344 THE GRAMMAR OF SCIENCE 



could be deduced from the other, it would greatly simplify 

 scientific description, but it would not lessen the mystery 

 of life. Those who project their conceptions into the 

 phenomenal sphere would still be puzzled to know why 

 corpuscles dance in each other's presence, and the mystery 

 would be no less or no greater because a dance of organic 

 corpuscles is at bottom a dance of inorganic atoms. Those 

 who treat all motion as conceptual (p. 275) would still 

 find the mystery of why sense -impressions change and 

 change with routine as insoluble as ever. Clearly those 

 who say mechanism cannot explain life are perfectly 

 correct, but then mechanism does not explain anything. 

 Those, on the other hand, who say mechanism cannot 

 describe life are going far beyond what is justifiable in the 

 present state of our knowledge. We must content our- 

 selves for the time being by saying that organic phenomena 

 may be described by aid of organic corpuscles constructed 

 out of inorganic corpuscles, and that the organic corpuscles 

 move in certain characteristic manners, but that whether 

 this motion follows or does not follow laws deducible from 

 those dealt with in Chapter VIII. we have not at present 

 the means of determining. 



S 6. — Life Defi7ied by Secondary Characteristics 



The distinction, therefore, between the inorganic and 

 the organic cannot be defined by saying that the one is 

 mechanical and the other is not. We are ultimately 

 obliged, in order to define life, to take secondary charac- 

 teristics — to describe the structure by which we concep- 

 tualise the organic corpuscle, the motions which are 

 peculiar to it, and the environment in which alone we 

 perceive life to exist. Thus we note that its atomic 

 structure is based upon complex compounds (p. 279) of 

 carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, a substance 

 termed protein peculiar to organic bodies, together with 

 water. The combination is termed protoplasm, but al- 

 though its chemical constitution has in some measure 

 been investigated, it has not yet been, and there at 



