THE BREATH OF LIFE 



only leads the dance along our own line of descent 

 from our remote ancestors — it leads the dance 

 along the long road of evolution from the first uni- 

 cellular form in the dim palaeozoic seas to the com- 

 plex and highly specialized forms of our own day. 



The secret of this life force, or biotic energy, ac- 

 cording to Professor Moore, is in the keeping of mat- 

 ter itself. The steps or stages from the depths of 

 matter by which life arose, lead up from that im- 

 aginary something, the electron, to the inorganic 

 colloids, or to the crystallo-colloids, which are the 

 threshold of life, each stage showing some new trans- 

 formation of energy. There must be an all-potent 

 energy transformation before we can get chemical 

 energy out of physical energy, and then biotic en- 

 ergy out of chemical energy. This transformation 

 of inorganic energy into life energy cannot be traced 

 or repeated in the laboratory, yet science believes 

 the secret will sometime be in its hands. It is here 

 that the materialistic philosophers, such as Profes- 

 sors Moore and Loeb, differ from the spiritualistic 

 philosophers, such as Bergson, Sir Oliver Lodge, 

 Professor Thompson, and others. 



Professor Moore has no sympathy with those 

 narrow mechanistic views that see in the life proc- 

 esses "no problems save those of chemistry and 

 physics." "Each link in the living chain may be 

 physico-chemical, but the chain as a whole, and its 

 purpose, is something else." He draws an analogy 



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