The chemist in his laboratory can make explosives, chemical compounds that will easily break down and in breaking down will liberate, for good or ill, great power. He makes nitroglycerin and trinitrotoluol. He can also make very elaborate and more stable compounds than a plant makes, for instance, indigo or madder-red, though for such as these he does not usually begin like the plant with chemical elements; he begins half way—with lesser compounds, ready made—and thus, or even sometimes by building up from the bottom, from elements, like the plant, he makes what are known as 'organic' substances of many sorts and uses. Is it possible that he will ever make that organic substance protoplasm, the life-jelly of living things? He has not done so yet. Suppose he did, suppose he went on from making indigo to make the indigo-maker itself. There is nothing of a chemical kind in the indigo-plant which his laboratory does not contain; there are just the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, salts and the rest, with which he deals so successfully elsewhere. He has all the materials to hand. Why should he not make its living stuff? Again, suppose he did, for perhaps he will. What then? Will he have made life, as well as built up the material substance of a living thing? That is a question of questions.
We know life here only in association with its jelly. What is the character of that association? Granted that life depends on the jelly, in what way does it depend? If we can answer these questions we may know how to answer the one about the chemist's making or not making life, if and when he makes the jelly.
There are different ways of being dependent, as there are different ways of growing. The steam depends on the boiler and the boiler-fire. In this case the dependence is one of being _produced_. The boiler and its fire produce the steam. So we say, in the ordinary way of speaking of such things. Again—when I press the trigger of a rifle the bullet is shot out. I have only pressed the trigger; you can hardly say I have produced the bullet. What I have done is to release an explosive power that drives the bullet. That is another kind of dependence, dependence on the _release_ of power. There may be still, there certainly have been, men who would tell you that life is produced by protoplasm as steam is produced by the boiler, or that it is released from a chemical compound by some chemical or physical trigger action. They might, once they did in large numbers, say that consciousness is produced by or released from the brain, and that this must be so because it depends upon the brain.