THE BAFFLING PROBLEM 



All Professor Loeb's experiments and criticisms 

 throw light upon the life processes, or upon the fac- 

 tors that take part in them, but not upon the secret 

 of the genesis of the processes themselves. Amid all 

 the activities of his mechanical and chemical fac- 

 tors, there is ever present a factor which he ignores, 

 which his analytical method cannot seize; namely, 

 what Verworn calls "the specific energy of living 

 substance." Without this, chemism and mechanism 

 would work together to quite other ends. The water 

 in the wave, and the laws that govern it, do not dif- 

 fer at all from the water and its laws that surround 

 it; but unless one takes into account the force that 

 makes the wave, an analysis of the phenomena will 

 leave one where he began. 



Professor Le Dantec leaves the subject where he 

 took it up, with the origin of life and the life pro- 

 cesses unaccounted for. His work is a description, 

 and not an explanation. All our ideas about vitality, 

 or an unknown factor in the organic world, he calls 

 "mystic" and unscientific. A sharp line of demarca- 

 tion between living and non-living bodies is not per- 

 missible. This, he says, is the anthropomorphic error 

 which puts some mysterious quality or force in all 

 bodies considered to be living. To Le Dantec, the 

 difference between the quick and the dead is of the 

 same order as the difference which exists between two 

 chemical compounds — for example, as that which 

 exists between alcohol and an aldehyde, a liquid that 



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