wit than science in Huxley's question, "What better
philosophical status has vitality than aquosity?" There is at least this
difference: When vitality is gone, you cannot recall it, or reproduce
it by your chemistry; but you can recombine the two gases in which you
have decomposed water, any number of times, and get your aquosity back
again; it never fails; it is a power of chemistry. But vitality will not
come at your beck; it is not a chemical product, at least in the same
sense that water is; it is not in the same category as the wetness or
liquidity of water. It is a name for a phenomenon--the most remarkable
phenomenon in nature. It is one that the art of man is powerless to
reproduce, while water may be made to go through its cycle of
change--solid, fluid, vapor, gas--and always come back to water. Well
does the late Professor Brooks, of Johns Hopkins, say that "living
things do, in some way and in some degree, control or condition
inorganic nature; that they hold their own by setting the mechanical
properties of matter in opposition to each other, and that this is their
most notable and distinctive characteristic." Does not Ray Lankester,
the irate champion of the mechanistic view of life, say essentially the
same thing when he calls man the great Insurgent in Nature's
camp--"crossing her courses, reversing her processes, and defeating her
ends?"

Life appears like the introduction of a new element or force or tendency
into the cosmos. Henceforth the elements go new ways, form new
compounds, build up new forms, and change the face of nature. Rivers
flow where they never would have flowed without it, mountains fall in a
space of time during which they never would have fallen; barriers arise,
rough ways are made smooth, a new world appears--the world of man's
physical and mental activities.

If the gods of the inorganic elements are neither for nor against us,
but utterly indifferent to us, how came we here? Nature's method is
always from the inside, while ours is from the outside; hers is circular
while ours is direct. We think, as Bergson says, of things created, and
of a thing that creates, but things in nature are not created, they are
evolved; they grow, and the thing that grows is not separable from the
force that causes it to grow. The water turns the wheel, and can be shut
off or let on. This is the way of the mechanical world. But the wheels
in organic nature go around from something inside them, a kind o