Changing Views of the Nature of Life

The nature of life has been a mystery of all the ages. The theories presented at different times have been as varied as the capacity of man’s mind to create new and subtle theories. The astrologers sought to relate each individual life to a sign of the zodiac, putting great emphasis on the time of the month of birth. Probably no civilization has had a greater influence on the minds of the scholars of the last two thousand years as have the Greeks.

No theory could have been formulated during the past centuries that would have satisfied the conceptions of this hour because the fundamental concept had not obtained of the universal nature of the matter making up various planetary systems and the relation of radiant energy to matter. The close of the nineteenth century saw physical science boasting of the indestructible nature of matter as expressed in the conservation of energy. The first and second decades of the twentieth century witnessed the undoing of most of the theories that had been held as final in the previous decade through the discovery of helium, uranium and radium and their associated elements.