What prevented the stomach from digesting itself—as sometimes, in fact, did happen after death? One might answer, life: a special power of resistance of the living protoplasm; but this would be not to recognize the mystical character of such an explanation. The theory of such an everyday phenomenon as fever was full of contradictions. Heightened oxidization resulted in increased warmth, but why was there not an increased expenditure of warmth to correspond? Did the paralysis of the sweat-secretions depend upon contraction of the skin? But such contraction took place only in the case of “chills and fever,” for otherwise, in fever, the skin was more likely to be hot. Prickly heat indicated the central nervous system as the seat of the causes of heightened catabolism as well as the source of that condition of the skin which we were content to call abnormal, because we did not know how to define it.
But what was all this ignorance, compared with our utter helplessness in the presence of such a phenomenon as memory, or of that other more prolonged and astounding memory which we called the inheritance of acquired characteristics? Out of the question to get even a glimpse of any mechanical possibility of explication of such performances on the part of the cell-substance. The spermatozoon that conveyed to the egg countless complicated individual and racial characteristics of the father was visible only through a microscope; even the most powerful magnification was not enough to show it as other than a homogeneous body, or to determine its origin; it looked the same in one animal as in another. These factors forced one to the assumption that the cell was in the same case as with the higher form it went to build up: that it too was already a higher form, composed in its turn by the division of living bodies, individual living units. Thus one passed from the supposed smallest unit to a still smaller one; one was driven to separate the elementary into its elements. No doubt at all but just as the animal kingdom was composed of various species of animals, as the human-animal organism was composed of a whole animal kingdom of cell species, so the cell organism was composed of a new and varied animal kingdom of elementary units, far below microscopic size, which grew spontaneously, increased spontaneously according to the law that each could bring forth only after its kind, and, acting on the principle of a division of labour, served together the next higher order of existence.
Those were the genes, the living germs, bioblasts, biophores—lying there in the frosty night, Hans Castorp rejoiced to make acquaintance with them by name. Yet how, he asked himself excitedly, even after more light on the subject was forthcoming, how could their elementary nature be established? If they were living, they must be organic, since life depended upon organization. But if they were organized, then they could not be elementary, since an organism is not single but multiple. They were units within the organic unit of the cell they built up. But if they were, then, however impossibly small they were, they must themselves be built up, organically built up, as a law of their existence; for the conception of a living unit meant by definition that it was built up out of smaller units which were subordinate; that is, organized with reference to a higher form. As long as division yielded organic units possessing the properties of life—assimilation and reproduction—no limits were set to it. As long as one spoke of living units, one could not correctly speak of elementary units, for the concept of unity carried with it in perpetuity the concept of subordinated, upbuilding unity; and there was no such thing as elementary life, in the sense of something that was already life, and yet elementary.
And still, though without logical existence, something of the kind must be eventually the case; for it was not possible to brush aside like that the idea of the original procreation, the rise of life out of what was not life. That gap which in exterior nature we vainly sought to close, that between living and dead matter, had its counterpart in nature’s organic existence, and must somehow either be closed up or bridged over. Soon or late, division must yield “units” which, even though in composition, were not organized, and which mediated between life and absence of life; molecular groups, which represented the transition between vitalized organization and mere chemistry. But then, arrived at the molecule, one stood on the brink of another abyss, which yawned yet more mysteriously than that between organic and inorganic nature: the gulf between the material and the immaterial. For the molecule was composed of atoms, and the atom was nowhere near large enough even to be spoken of as extraordinarily small. It was so small, such a tiny, early, transitional mass, a coagulation of the unsubstantial, of the not-yet-substantial and yet substance-like, of energy, that it was scarcely possible yet—or, if it had been, was now no longer possible—to think of it as material, but rather as mean and borderline between material and immaterial. The problem of another original procreation arose, far more wild and mysterious than the organic: the primeval birth of matter out of the immaterial. In fact the abyss between material and
