ntelligent
physical and chemical activities in matter.

May we not say that all the marks or characteristics of a living body
which distinguish it in our experience from an inanimate body, are of a
non-scientific character, or outside the sphere of experimental science?
We recognize them as readily as we distinguish day from night, but we
cannot describe them in the fixed terms of science. When we say growth,
metabolism, osmosis, the colloidal state, science points out that all
this may be affirmed of inorganic bodies. When we say a life principle,
a vital force or soul or spirit or intelligence, science turns a deaf
ear.

The difference between the living and the non-living is not so much a
physical difference as a metaphysical difference. Living matter is
actuated by intelligence. Its activities are spontaneous and
self-directing. The rock, and the tree that grows beside it, and the
insects and rodents that burrow under it, may all be made of one stuff,
but their difference to the beholder is fundamental; there is an
intelligent activity in the one that is not in the other. Now no
scientific analysis of a body will reveal the secret of this activity.
As well might your analysis of a phonographic record hope to disclose a
sonata of Beethoven latent in the waving lines. No power of chemistry
could reveal any difference between the gray matter of Plato's brain
and that of the humblest citizen of Athens. All the difference between
man, all that makes a man a man, and an ox an ox, is beyond the reach of
any of your physico-chemical tests. By the same token the gulf that
separates the organic from the inorganic is not within the power of
science to disclose. The biochemist is bound to put life in the category
of the material forces because his science can deal with no other. To
him the word "vital" is a word merely, it stands for no reality, and the
secret of life is merely a chemical reaction. A living body awakens a
train of ideas in our minds that a non-living fails to awaken--a train
of ideas that belong to another order from that awakened by scientific
demonstration. We cannot blame science for ruling out that which it
cannot touch with its analysis, or repeat with its synthesis. The
phenomena of life are as obvious to us as anything in the world; we know
their signs and ways, and witness their power, yet in the alembic of our
science they turn out to be only physico-chemical processes; hence that
is all there is of