One stands for the choice either to speak of Life as to be a one-off total synthesis resulting in an indestructible product under especially favorable one-off conditions, or to see in the reproduction of Life an until now ever repeating total-synthesis going on at the largest scale, in which, so to say, the former conditions of origin are, in a perhaps changed form, conserved as constitutive constituents of typical Life. This is a purely formal way of seeing things, but should show under which different views the problem of Life may be expressed. The just mentioned view of repeating total-synthesis contains some truth, because today [i.e. in today's organisms] the stimulative to increase the amount of living matter [the creation of new life, in reproduction] must contain a residue or part of those ancient conditions having made possible the origin of the first living beings.
The gap between organismic Life and organogeneous non-life is continuously and apparently easily crossed by existent Life, but we are experimentally not able to follow this step all along its line of transition, or to simulate it in thought [or on the computer] in the form of a model.
Who sees in the extended and [evolutionarily] gradually prepared ontogenetic development [= individual development of an organism] of an organismic molecule too great a difference with the inorganic, he/she should think of the fact that the immediate spontaneous production of the inorganic molecules is just a mere time-compressed sensory impression. Seen under a reaction-kinetic time magnifying glass with sufficient effect of extension [decompression] also the production of a small molecule -- sugar, urea, or also color substances and alkaloids -- is a temporally extended multiple-step process with precisely such unequivocal "preformistic" preparations (of which we now can only put down well-known chemical regularities) [as in organismic individual development]. The qualitative difference now is more like a quantitative one, which is to be expected already by reason of the giant differences in sizes. [So the origin or reproduction of an organismic molecule may be compared with the detailed reaction producing a non-living smaller molecule in just ordinary chemistry.