Life, its nature, origin and maintenance : an address delivered to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at its meeting at Dundee, in September, 1912 / by E.A. Schäfer.

  • Sharpey-Schäfer, E. A. (Edward Albert), Sir, 1850-1935.
Date:
1912
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Life, its nature, origin and maintenance : an address delivered to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at its meeting at Dundee, in September, 1912 / by E.A. Schäfer. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by King’s College London. The original may be consulted at King’s College London.

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    in- doubtedly antithetical. Strictly and literally, the words animate and animate express the presence or absence of 'soul'; and not in- frequently we find the terms ' life ' and ' soul' erroneously employed as if Life not identical ^^^^^^^^^^ hardly necessary for me to state that with Boul. the remarks I have to make regarding ' life ' must not be taken to apply to the conception to which the word ' soul' is attached. The fact that the formation of such a conception is only possible in connection with life, and that the growth and elabora- tion of the conception has only been possible as the result of the most complex processes of life in the most complex of living organisms, has doubtless led to a behef in the identity of life with soul. But unless the use of the expression ' soul' is extended to a degree which would deprive it of all special significance, the distinction between these terms must be strictly maintained. For the problems of life are Problems of life are ^.^^^^.^^^^^^ problems of matter; we cannot conceive of problems of matter. scientific sense as existing apart from matter. The phenomena of Ufe are investigated, and can only be investigated, by the same methods as all other phenomena of matter, and the general results of such investigations tend to show that living beings are governed by laws identical with those which govern in- animate matter. The more we study the manifestations of hfe the more we become convinced of the truth of this statement and the less we are disposed to call in the aid of a special and unknown form of energy to explain those manifestations. The most obvious manifestation of life is * spontaneous ' movement. We see a man, a dog, a bird move, and we know that they are alive. We place a drop of pond water under the microscope, and tivro?lift^*Move- numberless particles rapidly moving within it; we ment. afifirm that it swarms with ' life.' We notice a small mass of clear slime changing its shape, throwing out projections of its structureless substance, creeping from one part of the field of the microscope to another. We recognise that the slime is living; we give it a name—Amoeba Umax—the slug amoeba. We observe similar movements in individual cells of our own body; in the white corpuscles of our blood, in connective tissue cells, in growing nerve cells, in young cells everywhere. We denote the similarity between these movements and those of the amoeba by employing the descriptive term ' amceboid' for both. We regard such movements as indicative of the possession of' life '; nothing seems more justifiable than such an inference. But physicists * show us movements of a precisely similar character in substances which no one by any stretch of imagination can regard as living; movements of oil drops, of organic and inorganic mixtures, even of mercury globules, which are indistinguishable in their character from those of the living organisms we have been studying: movements which * G. Quincke, Annal. d. Physik u. Chem., 1870 and 1888.