Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 30.djvu/169

Rh The most advanced science of our time does not regard life as a special and separate principle, a real entity which has been added to matter, but as a mode in which certain physical forces manifest themselves, just as heat is not a thing of itself, but a mode of motion.

"Mechanical, chemical, and physical forces are the only efficient agents in the living organism," at least the only ones which science can recognize, and these forces are the same in both the organic and the inorganic worlds.

Behold a fire, a conflagration; see it leap and climb, witness its fierce activity, its all-devouring energies! How like a thing of life it is! Is there a unique and original principle at work here, the principle or spirit of fire, a thing apart from the intense chemical activity which it occasions? The ancient observers believed so, and it is a pretty fancy, but science recognizes in it only another of the protean forms in which force clothes itself. We can evoke fire without the aid of fire, but the fire called life man has not yet been able so to evoke—probably never will be able. The nearest he has as yet come to it is in producing many of the organic compounds synthetically from inorganic compounds—a triumph a few years ago thought to be impossible.

The barrier, then, between the organic and the inorganic, upon which the scheme of theology of Professor Drummond turns, is by no means a fixed conclusion of science. Science believes that the potencies or properties of life are on the inorganic side, and that the passage has actually taken place in the past or may still take place in the present. In working out his general thesis, our author takes courage from the example of Walter Bagehot, whose physical politic, he says, is but the extension of natural law to the political world; and from the example of Herbert Spencer, whose biological sociology is but the application of natural law to the social world. But the political world of Walter Bagehot and the social world of Herbert Spencer are worlds which science recognizes; they fall within its pale; their existence is never disputed. But the spiritual world of Professor Drummond is a world of which science can know nothing. It is to science just as fanciful or unreal as the spiritual world of Grecian or Scandinavian mythology, or as the fairy world of childhood.

It is true the world of art, the world of genius, the world of literature, is a very select and limited affair too; but does anybody ever call the reality of it in question? Do we want proof that Shakespeare and Milton are poets? But science does want proof, if the matter comes to that, that the typical Puritan has the favor of any spiritual powers not known to the rest of mankind—not known and equally accessible to Zeno, or Plutarch, or Virgil, or Marcus Aurelius.

It is just these exceptions, these departures from the established course of Nature, that the natural philosopher is skeptical about. If an obscure event, which happened in Judea over eighteen hundred years