202 EVOLUTION 



THE LIVING ORGANISM. The secret of 

 Life is baffling to the human intelligence, 

 refusing to be formulated. Often the con- 

 ception of Life has seemed to biologists to 

 be within reach, and then it is perhaps farthest 

 away. It recedes as we approach. Yet, 

 though intelligence fails, do we not at times 

 come nearer to it through sympathy ? Words- 

 worth, Emerson, Meredith, these and many 

 other Nature-poets are perhaps the truest, 

 because deepest, biologists of us all. 



It is partly in the intrinsic difficulty of the 

 problem vital activity being something be- 

 tween mechanical causality and our conscious 

 purposing and partly in the way that 

 science ever takes on the colour of its time, 

 that we must look for an explanation of the 

 historical oscillations of biology between the 

 mechanistic interpretations of the living organ- 

 ism and the vitalistic appreciations of it. 

 Now it is a machine and again it is a spirit, 

 now an automaton and again a free agent, 

 now an engine and again an entelechy. The 

 pendulum of thought continues to swing. 



Despite the fact that as yet no vitalist 

 writer has succeeded in making himself 

 and his nomenclature really intelligible to 

 any other, and that the frequent gibes at 

 vitalistic metaphysics and mysticism remain 



