This conviction was there as long as one was seriously judging the question of Life. And that is going on for some 150 years [i.e. since about Darwin]. Many investigators took too easy a way. Others have left open too much, having posited behind their statement the unspoken opinion that the whole is just a kind of basis, to which then conceptual life and mind is added. Radical courage, as shown by Haeckel and Oparin, only few had. Much judgements [about the nature of Life] are merely additional remarks sparked off in works in which the phenomena of Life were a mere by-problem. Here a [translated] citation from Wolfgang Ostwald :
" The colloidal state is an integrating precondition of the appearance of biological phenomena, or perhaps better : We only take those entities to be organisms in which we can demonstrate in all circumstances the colloid state. Organisms are special cases of colloid systems [...]. The chemical elementary conditions of the organismic substance are characterized by the concepts protein, lipoid, salts and water."
It surprises us that a biologically motivated colloid researcher is so succinct in these matters. But maybe a whole world of supplementing images was concealed behind his arid concepts. He, had, though, also the impression :
" The protoplasmatic hydro-sol mixture does not just consist in a floating about of the albumine and lipoid particles, but there is [also] some secondary ordering and connecting, resulting in microscopical structures, namely net and honeycomb structures"
which [net and honeycomb structures] to a chemist may only be imaginable as being constituted by genuine [chemical] bondings.
All in all, one may say that the theoretical physicists did contribute more to the problem of Life than did the colloid chemists in fact working with it. The contributions of the physicists can be characterized by there being a counselling critique. Our [Müller] own considerations also can be seen from this viewpoint.