than a
man, and yet it is just as truly living. To refer life to complexity
does not help us; we want to know what lies back of the complexity--what
makes it a new species of complexity.

We cannot explain the origin of living matter by the properties which
living matter possesses. There are three things that mechanics and
chemistry cannot explain: the relation of the psychical to the physical
through the law of the conservation and correlation of forces; the agent
or principle that guides the blind chemical and physical forces so as to
produce the living body; and the kind of forces that have contributed to
the origin of that morphological unit--the cell.

A Western university professor in a recent essay sounds quite a
different note on this subject from the one that comes to us from
Harvard. Says Professor Otto C. Glaser, of the University of Michigan,
in a recent issue of the "Popular Science Monthly": "Does not the
fitness of living things; the fact that they perform acts useful to
themselves in an environment which is constantly shifting, and often
very harsh; the fact that in general everything during development,
during digestion, during any of the complicated chains of processes
which we find, happens at the right time, in the right place, and to the
proper extent; does not all this force us to believe that there is
involved something more than mere chemistry and physics?--something, not
consciousness necessarily, yet its analogue--a vital _x_?"

There is this suggestive fact about these recent biological experiments
of Dr. Carrel, of the Rockefeller Institute: they seem to prove that the
life of a man is not merely the sum of the life of the myriad cells of
his body. Stab the man to death, and the cells of his body still live
and will continue to live if grafted upon another live man. Probably
every part of the body would continue to live and grow indefinitely, in
the proper medium. That the cell life should continue after the soul
life has ceased is very significant. It seems a legitimate inference
from this fact that the human body is the organ or instrument of some
agent that is not of the body. The functional or physiological life of
the body as a whole, also seems quite independent of our conscious
volitional or psychic life. That which repairs and renews the body,
heals its wounds, controls and coordinates its parts, adapts it to its
environment, carries on its processes during sleep, in fact in all ou