24 LIFE: ITS ORIGIN AND NATURE 
in attempts to discover the precise nature of 
these various transformations; but the dis¬ 
cussion of these detailed chemical questions 
would take us too far afield. The interested 
reader may be referred to such books as Prof. 
Chittenden’s “The Nutrition of Man,” and P. 
Czapek’s “Chemical Phenomena of Life.” 
The mechanistic view of life is merely that 
physico-chemical reactions are alone sufficient 
to account for the life of the cell, and that 
the life of the organism is composed, as it were, 
of the totality of these cell-lives. It is difficult 
to see, however, how such a unifying of cell- 
lives could take place, unless there were some 
unifying principle or force, uniting these many 
lives into one —some “key-stone of the arch” 
which bound them together into a single living 
organism, such as we know it. This difficulty 
is still further exemplified by death, for here 
the lives of the individual cells continue for 
some time, and yet we say that such a person 
is “dead.” It appears, at such times, as though 
the central, unifying principle had departed, 
leaving the cells of the body to die individual¬ 
ly, in their own good time. We have discussed 
this question more fully, however, in the vol¬ 
ume in this series devoted to the problem of 
“Death.” 
The body which we inhabit is intricate and 
beautiful almost beyond imagination. The com¬ 
plexity of its constituents, the marvelous inter¬ 
play of its organs and functional activities, the 
beauty of its regulating mechanisms, the intric¬ 
acy of its nervous system, the miracles of di¬ 
gestion, the subtlety of our sense organs, the 
