Life process

“ I have endeavoured, in the first part of this discourse, to give you a conception of the direction towards which modern physiology is tending; and I ask you, what is the difference between the conception of life as the product of a certain disposition of material molecules, and the old notion of an Archæus governing and directing blind matter within each living body, except this—that here, as elsewhere, matter and law have devoured spirit and spontaneity? ”

“ This is no place, and at present we have no need, for a psychological theory of the origin or of the causes of what is called activity, but as a fact, you have in your mental life a sort of consciousness accompanying the processes by which, as the psychologists are accustomed to say, you adjust your organism to its environment ”

“ Truly do we carry in us, each human of us alive on the planet today, the incorruptible history of life from life's beginning. This history is written in our tissues and our bones, in our functions and our organs, in our brain cells, and in our spirits, and in all sorts of physical and psychic atavistic urgencies and compulsions. ”

“ If I study a living being, under what heads does the knowledge I obtain fall? I can learn its structure, or what we call its Anatomy; and its development, or the series of changes it passes through to acquire its complete structure. Then I find that the living being has certain powers resulting from its own activities, and the interaction of these with the activities of other things—the knowledge of which is Physiology. Beyond this, the living being has a position in space and time, which is its Distribution. ”

“ Life is simply a process of stimulus and response; and stimulus and response are one unitary movement. ”

“ Now the whole life of the organism is precisely the life of adjustment. The physical activities accompanying consciousness so take place that the organism preserves itself, and expresses its natural bearing towards its world. And the whole life of consciousness, accompanying these adjustments, constitutes a more or less accurate knowledge of what the adjustments are. The life of our consciousness is therefore a life of watching our deeds, of estimating our deeds, of predicting our deeds, and of interpreting our whole world in terms of deeds. ”

“ And as a fact, in normal cases, to will and to observe that our efforts are to a certain degree efficacious, at least in controlling bodily movements, or in directing the course of our inner life, are actually very closely related processes. ”

“ But habits and instincts are as strongly inherited as structure, so that, as it appears to me, the study of life is, even from the orthodox scientific point of view, as important as the study of death. ”

“ All living things which exist at the present day have been successively formed by this means, aided by a long lapse of time, by favourable conditions, and by the changes on the surface of the globe—in a word, by the power which new situations and new habits have of modifying the organs of a body which is endowed with life. ”

“ The balance of mental and social, as well as of physiological, functions, is implied in the complex life of whose evolution we form a part. To say that we are to promote this balance of various functions, is to say nothing more than that we are to promote the life into which physical and mental and social factors enter. ”

“ Finally we can conclude with a high degree of certainty that the psychical faculties—of knowing, feeling, and willing—have increased in intensity, and also in their relative importance for the life of the individual organism. ”

“ Living things are distinguished from the not living by a series of processes, or changes (feeding, growth, development, multiplication, etc.) , which together constitute what is called life. These processes are called functions. ”

“ All vegetable and animal productions, even the bodies of men, are formed by the gradual accumulation and accretion of various particles of matter, in accordance with certain unchangeable laws and in obedience to a certain dynamic spiritual principle, called life. ”

“ Then, starting from that conception of life as the continuous adjustment of inner relations within the organism to outer relations in the environment—a conception of which he made such brilliant use in his Principles of Biology—he shows how the psychical life gradually becomes specialized in certain classes of adjustments or correspondences, and how the development of psychical life consists in a progressive differentiation and integration of such correspondences. ”

“ Survival of the Fittest.—The survival of the fittest, in the fierce struggle for life, is the best known and most universally recognized factor of the evolution of the organic kingdom. The manner in which this factor operates especially in successive differentiation, and the increasing specialization of each differentiated form, in causing the tree of life to branch and again branch continuously, each branch pushing its shoot as far as possible in its own direction, are well understood. ”

“ Life then, or those functions which we call living, are the effects of certain exciting powers, acting on the excitability, or property distinguishing living from dead matter. When those effects, namely, the functions, flow easily, pleasantly, and completely, from the action of the exciting powers, they indicate that state which we call Health. ”

“ It is the interaction and resultant of all the forces of Nature, both favourable and unfavourable to life, that determine the development and growth of every individual organism. And so the form and characteristics of every living being depend on the nature and strength of these contending forces. ”

“ Living matter is characterised by its innate tendency to exhibit a definite series of the morphological and physiological phenomena which constitute organisation and life. Given a certain range of conditions, and these phenomena remain the same, within narrow limits, for each kind of living thing. ”

“ And still more surely can we refer to it those progressive manifestations of Life in the vegetable, the animal, and man—which we may classify as unconscious, conscious, and intellectual life,—and which probably depend upon different degrees of spiritual influx. ”

“ As the seed is cast into the bosom of nature in order that its energies may be called forth and its destinies accomplished, so do you cast yourselves into active life, determined in it to exercise, and by exercise to increase those mental powers that the training of the past has given you—determined that by continual accessions to your knowledge, the stream of thought shall be kept flowing constantly within you and bearing health, activity and growth into the very recesses of your being. ”

“ Thus a critical testing of the definition brings us, in another way, to the conclusion reached above, that that which gives the substance to our idea of Life is a certain unspecified principle of activity. The dynamic element in life is its essential element. ”

“ Like a living thing it ejects into its environment the waste products of its function. Moreover, it grows and develops structures like those of living organisms, and it is sensitive to many exterior changes, which influence its form and development. But these very phenomena—nutrition, assimilation, sensibility, growth, and organization—are generally asserted to be the sole characteristics of life. ”

“ By life I every where mean the true idea of life, or that most general form under which life manifests itself to us, which includes all its other forms. This I have stated to be the tendency to individuation and the degrees or intensities of life, to consist in the progressive realization of this tendency. ”

“ This same grain taken as food by two persons will be converted into the body of a criminal in the one case, and into the body of a saint in the other, each after its kind; and its kind is determined by the inner life of each. And what again determines the inner life of each? ”

“ This, then, is that which is true of every living form, from the lowest plant to the highest animal—to man himself. You might define the life of every one in exactly the same terms as those which I have now used; the difference between the highest and the lowest being simply in the complexity of the developmental changes, the variety of the structural forms, the diversity of the physiological functions which are exerted by each. ”

“ Choosing assimilation, then, for our example of bodily life, and reasoning for our example of that life known as intelligence; it is first to be observed, that they are both processes of change. Without change, food cannot be taken into the blood nor transformed into tissue; without change, there can be no getting from premisses to conclusion. ”

“ Here the natural sciences — in the strict sense of the word "natural" — may be evoked to tell of the physical conditions, under which the genesis and development of mental life takes place. But we make a very meagre, an unnecessarily meagre, use of the principle of development, if we fail to apply it directly to mental life itself. ”

“ A single touch, by introducing into the body some morbid matter, may set up an immensely involved set of functional disturbances and structural alterations. The whole tenor of a life may be changed by a word of advice; or a glance may determine an action which alters thoughts, feelings, and deeds throughout a long series of years. In those still more involved combinations of changes which societies exhibit, this truth is still more conspicuous. ”

“ Under the head of organic behaviour, in the widest acceptation of the term, fall the whole of physiology, the whole of embryological development, nay, more, the whole of organic evolution; while mental evolution, in all its stages, may be regarded as the psychological aspect of that which, from the physiological aspect, is the evolution of nervous systems. Life itself is the behaviour of a particular kind of substance which is found more or less abundantly under natural conditions. ”

“ And, taught as we have been to regard these definitions as complete, we naturally and rightly reject the monstrous notion that out of such matter any form of life could possibly arise. But are the definitions complete? Every thing depends on the answer to be given to this question. Trace the line of life backward, and see it approaching more and more to what we call the purely physical condition. ”

“ In this chapter we propose to consider Life in its primitive manifestations. Biology is the science of living bodies, or the science of life. Every organ of a living body has a function to perform, and Physiology treats of these functions. ”

“ Physiology teaches the nature of man, the laws that govern his being, the functions of the vital organs, and the conditions upon which alone health and life depend. Phrenology treats of the laws of mind, the different portions of the brain, the temperaments, the organs, how to develop some and repress others to produce a well balanced and healthy condition. ”

“ One of the phenomena which had peculiarly attracted my attention was the structure of the human frame, and, indeed, any animal endued with life. Whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed? ”

“ Now, this whole enterprise, this entire process of biological evolution, has been accomplished by the survival from age to age of the fittest to survive; that is, by the subjection and elimination of the weak and the simple by the more powerful and sophisticated. ”

“ The nature of that mysterious principle which we call life is unknown to scientists. Yet we may know and understand many of those things which are believed by physiologists concerning life. Certain of them believe that life is a phenomenon that follows organization ”

“ The subject is of entrancing interest to the biologist and the physician, quite apart from its bearing on the question of spontaneous generation. Whatever view may be entertained by the different schools of thought as to the nature and significance of life, all alike will welcome this new and important contribution to our knowledge of the mechanism by which Nature constructs the bewildering variety of her forms. ”

“ And he further adds that each additional year's labor, in this special field of investigation, "only confirms him more strongly than ever in the opinion that the physical doctrine of life cannot be sustained." ”

“ Physical properties, vital phenomena, psychical facts, all have their foundation in this immanent activity. Material activity is a minimum of soul or thought which, by continuous gradation and progressive complexity, without solution of continuity, without an abrupt transition from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, rises through the series of living beings to the dignity of the human soul. ”

“ When, however, we say that life is a property of protoplasm, we assert as much as we are justified in doing. Here we stand upon the boundary between life in its proper conception, as a group of phenomena having irritability as their common bond, and that other and higher group of phenomena which we designate as consciousness or thought, and which, however intimately connected with those of life, are yet essentially distinct from them. ”

“ For a purpose is the tendency to realize some external action which is useful or indispensable to the life-existence of the particular individual being. The tendency to the maintenance of a definite activity in opposition to the onset of disturbing forces of the environment in order to restore the lost equilibrium, may be considered as the universal formula for purposive life in general. ”

“ Having treated these conditions broadly, and explained why they are important and even indispensable for life, we next proceed to show how they are fulfilled upon the earth, and how numerous, how complex, and often how exact are the adjustments needed to bring them about, and maintain them almost unchanged throughout the vast æons of time occupied in the development of life. ”