uestion. Certainly when you have
got the evolutionary process once started in matter which has these
wonderful powers, all is easy. The professor simply describes what has
taken place and seems to think that the mystery is thereby cleared up,
as if by naming all the parts of a machine and their relation to one
another, the machine is accounted for. What caused the iron and steel
and wood of the machine to take this special form, while in other cases
the iron and steel and wood took other radically different forms, and
vast quantities of these substances took no form at all?

In working out the evolution of living forms by the aid of the blind
physical and chemical agents alone, Professor Schaefer unconsciously
ascribes the power of choice and purpose to the individual cells, as
when he says that the cells of the external layer sink below the surface
for better protection and better nutrition. It seems to have been a
matter of choice or will that the cells developed a nervous system in
the animal and not in the vegetable. Man came because a few cells in
some early form of life acquired a slightly greater tendency to react to
an external stimulus. In this way they were brought into closer touch
with the outer world and thereby gained the lead of their duller
neighbor cells, and became the real rulers of the body, and developed
the mind.

It is bewildering to be told by so competent a person as Professor
Schaefer that at bottom there is no fundamental difference between the
living and non-living. We need not urge the existence of a peculiar
vital force, as distinct from all other forces, but all distinctions
between things are useless if we cannot say that a new behavior is set
up in matter which we describe by the word "vital," and that a new
principle is operative in organized matter which we must call
"intelligence." Of course all movements and processes of living beings
are in conformity with the general laws of matter, but does such a
statement necessarily rule out all idea of the operation of an
organizing and directing principle that is not operative in the world of
inanimate things?

In Schaefer's philosophy evolution is purely a mechanical process--there
is no inborn tendency, no inherent push, no organizing effort, but all
results from the blind groping and chance jostling of the inorganic
elements; from the molecules of undifferentiated protoplasm to the
brain of a Christ or a Plato, is just one series of uni