What Is Life? (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1908 edition. Excerpt: ...time, that is, only by supplying a definite quantity of heat." (Italics mine.) This quotation from Mr. Spencer exhibits him in his strength and his weakness. He saw the heat of the sun creating plant life and animal life; he saw the transformation of an egg into a chick by heat; what more did he want to see? What more was there to be seen? Here was the force that he had written so splendidly about, shown in the concrete instead of in the abstract. He clearly points out the results that show this heat of the sun to be a force. He points out how it creates all life.--I ask what else is there to be created? It not only creates it but it carries it through to the end, then places the elements back into the earth to be again taken up and put into other life by the same force. I have never been able to comprehend why he did not say, at the conclusion of his observations on the production of life by heat, that life is heat--as I say now. But while he plainly saw the fact he did not comprehend its full meaning, as is shown by his speaking of forces in the plural, and of other forces in nature, such as molecular forces, chemical forces, and muscular forces, but never in a single instance pointing out the nature of these other forces as he does that of heat. He was like the man who sows and reaps but fails to gather up the sheaves and lets the grain rot on the ground. If he had drawn the proper deductions from the established facts, science would now be fifty years in advance of where it is. And what fifty years of scientific research will bring about, when it is known that there is but one force in the universe and that force is heat, is beyond the bounds of calculation. Spencer had seen that heat created all vegetable and animal life. He must also...