its origin. 

 That the life is inherent in, or evolved by, matter is incon- 

 ceivable, for the living protoplasm often dies, and then, though 

 all the material elements are still present, development ceases at 

 once ; the power which moulds and builds has gone mysteri- 

 ously as it came, and no human agency can again vitalise the 

 dead mass, which now obeys the ordinary laws of matter, and 

 is resolved into its mineral constituents. " The living body 

 resists the chemical agencies that are ready to attack it ; the 

 dead body at once succumbs to these agencies." Life is the 

 power which moulds and builds up organisms, and preserves 

 the matter of which they are composed from the dissolving 

 force of the ordinary laws to which mere matter is subject. 

 The teaching of Science, therefore, is, that life is something 

 apart from matter ; but what it is, whence it comes, and whither 

 it goes. Science cannot tell. Its operation on matter is won- 

 derful. It guides the chemical forces so as to arrange inert 

 matter into shapes of the most exquisite proportions, and 

 organisms of the most delicate and complicated mechanism — 



* Lay Sermons, p. 138. t Ibid., p. 137. 



X Brighton paper. 



