There are examples of highly complex union to be seen in the chemist's laboratory and elsewhere which are never called living matter. The chemist speaks of some of them as colloids (we should naturally call many of these jellies, or gums) and he calls protoplasm a colloid too. They have remarkable properties, and the new bio-chemist thinks he may some day make that elaborate colloid with more remarkable properties, which we know as protoplasm. He thinks also that we do ill to confine the first production of life-jellies to the age of steaming seas and cloud-shadowed lagoons, before the Pre-Cambrian geologic times. He tells us that in his opinion it may always be going on and always have gone on since the earth was cool enough to permit of it. He thinks that if all the living creatures we are aware of were swept out of the world to-day there would still be living stuff remaining on it of which we are ignorant now; and that in the course of millenniums this would people it once more. The beginnings of the life-jelly must be so small as to be far out of the reach of our microscopes and every other tool we can bring to bear, as yet, he says. And there, doubtless, he is right.
Let us suppose that he is right, too, in his main contention. Let us look at inorganic matter with a new eye, seeing in its evolutionary change the forerunner of greater change and greater evolution, the preparer of the narrow pathway by which life approaches to its display, and at last enters on possession of a body that in union with it shall be the germ of lives to come—enters the realm of physical forces and the relative necessity of material things, where and by use of those forces it will subdue necessity to the purposes of freedom. This indeed seems to be the manner and purposing of life as it extends from the single cell to the assemblage of cells that constitutes my body. There is continuity from first to last; and yet the differences between me and the primitive jelly-speck are even more striking than the resemblances. Students of the cell itself and students of my body as merely composed of cells are, naturally, cytologists, histologists, physiologists, embryologists, and the like. But unless there are others, unless students of psychology, ethics, aesthetics, social science, history, and many more, bring their minds to bear on me, I am studied to little sense and in small part. I am obliged to regard myself as not only physical but psychical; I seek after, and sometimes find, goodness and truth and beauty. I admire, I hate or love. I am a hero or a criminal, or both. I sin. In the advance of life from the minute and primitive colloid lump to me amazing things have happened. When I see life making its humble appearance by that speck of jelly, I must in my mind's eye connect it with what I am, and see there in its almost inchoate wonders the promise of myself. And still I must look behind even that first living thing and consider matter as well as life; for the physical potency of that thing was long of building up; and this physical potency has its place in me. The material pathway of life is the pathway of my powers, and it stretches far back into cosmic happenings smaller or (it depends how you look at these high matters and what you see in them) greater still.