Origin of Life. Early Ideas
Section 1.2. Man has always been entwined in interrelationships with surrounding nature. At the very dawn of his conscious existence he had contemplated it and with the course of time had got convinced of the presence of non-living, lifeless matter and a stunning variety of animals and plants. This objective reality has urged him to think about where all this has come from, who has created it and at a later stage to make a distinction between the common and the different of these two forms from which the material world is made. At that time microorganisms not only were unknown to man, but he did not even have any suspicion of their existence. He got knowledge of them only after discovery of the microscope.
The common between these two forms is that they are material. This is an undisputed fact that no rational human can deny. More important prove to be the differences between them which have become the reason to accept the notions of the living and non-living matter. What in fact is living matter and what is its origin? This question is of particular importance, and without a scientifically based answer to it, no realistic idea about the objective reality in which living organisms have emerged and are existing can be obtained. The problem of the essence of life and its emergence has occupied mankind since ancient times. At the top of the pyramid of the evolutionary development of living organisms, having become conscious of his own self man could not have bypassed it without taking an interest in its clarification. He is an already thinking being. And the more his knowledge of nature has broadened and his practical capacities have increased with the development of science, the more his interest in this problem has been increasing aiming at its clarification. In ancient times Heraclitus (540—483 B. C.), the Greek materialist and founder of dialectics and later Aristotle (384—322 B. C.) have taught that the essence of things can be understood only when their origin and development are known. The essence of life has more of a philosophical interpretation. It is hardly possible for one to give an exact and thorough definition of the notion of “life” the way the term “matter” has not yet been defined. For the present as most adequate is accepted the one given by V. I. Lenin that “the matter is a philosophical category for designating objective reality existing outside and independently of our consciousness”. As more important here emerges the point of view from which it is perceived. The differences in the point of view have engendered two basic philosophical concepts — the idealistic and the materialistic, which because of their important historical role for the development and clarification of this problem cannot be ignored. The followers of the idealistic concept with all its variations discern in the essence of life a certain “meta-material principle” or “life force” (vis vitalis), and matter is considered only a substance from which living entities are made. And since life is “meta-material” incorporating a “God-like” or “life