LIFE AND MIND 



entiated protoplasm to the brain of a Christ or a 

 Plato, is just one series of unintelligent physical and 

 chemical activities in matter. 



May we not say that all the marks or character- 

 istics of a living body which distinguish it in our 

 experience from an inanimate body, are of a non- 

 scientific character, or outside the sphere of experi- 

 mental science? We recognize them as readily as 

 we distinguish day from night, but we cannot de- 

 scribe them in the fixed terms of science. When we 

 say growth, metabolism, osmosis, the colloidal state, 

 science points out that all this may be affirmed of 

 inorganic bodies. When we say a life principle, a 

 vital force or soul or spirit or intelligence, science 

 turns a deaf ear. 



The difference between the living and the non- 

 living is not so much a physical difference as a meta- 

 physical difference. Living matter is actuated by 

 intelligence. Its activities are spontaneous and self- 

 directing. The rock, and the tree that grows beside 

 it, and the insects and rodents that burrow under it, 

 may all be made of one stuff, but their difference to 

 the beholder is fundamental; there is an intelligent 

 activity in the one that is not in the other. Now no 

 scientific analysis of a body will reveal the secret 

 of this activity. As well might your analysis of a 

 phonographic record hope to disclose a sonata of 

 Beethoven latent in the waving lines. No power of 

 chemistry could reveal any difference between the 



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