LIFE FROM A PHYSICAL STANDPOINT. 5 



exhibited by living things are to be explained only on the 

 assumptions, first as due to the inherent properties of the 

 matter that exhibits it, or to some external agency — not 

 inherent in it, to which the name vital force is just as good as 

 any ? and if this has been discarded for seemingly good reason, 

 then there is the other alternative only. But somehow most 

 men who have thought about it have felt loth to adopt this. 

 Is not this the same as saying that there is somehow felt to be 

 a good reason for refusing to adopt it, even in the absence of 

 any proof that it is untrue .' I suspect it lies in the common 

 unanalyzed notion into which we have all been schooled, that 

 matter is dead and inert and out of it can come nothing but 

 so-called inorganic phenomena. Along with this has come a 

 relatively new piece of knowledge called the conservation of 

 energy, which asserts that all the forms of energy are trans- 

 formable and that the sum of their energies is a constant 

 quantity. As no one hitherto has been able to see how vital 

 and physical phenomena are correlated, men have been loth to 

 believe it to be a fact, — a mental position which assumes that 

 before a relation can be logically accepted it must be explained, 

 which is not true. The relation between mechanical energy 

 and electrical energy is very definitely known, yet it has not 

 been explained; but in this question there is no personal equa- 

 tion, no such lively interest in its settlement as in the other. 

 The one has only mechanical interests involved, the other is so 

 much of a sociological question as to threaten war involving 

 church and state. Dr. Barnard, a former president of Columbia 

 College, said concerning a certain debatable statement in 

 science, that if it were true he did not want to know it, and 

 that is the way a large number of persons feel about this ques- 

 tion of life in its relation to ordinary matter. 



As every one knows, our knowledge of matter has wonder- 

 fully increased during the past twenty-five years, and along 

 with this knowledge has come too, the conviction that the older 

 conceptions of its nature and its possibilities cannot possibly 

 be true. It becomes important in a matter of the kind under 

 consideration that one should know what he is entitled to post- 

 ulate concerning matter and this for the manifest reason that 



