LIFE AND MIND 



affect another of our senses. But the vital activity 

 in matter is a concrete reality. With it there goes 

 the organizing tendency or impulse, and upon it 

 hinges the whole evolutionary movement of the bio- 

 logical history of the globe. We can do all sorts of 

 things with water and still keep its aquosity. If we 

 resolve it into its constituent gases we destroy its 

 aquosity, but by uniting these gases chemically we 

 have the wetness back again. But if a body loses its 

 vitality, its life, can we by the power of chemistry, or 

 any other power within our reach, bring the vitality 

 back to it? Can we make the dead live? You may 

 bray your living body in a mortar, destroy every one 

 of its myriad cells, and yet you may not extinguish 

 the last spark of life; the protoplasm is still living. 

 But boil it or bake it and the vitality is gone, and all 

 the art and science of mankind cannot bring it back 

 again. The physical and chemical activities remain 

 after the vital activities have ceased. Do we not then 

 have to supply a non-chemical, a non-physical force 

 or factor to account for the living body? Is there no 

 difference between the growth of a plant or an ani- 

 mal, and the increase in size of a sand-bank or a 

 snow-bank, or a river delta? or between the wear 

 and repair of a working-man's body and the weai 

 and repair of the machine he drives? Excretion and 

 secretion are not in the same categories. The living 

 and the non-living mark off the two grand divisions 

 of matter in the world in which we live, as no two 



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