MODERN THOUGHT 149 



Familiar as one may become with the processes of organization, 

 science has not yet been able to develop life out of what appears to be 

 dead matter. Nor has it yet been proved that life is ever spontaneously 

 developed from dead matter. Something more than mechanical pro- 

 cesses, or than the action of matter itself, is required for the production 

 of life even in its simplest and most primitive form. It may come 

 through the cell. The cell itself may be merely a bit of protoplasm. 

 This protoplasm may be either a germ of life or of the body. One 

 thing seems certain; life proceeds from life and is never produced by 

 mechanical processes, however constant these may be after life has once 

 appeared, or however necessary they may be after life has begun its 

 career in matter. 



As has been said, the study of biology is fascinating. It is likely to 

 become more fascinating with renewed efforts to attack the problem of 

 life in its secret fastnesses. There will always be some students of 

 biology who will be content to assume the existence of life either as 

 something which may reasonably be taken for granted, or as furnishing 

 a problem which at present can not be solved. But there will be others 

 who will feel that biology must remain an incomplete science so long 

 as the origin and nature of life are unknown. Its study as yet is in the 

 era of beginnings and, in spite of its apparently insoluble problems, is 

 full of promise. For the problems of the science are interesting and 

 worthy an attempted solution, even if it be found advisable to put aside 

 all thought of a solution of the mystery of life itself. 



The fourth of the concrete theories of the origin and nature of the 

 universe is called by Merz the psychophysical theory. It presupposes 

 the study of mind and matter as found in man, in their relation to one 

 another. In this study we may proceed from within by introspection or 

 speculatively, or we may proceed from without objectively, obtaining 

 our knowledge of mind from what it does, as shown in history, science, 

 art, language, as Herder suggested should be done. 



In the study of mind introspectively, or as it reveals itself in con- 

 nection with the human machine of which it makes constant and neces- 

 sary use, such men have been prominent as Cabanis, G. T. Fechner, 

 the leaders of the Naturphilosophie school of Germany, Schelling, Hegel 

 and others, the Weber Brothers, of Leipzig, Du Bois Beymond, Herbart, 

 the philosopher who rejected physiology altogether and insisted upon 

 the study of the mind as a unit by itself, Thomas Young, as shown by 

 his theory of colors, Charles Bell, who discovered the difference between 

 the anterior and posterior roots of the nerves of the spine and did not a 

 little toward pointing out the difference in their functions, and John 

 Miiller with his " specific energies " which have long been taken for 

 granted in all physiological reasoning as to the nature of sense percep- 

 tion. 



Helmholtz, too, has contributed not a little to the solution of the 



