The pathway for life has been traced back and back to the utmost of the regressive journey of science. We have seen (perhaps) the first stones being fashioned in the fires of the suns; at least we may believe that in some such place and way they have been and are being fashioned. We know—radium has shown us and the proto-iron—how chemical elements can be disintegrated and brought down to lower states of material complexity. In radio-active matter there is more than a hint that they may be brought lower still, returned to the fecund mother from which they came, restored, let us say, to the ether.
We may have learnt—that depends on our prepossessions—we may have learnt in studying this regress to see in what the chemist calls the 'affinity' of one element for another, and in its 'valency' (that is, its ability to grip one or another and even several to itself and take part in building up compounds), a likeness or a congruity with living stuff. And we have seen a living thing as compounded physically of the compounds of the chemist, though not, as yet, compounded by him. Unless our prepossessions form in us irrational prejudice we may gladly follow the clue science puts in our hands, and confess a continuous advance in order upon order of nature from the womb of the ether to ourselves.
There the Eternal Fountain is playing its endless life-streams of birth and death. _Kabir._
We have followed the physicist and the chemist to the farthest point they have reached in their research. They cannot show us anything beyond, and we, unsatisfied, must look elsewhere. The problems of life remain. We ourselves stand on the great pathway, its continuous road of rising orders, and from our place of vantage we contemplate the first living thing. A profound discrepancy, or what seems like one, stares us in the face, the discrepancy between our mastery over things and our self-conscious, self-creative abilities on the one hand, and, on the other, that first humble yet awe-inspiring revelation by elements generated, perhaps, within a white-hot star. Science has nothing to do with meanings and purposes and values in our lives or with our concern for them. Indeed it has nothing to do, in strictness, with meanings and purposes and values anywhere. This is the business of philosophy and of all ordinary men.