LIFE AND ITS PHENOMENA 53 



of this, does it not excite our wonder to an astonishing 

 degree, on witnessing the practical omnipotence of proto- 

 plasm and its nucleus, and to imagine how it could have 

 acquired it? Materialistic Monists and Rationalists, like 

 Romanes, try to bring life into the same category as all 

 physical forces ; but, as pointed out, we see a feature 

 altogether unknown in the inorganic world. All physical 

 forces act in precisely the same way now as ever before. 

 It is just because they do so that we can interpret the 

 past physical phenomena of the world by means of the 

 present. 



It is not so with living beings. Evolution shows us 

 that so far as organisms go, though the same type is 

 produced by heredity, generation after generation, as 

 long as the conditions of life are constant ; yet change 

 is really the order of the day sooner or later. 



Moreover, contrary to the behaviour of physical forces 

 which tend to dissipation, the commonest result being 

 heat, animals and plants have gone on getting more and 

 more complicated as the world grew older. The law 

 of adaptation has ever added new features as required, 

 though usually coupled with degeneracy whenever any 

 special structure is no longer useful. Thus have been 

 left the numerous rudimentary organs in animals and 

 plants still present, or, as in many cases, they have gone 

 altogether. 



In whatever way we compare living beings with non- 

 living we see striking contrasts both in structures and 

 energies concerned with them, which have to be accounted 

 for, if it be thought that all the phenomena of life can be 

 relegated to purely physical procedures. 



All the way from primitive protoplasmic beings to 

 man there is that Directivity which refuses to be ex- 

 cluded. It thrusts itself upon our notice, as I have said, 



