LIFE’S WONDERFUL MYSTERY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 18785, 19 May 1923, Page 11

LIFE’S WONDERFUL MYSTERY

A Talk on the Fascinating Problem of the Human Race

By

ROBERT BLATCHFORD

TdlS week, for a change, let us philosophise. I have been delving into the vexed question of the origin of life. No it is not a dry subject. It is far more fascinating than the particulars of Miss Georgina Bybye’s part in the new film, “Dregs and Drugs,” or the speculations as to whether Mr. Winston Churchill will or will not confer his embarrassing patronage on the Liberal Party. There are many theories of the origin of life. We will confine ourselves to three of the best known. There is the theory favoured by Lord Kelvin, that as life could have originated in dead matter it is possible that life was brought to the earth by star dust or meteorites from other planets. This theory only shifts the jwoblem from one world to another. If life came from another planet, how did life originate there? If life originated in another planet, why could it not originate in our own planet ? There is the theory, so ably upheld by Professor T. J. Hudson, tha£ life is of divine origin, and was conferred by a special act of God. And there is the theory, for which Professor Haeckel fought so hard, that life was generated on the earth by the spontaneous action of energy and force. The struggle between these two theories is extremely interesting. The battle rages round the moncron, which is the earliest, or, as it is often called, the lowest form of life. This mysterious microscopic creature is more important and Eiorc intriguing than Herr Stinnes, or Lord Birkenhead, or Mr. de Valera. I have been quite excited about the wee beastie for more than a week. A WONDERFUL “JELLY.” The amoeba, from which the human race is descended, is a far more Complex structure than the moneron; it has a nucleus, and a very elaborate Organisation. The moneron lias no nucleus and, so far as scientific tests can show, no organisation of any kind. It is first a tiny speck of jelly, “plasma.” But it is very much alive and very wonderful. Having’no feet it can walk, Laving no hands it can grasp, having no stomach it can digest, having no lungs it can breathe, and without heart or circulatory system it can diffuse water or particles through its mass. Yes, it can find a mate and absorb it and can reproduce its kind by division. Nobody knows how or why it docs these things. And now we come to our first question: if a creature can walk without feet and digest without a stomach, why should it not think without a brain, or feel without a nervous system’ And the answer is that, apparently, the moneron doe® both. At any rate, if it does not feel it is susceptible to cold or to irritation, and if it does not think it wills, for it moves as it lists, it *aocses its food, it finds its mate. But Professor Hudson claims for the velious moneron very much more than this. He claims that the moneron has a soul and that its soul is of the same essence as the human soul, as the parent of the human soul, and is divine. THE ELEMENTAL SOUL. Professor Haeckel will have none of this. For him the moneron is an automatic product of chemical and mechanical operations of nature. Professor Hudson claims that the mind of the moneron is the ancestor of our subjective mind, what we call our subliminal consciousness, and that it persists throughout the long processes of evolution and through human life is immortal. Divine in its origin, it is divine in its future. The moneron is inspired by the elemental soul.

Professor Haeckel devoted many years of arduous work to the effort to prove that life originated on the earth from natural causes, and that the human soul cannot be immortal. One cannot but admire the industry and

genius and the great learning displayed in this crusade for that which Haeckel believed to be the truth. But even genius cannot achieve the impossible, and Haeckel failed. Now, let us see how the matter stands. Haeekel uses one strong argument which will oeeur to anybody who gives the subject a little thought. He says that plasma, which is the staple of life, could not exist in an incandescent globe, and as our globe was for ages incandescent, the plasma must have been developed after the crust began to cool and the seas to form. That argument is conclusive, as it goes, but it does not go far. The incandescent globe must have contained, during incandescence, all the elements it contained when cool. It must, therefore, have contained all tn-5 chemical and atomic elements which afterwards constituted the plasma. The elements of the moneron, like the elements of water, were present in the igneous planet. We have only, as in the case of Lord Kelvin’s planetary theory, shifted the venue of the problem. The moneron was very probably the result of some process of fermentation or accretion in the sea. It was the result of “natural causes.” Granted. But then comes the colloquial question: “What about it?” The moneron is a child of the sea. The earth is a child of the sun. The sun was born of the nebulae. In the primordial nebulae or star dust there existed and still exist all the elements of life. We have not found the origin of life until we have found the origin of the nebulae, and perhaps not then. WHAT IS NATURE? Haeckel seems to suppose that if it is proved that the moneron was an earthly result of natural causes he has finally disposed of the ideas of a divine origin and a creator. But he has not explained the meaning of the phrases, “natural causes” and “laws of nature.” What is “nature” and whence came nature’s “laws?” There is a well-known photograph of a portrait or the Milky Way, near Messier IL, in which the stars are as thick as a swarm of bees. Every one of those crowding sparks is a sun, and probably every sun has a planetary system, each separate planet as full of wonders as our own. And perhaps in some of those planets are learned professors explaining the universe as the

natural outcome of natural laws. I have often looked at nebulae through the telescope. In that thin, impalpable ghostly light is concealed the magic which creates sidereal systems. Out. of that luminous mist come the suns and the worlds and the moneron which may develop into a water flea or an elephant, a scorpion or a skylark, a giraffe or a poet, a Torqucmada or a Joan of Are. The origin of life is older than the Milky Way. The farther back we push the origin of life the more wonderful does it appear. It took billions of years to evolve the moneron. He must have been conceived in the womb of time countless aeons before Professor Haeckel’s incandescent world began to spin. Haeckel was implacably, almost bitterly, opposed to the idea of an immortal soul. He says that a child is the result of the union of two parental cells, and that his existence begins with that union. He is a new individual; then how can he be eternal* Very well. A boy is not a facsimile of his father, nor of his mother. He is an original person. But he is a man, and his parents have made him a man, and given him a mind. Is it impossible for them to have given him a soul? CONFUSION OF THOUGHT. ..Professor Hudson claims that the subjective mind, or subliminal mind, is older than the brain. Animals before the evolution of the brain used the sub-conscious mind, and passed such a mind on to their progeny. This happens still among human beings. A man or woman has two minds—jhe subjective and objective—and both are inherited from parents. If we call the subjective mind the soul, as we may quite logically, then the soul is hereditary, like the body, but the soul is older than humanity and older than the brain. The soul, which enabled the moneron to move without feet and will without a brain, was inherent in the cosmic fire, mist, or star dust out of which suns and worlds are made. Some confusion of thought has arisen from two indefinite ideas about the soul, one idea being that a soul is and always was an individual entity, existent as itself for all time, and the other idea being that a soul or spirit is impalpable and immaterial, composed of ‘'nothing.”

But why should a soul be composed of nothing, any more than the ether is composed of nothing, and why should not a new sonl be born with a new body? We need not imagine that when a child is born an angel comes down from heaven and pops a soul into its mouth like a pill. Soul and body are parts of the child, and the child is born from the parental stock. It were easy for us in our human conceit to look down upon the moneron. Pooh! a speck of jelly. The lowest form of life. It does not know its own name. It could not invent a fly-trap, nor roll a cigarette. It knows neither art, nor science, nor music! True. But it never commits murder, nor has the toothache, nor votes Bolshy, nor tells lies, and it can produce its own young. It cannot talk about rent reduction on tie Ruhr, but it is the ancestor of Euclid and Plato, of Newton and Pasteur, of Bach and Rembrandt, and Haeckel and Shakespeare. Hats off to another moneron. 20,000 DEVILS ON A NEEDLE. We have not accounted for life, nor explained life when we have put it down to natural causes. The great underlying mystery is the nature an 4 potentiality of what we call energy and matter. As Professor Bcnjomii Moore says in "The Origin and Nature of Life”:— The Fundamental mystery lies in the existence of those entities, or things, which we call matter and energy, and in the existence of the natural laws which correlate them and cause all those things to happen which the natural philosopher observes and classifies and cor relates, but canuot explain in one single instance. I Haeckel and other men of science tell us that the amoeba differs in n« perceptible way when acting as the ovum of an animal or a human being. But the amoeba is highly organised. Sterne spoke of John de la Casse’s devjls, twenty thousand of whom danced on the point of a needle. Ba* they were, comparatively speaking, giants in the land. The amoeba is invisible to the naked eye, yet in his microscopic form arc billions of specialised atoms standing for all the potentialities of heredity. In the tiny egg are stored up all the sorceries of evolution, the stores of race and families, the differences of species and type and personality, the dual mind of man, the seeds of the body and the intellect and the soul. •Some minds seem to perceive a great and important difference between the idea of divine creation and the idea of natural evolution. The difference does not to me seem one of great moment. Is it any less wonderful that star dust should evolve plasma and plasma should evolve ancient Greeks and the Modern British than that a. supreme being should create or make an Adatn and an Eve? Could any miracle seem more miraculous than the mowron and the descent from the moneron? Everything must be caused! say some scientists. So? Then, what causes the cause? The moneron had lite. What is life? No creature before the moneron had life and no creature since has made a new departure so wonderful os so far-reaching in its results. Between the living speck of jelly and the inorganic world there seems to be an enormous and unbridgable gulf. And again between the living and the dead another gulf appears to exist. But Professor Hudson denies it; and one of the most interesting features of hi* engrossiug book, ‘‘The Divine Pedigree of Man,” is th> argument in favour of the survival of the soul, or subjective mind, and its adapability to immortal life in the divine realms beyond the grave. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I hope 1 have not bored you. The fact is I found our little old friend the monerou such delightful company that I could not forbear to write of him.—(lllustrated Sunday Herald).