6 WHAT IS LIFE 



and importance of these was intoxicating and it is 

 not hard to understand how men came to think, 

 for a time, that there was nothing in the earth or 

 in the heavens over the earth which was past their 

 finding out. And so Professor Huxley l proclaimed 

 that " the whole world, living and not-living, is the 

 result of the mutual interaction, according to de- 

 finite laws, of the forces possessed by the molecules 

 of which the primitive nebulosity of the universe 

 was composed ". 



And again 2 he stated " that the living body is 

 a mechanism ... is now the expressed or im- 

 plied fundamental proposition of the whole of sci- 

 entific physiology ". There is a curious difference 

 between the phrasing of the first and second editions 

 of this article which very clearly shows how definite 

 the late professor's views were on this point, and 

 how rigidly he excluded any such thing as a vital 

 force from his philosophy. In the first edition he 

 wrote " our volition counts for something as a con- 

 dition of the course of events ". But, in a later 

 edition, fearing evidently lest he might have seemed 

 to have bowed down in the House of Kimmon, he 

 altered this so that it reads " or, to speak more 

 accurately, the physical state of which our volition 

 is the expression ". And here he shows himself to 



1 Belfast Address, 1874. 



2 Collected Essays, i., 163. 



