The Life Principle Is Ever Present in the Atom

N.D. Khandalawala, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 13 pages

From Lucifer of March 1888, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IX as The Life Principle, and unusual in this section for engaging the laboratory science of its day directly. The controversy reviewed is the one that ran between several scientists of reputation over spontaneous generation: some holding it a fact in nature, others proving that as far as experiment went there was biogenesis — life generated from previously existing life — and never the production of any form of life from non-living matter.

The experimental history is given fairly. An erroneous assumption was made at first that heat equal to the boiling point of water destroyed all life organisms; sealed vessels of infusion subjected to that heat and more still produced living organisms. More careful work then showed that the spores of bacteria and other animalculae floating in the air can, when dry, withstand a greater degree of heat — and that in optically pure air no life ever appears and the infusions never putrefy. Huxley's caution is quoted, that with organic chemistry and physiology still in their infancy it would be the height of presumption to say the conditions under which matter assumes vital qualities may not one day be artificially brought together. Against all of which the occult position is stated at the head: that the Life Principle is ever present in the atom, an atom being termed organic when it is active and inorganic when it is dormant or latent. Note that a second file in this section, The Life Principle, draws on the same article from Lucifer of March 1888 and repeats a good deal of this text; it is framed as Khandalawala's question with Blavatsky's footnotes, where this one is arranged as her annotations.

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