1 88 THE ORIGIN OF LIFE 



protoplasm should be evolved from inactive matter 

 in the laboratory, seems extremely improbable. 

 There is but one step from the artificial to the 

 natural, and it is a step that by artificial means 

 we do not think we shall ever be able to take. 

 The gap is insurmountable, and the most we can 

 hope to accomplish is to fill in a few of those gaps 

 in the chain of evolution. That is what we have 

 been endeavouring to do. We do not think that 

 science for many days to come will be successful 

 in filling all the gaps. But it may continue day 

 by day to furnish a new link, philosophically speak- 

 ing, between living and so-called dead matter. 



If these experiments, then, do not bear directly 

 on the problem of the origin of life, they at any 

 rate do bear indirectly upon it. 



In this way too the question of that origin 

 seems to us to be involved with many other 

 questions, such as the origin of mind, the origin 

 of consciousness, and perhaps even the origin of 

 conscience too, as the direct outcome of natural 

 development of a struggle between the individual 

 and its surroundings, by promoting such as are 

 often merely accidental variations, but which happen 

 to be most adapted to them. We may regard 

 in a certain sense a certain amount of psychical 

 as well as vital, chemical, and physical phenomena 

 of the most elementary type to be inherent in all 

 matter. Ours is merely a middle nature, between 

 the infinitely great and the infinitely small, between 

 the infinitely complex and the absolutely simple. 



