IV 

 THE BAFFLING PROBLEM 



STILL the problem of living things haunts my 

 mind and, let me warn my reader, will continue 

 to haunt it throughout the greater part of this vol- 

 ume. The final truth about it refuses to be spoken. 

 Every effort to do so but gives one new evidence of 

 how insoluble the problem is. 



In this world of change is there any other change 

 to be compared with that in matter, from the dead 

 to the living ? — a change so great that most minds 

 feel compelled to go outside of matter and invoke 

 some super-material force or agent to account for 

 it. The least of living things is so wonderful, the 

 phenomena it exhibits are so fundamentally unlike 

 those of inert matter, that we invent a word for it, 

 vitality; and having got the word, we conceive of a 

 vital force or principle to explain vital phenomena. 

 Hence vitalism — a philosophy of living things, 

 more or less current in the world from Aristotle's 

 time down to our own. It conceives of something 

 in nature super-mechanical and super-chemical, 

 though inseparably bound up with these things. 

 There is no life without material and chemical 



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