THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF LIFE 87 



If some investigator in the distant future had at 

 length arrived at the conditions by which highly 

 developed life could be produced : let us suppose, for 

 the sake of argument, that he found vertebrates 

 under certain circumstances to be artificially gene- 

 rated, and that he set out to manufacture a man, but 

 only managed to produce a donkey : what inference 

 would it be possible to draw from such an achieve- 

 ment ? Well, if he was too ambitious, we might 

 admit he was sadly disappointed ; but if his object 

 was merely to attain what was possible, and neither 

 more nor less, we might have thought his efforts 

 eminently successful. His failure would have been 

 in not having produced a man, even if intellectually 

 it should approximate to some of them ; but his 

 success would have been in having manufactured an 

 animal, which as an animal was not much worse than 

 man. So likewise is it with the products that we now 

 call vital. They are not bacteria, not more bacteria 

 than donkeys are men ; but, as we have endeavoured 

 to emphasise, they possess most of the qualities 

 which are observed in bacteria, and though not all 

 of them, at least enough of them to enable us to 

 identify, or rather to classify, them with the living 

 things we see. We have made clear, then, what 

 we consider our position in the matter is. We 

 cannot claim that in all our observations there is the 

 slightest evidence of anything which is the same as 

 natural life. What is produced artificially is essen- 

 tially artificial life, and is no more to be identified 

 with the natural survivals which have been handed 



