LIFE AND MIND 



an association and cooperation of communities of 

 cells, each community working to a definite end and 

 building an harmonious whole. The biochemist who 

 would produce life in the laboratory has before him 

 the problem of compounding matter charged with 

 this organizing tendency or power, and doubtless 

 if he ever should evoke this mysterious process 

 through his chemical reactions, it would possess 

 this power, as this is what distinguishes the organic 

 from the inorganic. 



I do not see mind or intelligence in the inorganic 

 world in the sense in which I see it in the organic. 

 In the heavens one sees power, vastness, sublimity, 

 unspeakable, but one sees only the physical laws 

 working on a grander scale than on the earth. 

 Celestial mechanics do not differ from terrestrial 

 mechanics, however tremendous and imposing the 

 result of their activities. But in the humblest living 

 thing — in a spear of grass by the roadside, in a 

 gnat, in a flea — there lurks a greater mystery. In 

 an animate body, however small, there abides some- 

 thing of which we get no trace in the vast reaches of 

 astronomy, a kind of activity that is incalculable, 

 indeterminate, and super-mechanical, not lawless, 

 but making its own laws, and escaping from the 

 iron necessity that rules in the inorganic world. 



Our mathematics and our science can break into 

 the circle of the celestial and the terrestrial forces, 

 and weigh and measure and separate them, and in a 



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