130 WHAT IS LIFE 



judge," says Balfour Stewart, 1 " life is always associ- 

 y ated with machinery of a certain kind, in virtue 

 \ of which an extremely delicate directive touch is 

 : magnified ultimately into a very considerable trans- 

 mutation of energy." But a solution which proposes 

 / to omit any factor, no matter how small it may be, 

 from the general account cannot be regarded as a 

 satisfactory explanation. The disengaging power 

 is either something or it is nothing. If it is nothing 

 it is clear that it can do nothing. If it is something 

 it must not be left out of consideration, but must 

 be brought into account with the other items of the 

 transaction. 



If this and some other attempts to solve the 

 difficulty do not seem to help us very far, must we 

 then conclude that the Law of the Conservation of 

 Energy excludes the possibility of the existence of 

 a power controlling the operations of the cell? 

 Certainly not. To do this would be to assume, as 

 we have no right to do, that we know all about the 

 Laws of Nature and the particular Law in question 

 as well as to assume that the facts of living matter 

 are opposed to the law as at present formulated, 

 which is by no means certain. 



"The very advance of physics," says Ward, 2 "is 

 proving the most effectual cure for this ignorant 



1 On the Conservation of Energy, p. 163. 



2 Op. cit., L, 180. 



