LIFE AND MIND 



of all organisms is terminated by other organisms. 

 In the order of nature, life destroys life, and com- 

 pounds destroy compounds. When the air and soil 

 and water hold no invisible living germs, organic 

 bodies never decay. It is not the heat that begets 

 putrefaction, but germs in the air. Sufficient heat 

 kills the germs, but what disintegrates the germs and 

 reduces them to dust? Other still smaller organisms? 

 and so on ad infinitum? Does the sequence of life 

 have no end? The destruction of one chemical com- 

 pound means the formation of other chemical com- 

 pounds; chemical affinity cannot be annulled, but 

 the activity we call vital is easily arrested. A living 

 body can be killed, but a chemical body can only 

 be changed into another chemical body. 



The least of living things, I repeat, holds a more 

 profound mystery than all our astronomy and our 

 geology hold. It introduces us to activities which 

 our mathematics do not help us to deal with. Our 

 science can describe the processes of a living body, 

 and name all the material elements that enter into 

 it, but it cannot tell us in what the peculiar activity 

 consists, or just what it is that differentiates living 

 matter from non-living. Its analysis reveals no 

 difference. But this difference consists in something 

 beyond the reach of chemistry and of physics; it is 

 active intelligence, the power of self-direction, of 

 self-adjustment, of self-maintenance, of adapting 

 means to an end. It is notorious that the hand 

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