nd invoke some
super-material force or agent to account for it. The least of living
things is so wonderful, the phenomena it exhibits are so fundamentally
unlike those of inert matter, that we invent a word for it, _vitality_;
and having got the word, we conceive of a vital force or principle to
explain vital phenomena. Hence vitalism--a philosophy of living things,
more or less current in the world from Aristotle's time down to our own.
It conceives of something in nature super-mechanical and super-chemical,
though inseparably bound up with these things. There is no life without
material and chemical forces, but material and chemical forces do not
hold the secret of life. This is vitalism as opposed to mechanism, or
scientific materialism, which is the doctrine of the all-sufficiency of
the physical forces operating in the inorganic world to give rise to all
the phenomena of the organic world--a doctrine coming more and more in
vogue with the progress of physical science. Without holding to any
belief in the supernatural or the teleological, and while adhering to
the idea that there has been, and can be, no break in the causal
sequence in this world, may one still hold to some form of vitalism, and
see in life something more than applied physics and chemistry?

Is biology to be interpreted in the same physical and chemical terms as
geology? Are biophysics and geophysics one and the same? One may freely
admit that there cannot be two kinds of physics, nor two kinds of
chemistry--not one kind for a rock, and another kind for a tree, or a
man. There are not two species of oxygen, nor two of carbon, nor two of
hydrogen and nitrogen--one for living and one for dead matter. The water
in the human body is precisely the same as the water that flows by in
the creek or that comes down when it rains; and the sulphur and the lime
and the iron and the phosphorus and the magnesium are identical, so far
as chemical analysis can reveal, in the organic and the inorganic
worlds. But are we not compelled to think of a kind of difference
between a living and a non-living body that we cannot fit into any of
the mechanical or chemical concepts that we apply to the latter?
Professor Loeb, with his "Mechanistic Conception of Life"; Professor
Henderson, of Harvard, with his "Fitness of the Environment"; Professor
Le Dantec, of the Sorbonne in Paris, with his volume on "The Nature and
Origin of Life," published a few years since; Professor Schae