sense of how closely mechanical and chemical principles are associated
and identified with all the phenomena of life and with all animal
behavior. Given a living organism, mechanics and chemistry will then
explain much of its behavior--practically all the behavior of the lower
organisms, and much of that of the higher. Even when we reach man, our
reactions to the environment and to circumstances play a great part in
our lives; but dare we say that will, liberty of choice, ideation, do
not play a part also? How much reality there is in the so-called animal
will, is a problem; but that there is a foundation for our belief in the
reality of the human will, I, for one, do not for a moment doubt. The
discontinuity here is only apparent and not real. We meet with the same
break when we try to get our mental states, our power of thought--a
poem, a drama, a work of art, a great oration--out of the food we eat;
but life does it, though our science is none the wiser for it. Our
physical life forms a closed circle, science says, and what goes into
our bodies as physical force, must come out in physical force, or as
some of its equivalents. Well, one of the equivalents, transformed by
some unknown chemism within us, is our psychic force, or states of
consciousness. The two circles, the physical and the psychical, are not
concentric, as Fiske fancied, but are linked in some mysterious way.

Professor Loeb is a master critic of the life processes; he and his
compeers analyze them as they have never been analyzed before; but the
solution of the great problem of life that we are awaiting does not
come. A critic may resolve all of Shakespeare's plays into their
historic and other elements, but that will not account for Shakespeare.
Nature's synthesis furnishes occasions for our analysis. Most assuredly
all psychic phenomena have a physical basis; we know the soul only
through the body; but that they are all of physico-chemical origin, is
another matter.

II

Biological science has hunted the secret of vitality like a detective;
and it has done some famous work; but it has not yet unraveled the
mystery. It knows well the part played by carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen
in organic chemistry, that without water and carbon dioxide there could
be no life; it knows the part played by light, air, heat, gravity,
osmosis, chemical affinity, and all the hundreds or thousands of organic
compounds; it knows the part played by what are called the enz