THE UNVOICED LIFE
By Sir J. C. BOSE, f.r.s.
The mysterious workings of life continually baffle the inquirer, for numerous are the difficulties which confront him. The generally accepted view is that the mechanism of life is widely different in the animal and in the plant. The animal responds to a shock by a rapid twitching movement; ordinary plants are regarded as insensitive to a succession of blows. The animal has a pulsating heart, the plant being supposed to possess no such throbbing organ. The sense organs of the animal, like so many antennae, pick up messages of external happenings, the tremor of excitation being conducted along nerves to produce reflex movements at a distance. All authorities are unanimous in their belief that the plant possesses no nervous system. Two streams of life are thus supposed to flow side by side with nothing common between them. This view is wholly incorrect and it is the paralyzing influence of wrong theories that has arrested the march of knowledge.
It may be admitted at once that there are reasons for the prevailing error, for, to all outward appearances, the plant seems to be immobile and insensitive. Yet the same environment, which with its changing influences so profoundly affects the animal, is also playing upon the plant. Storm and sunshine, the warmth of summer, and the frost of winter, drought and rain—all these and many more come and go about it. What subtle impress do they leave behind? Internal changes there must be; but our eyes have not the power to see them. For, detecting the invisible internal changes, it became necessary to discover a compulsive force by which the plant was made to give an answering signal; instrumental means had then to be supplied for the automatic conversion of these signals into an intelligible script; and, last of all it was necessary to decipher the nature of the hieroglyphic.
Let us consider the conditions which are necessary for the advancing the frontiers of knowledge. For this three factors are important: a clear inner vision, great experimental dexterity and power of invention of supersensitive instruments by which alone the realm of the invisible could be successfully explored.
India’s Gift
Nothing can be more vulgar or more untrue than the ignorant assertion that the world owes its progress of knowledge to any particular race. The whole world is inter-dependent, and a constant stream of thought has throughout ages enriched the common heritage of mankind. It is the realisation of this mutual dependence that has kept the mighty human fabric bound together and ensured the continuity and permanence of civilization. Although science is neither of the East nor of the West, but international in its universality, yet India by her habit of mind and inherited gifts handed down from generation to generation, is specially fitted to make great contributions in furtherance of knowledge. The burning Indian imagination which can extort new order out of a mass of apparently contradictory facts, can also be held in check by the habit of concentration: it is this restraint which confers the power to hold the mind in pursuit of truth in infinite patience. The true laboratory is the mind, where, behind all illusions we catch glimpses of truth. In order to discover the life mechanism in the interior of the tree, one has to become the tree, and feel the throbbings of its beating heart. This inner vision has, however, to be frequently tested by results of experimentation; for, otherwise it may lead to the wildest speculation subversive of all intellectual sanity. It is only by the contact of the hand with real things that the brain receives its stimulating message and the answering impulse then gives the hand its cunning.
For great inventions, a clear inner vision is also essential. When microscopic vision fails, we have still to follow the invisible, for the little that we can see is as nothing compared to the vastness we cannot. For example, exploring the realm of the invisible, the Magnetic Crescograph had to be
