supports have conditions
of well-being.

Professor Henderson concedes very little to the vitalists or the
teleologists. He is a thorough mechanist. "Matter and energy," he says,
"have an original property, assuredly not by chance, which organizes
the universe in space and time." Where or how matter got this organizing
property, he offers no opinion. "Given the universe, life, and the
tendency [the tendency to organize], mechanism is inductively proved
sufficient to account for all phenomena." Biology, then, is only
mechanics and chemistry engaged in a new role without any change of
character; but what put them up to this new role? "The whole
evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist
may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric."

V

Another Harvard voice is less pronounced in favor of the mechanistic
conception of life. Professor Rand thinks that in a mechanically
determined universe, "our conscious life becomes a meaningless replica
of an inexorable physical concatenation"--the soul the result of a
fortuitous concourse of atoms. Hence all the science and art and
literature and religion of the world are merely the result of a
molecular accident.

Dr. Rand himself, in wrestling with the problem of organization in a
late number of "Science," seems to hesitate whether or not to regard man
as a molecular accident, an appearance presented to us by the results of
the curious accidents of molecules--which is essentially Professor
Loeb's view; or whether to look upon the living body as the result of a
"specific something" that organizes, that is, of "dominating organic
agencies," be they psychic or super-mundane, which dominate and
determine the organization of the different parts of the body into a
whole. Yet he is troubled with the idea that this specific something may
be "nothing more than accidental chemical peculiarities of cells." But
would these accidental peculiarities be constant? Do accidents happen
millions of times in the same way? The cell is without variableness or
shadow of turning. The cells are the minute people that build up all
living forms, and what prompts them to build a man in the one case, and
the man's dog in another, is the mystery that puzzles Professor Rand.
"Tissue cells," he says, "are not structures like stone blocks
laboriously carved and immovably cemented in place. They are rather like
the local eddies in an ever-flowing and ever-c