Life and Death

MAN must have speculated on the meaning and source of life ever since a race of beings arose on this planet endowed with the power of reasoning, the particular form taken by his speculations depending on the stage of civilisation and culture reached. At all times there have been those—fewer now than even a century ago—who drew a sharp line of distinction between the living and the non-living, between the inorganic and the organic world; but the advance of scientific knowledge has slowly broken down the barriers between the animate and the inanimate, first when it was discovered that organic substances, previously supposed peculiar to the tissues of living beings, could be prepared in the test-tube in exactly similar manner to inorganic compounds, until nowadays many confidently assert that the phenomena of life will be explicable in the terms of the more exact sciences. Others, more cautious perhaps, consider that though it may be possible to describe these phenomena in the terms used in mathematics, physics, or chemistry, yet such description will still not provide us with a final and complete explanation.