168 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the plant grows and is fed, are dead ; that life is a mysterious some- 

 thing which comes from without, and is extraneous to the organism. 

 Perhaps we may trace the origin of this conception to the ancient 

 legend, which appears in more than one form, of a human body fash- 

 ioned out of dead matter and waiting for vivifying breath or fire. The 

 student of inorganic nature, however, soon learns to recognize the fact 

 that all matter is instinct with activities, and finds that a great num- 

 ber of those processes which were formerly regarded as functions of 

 organized bodies are really common to these and to inorganic matter. 

 The phenomena of gravitation, of light, and of electricity, the dif- 

 fusion and transpiration of gases and liquids, the crystallogenic proc- 

 ess, and the peculiar relations of colloids, are all, when rightly under- 

 stood, manifestations of energies and activities which forbid us to 

 speak of matter as dead. To all of these dynamical (or, as they are 

 generally called, physical) activities of matter, supervene those proc- 

 esses which we name chemical, and which give rise to new and spe- 

 cifically distinct inorganic forms. The attaining of individuality by 

 matter, which has always seemed to me the greatest step in the prog- 

 ress of nature, is first seen in the crystal, but therein the forces of 

 matter are in a statical condition, except so far as certain dynamical 

 relations are concerned. It is not until solid matter rises from the 

 crystalline to the higher condition of the colloid, that it becomes 

 capable of absorption, diffusion, and even of assimilation ; that, in a 

 word, it assumes relations to the external world which show that it 

 possesses an individuality higher than the cyrstal, and is, in fact, en- 

 dowed with many of the activities belonging to those masses of col- 

 loidal matter which biologists have agreed to call living. 



In these phenomena we have the first developments of individual- 

 ity and of organization, and I think that the careful student who 

 endeavors with a strong mental grasp to seize the true relations of 

 things will see that we have here to do, not with a new activity from 

 without, but with a new and higher development of a force which is 

 inherent in matter, and thus manifests itself at a certain stage in chem- 

 ical development. He will then, in the words of a philosophic poet 



"See through this air, this ocean, and this earth, 

 All matter quick, and bursting into birth." 



The adjective, quick, is here to be understood in its primitive 

 sense of living, as opposed to dead, and aptly defines the notion 

 which I have endeavored to convey. All the energies seen in nature 

 are in this view but manifestations of the essential life or quickness of 

 matter, whether displayed in the domain of what are called dynamical 

 or physical activities, in chemical processes, or in the phenomena of 

 irritability, assimilation, growth, and reproduction, which we may 

 comprehensively designate as biotical.* 



* This view, upon which I have insisted in the essay on " The Domain of Physiology," 

 cited below, was well set forth by Rosmini. According to him, in the words of his in- 



