A Japanese view of Nature: The world of living things.
Kinji Imanishi
Even a cell exists by the division of a cell or the fusion of two cells, so that if you follow the process from what is made to what is making it, the origin of living things may be dated back indefinitely. Still they are living things. Essen-tially, living things can be made only from living things. No one has thought it strange that when a living thing dies, it always becomes a nonliving thing, and that, on the other hand, nonliving things cannot become living things. However, if living things did not exist from the beginning of this world, and if it was originally a world of nonliving things, there are two alternatives for the origin of living things. One is that living things appeared suddenly in the world of nonliving things and so life too came into being then by chance. However, it was only once in the history of the world that nothing was transformed into being.
When we say "nonliving things" and "living things," it sounds equivalent to "nothing" and "being." However, nonliving things are constituents of this world which exist with structure and function. The structure of nonliving things changed into the structure of living things, and the function of nonliving things changed into the function of living things. That is the evolution from nonliving to living things. In this interpretation, even life did not come into being from nothing. The life of nonliving things evolved into the life of living things.
If, however, you admit life in nonliving things, many think that they cease to be nonliving things, or that this is a sort of pantheism. Still, I do not find it a problem to admit the life of nonliving things. Without tracing the evolutionary history here, it is certain that the life of all living things we see now originated from the life of one cell. That being the case, we must admit that this development was analogous to the growth of the body from a cell to a living thing. The growth of the body occurs when we absorb things from the environ-ment. What we absorb is assuredly nonliving things or mat-ter. Our body is being made by assimilating these things. In this case we do not create a being from nothing, but we transform one existence into another existence. As the growth of the body cannot be conceived without the growth of life, and life cannot be understood as beings coming from nothing, and as the growth of life corresponds to the growth of the body, living things take the life of nonliving things.
By assimilating this nonliving life, they develop their life.
However, the matter of living things is not a mere aggregate of compounds, but is a very complex organic integrated system. The action of the organic integrated body is the expression of life. Thus, the life of living things from this point of view is merely the organic integration of the life of matter, but it does not mean that there are changes in the life of matter. That is, the atom of oxygen keeps its life as the atom of oxygen and life in this sense is nothing but the action expressed by the atom of oxygen. The expression of the integrated organic body is the expression of life and that process controls the movement of the atom.
We do not need to invoke the life of matter; the atom itself does not change, but its action is under the control of the living body. Herein lies the difference between the mere existence of matter and the life of matter.
