“But it was all guesswork,” retorted Matthews, “unless you call it inspiration, and very inaccurate at that. If the author of Genesis had said that man was made of seawater, he would have been nearer the truth.”
“Well,” said Waters, “he put the beginnings of life on the face of the waters, which wasn’t so very far off.”
“But how did life begin?” I asked. “After all, there is a difference between the Organic and the Inorganic. Or there appears to be.”
“That’s for Waters to say,” said Matthews.
“I can’t be very didactic about that,” said the chemist. “But it appears possible that there was an evolution from Inorganic to Organic through the Colloids. We can’t say much more, and we haven’t—so far—succeeded in producing it in the laboratory. Matthews probably still believes that Mind is a function of Matter, but if he asks me to demonstrate it for him, I must beg to be excused. I can’t even show that Life is a function of Matter.”
“The Behaviourists seem to think that what looks like Intelligence and Freewill are merely mechanical responses to material stimuli,” I suggested.
“That’s all very well,” said Hoskyns, emerging with a grin from a cloud of tobacco-smoke, “but all you people talk so cheerfully about Matter, as if you knew what it was. I don’t, and it’s more or less my job to know. Go back again, go past your colloids and your seawater. Go back to the dust of the earth and the mass of rotating cinders which was before the ocean even began. Go back to the sun, which threw the planets off so unexpectedly, owing to a rare accident which might not happen in a million light-years. Go back to the nebula. Go back to the atom. Do some of the famous splitting we hear so much about. Where is your Matter? It isn’t. It is a series of pushes or pulls or vortices in nothingness.