The Atom of Matter Is the Vehicle of Life Itself

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 11 pages

N.D. Khandalawala's question from Lucifer of March 1888, with Blavatsky's footnotes, reprinted in Blavatsky Collected Writings IX as The Life Principle. It reviews the controversy then running between scientists of reputation over spontaneous generation — some holding it a fact in nature, others showing that as far as experiment went there was biogenesis, life generated from previously existing life, and never any form of life produced from non-living matter.

The experimental history is set out fairly: the early assumption that heat at boiling point destroyed all life organisms, disproved when sealed vessels of infusion produced organisms after that heat and more; then the finding that dry spores of bacteria floating in the air withstand far greater heat, and that in optically pure air no life ever appears and infusions never putrefy. Huxley's caution is quoted, that with organic chemistry and physiology in their infancy it would be presumption to say the conditions under which matter assumes vital qualities may not one day be brought together artificially. The teaching offered against all this is the title's: that every atom has its own life or force within it, and that the atoms making up the physical frame carry their life with them wherever they travel — the human or animal life-principle which vitalises the whole being standing above them as something further again. Note that a second file in this section, Life is an indestructible universal force, draws on the same article from Lucifer of March 1888 and repeats a good deal of this text; it is arranged as Blavatsky's annotations, where this one is framed as Khandalawala's question with her footnotes.

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