fact that there is no life without chemical reactions, no life without
oxidation. Yet chemical reactions in the laboratory cannot produce life.
With Le Dantec, biology, like geology and astronomy, is only applied
mechanics and chemistry.

III

Such is the result of the rigidly objective study of life--the only
method analytical science can pursue. The conception of vitality as a
factor in itself answers to nothing that the objective study of life can
disclose; such a study reveals a closed circle of physical forces,
chemical and mechanical, into which no immaterial force or principle can
find entrance. "The fact of being conscious," Le Dantec says with
emphasis, "does not intervene in the slightest degree in directing vital
movements." But common sense and everyday observation tell us that
states of consciousness do influence the bodily processes--influence the
circulation, the digestion, the secretions, the respiration.

An objective scientific study of a living body yields results not
unlike those which we might get from an objective study of a book
considered as something fabricated--its materials, its construction, its
typography, its binding, the number of its chapters and pages, and so
on--without giving any heed to the meaning of the book--its ideas, the
human soul and personality that it embodies, the occasion that gave rise
to it, indeed all its subjective and immaterial aspects. All these
things, the whole significance of the volume, would elude scientific
analysis. It would seem to be a manufactured article, representing only
so much mechanics and chemistry. It is the same with the living body.
Unless we permit ourselves to go behind the mere facts, the mere
mechanics and chemistry of life phenomena, and interpret them in the
light of immaterial principles, in short, unless we apply some sort of
philosophy to them, the result of our analysis will be but dust in our
eyes, and ashes in our mouths. Unless there is something like mind or
intelligence pervading nature, some creative and transforming impulse
that cannot be defined by our mechanical concepts, then, to me, the
whole organic world is meaningless. If man is not more than an "accident
in the history of the thermic evolution of the globe," or the result of
the fortuitous juxtaposition and combination of carbonic acid gas and
water and a few other elements, what shall we say? It is at least a
bewildering proposition.

Could one by analyzing a hive o