llization is in right lines, nor
of aquosity, though two thirds of the surface of the earth is covered
with water. Can we on any better philosophical grounds say that there is
a principle of vitality, though the earth swarms with living beings? Yet
the word vitality stands for a reality, it stands for a peculiar
activity in matter--for certain movements and characteristics for which
we have no other term. I fail to see any analogy between aquosity and
that condition of matter we call vital or living. Aquosity is not an
activity, it is a property, the property of wetness; viscosity is a term
to describe other conditions of matter; solidity, to describe still
another condition; and opacity and transparency, to describe still
others--as they affect another of our senses. But the vital activity in
matter is a concrete reality. With it there goes the organizing tendency
or impulse, and upon it hinges the whole evolutionary movement of the
biological history of the globe. We can do all sorts of things with
water and still keep its aquosity. If we resolve it into its constituent
gases we destroy its aquosity, but by uniting these gases chemically we
have the wetness back again. But if a body loses its vitality, its life,
can we by the power of chemistry, or any other power within our reach,
bring the vitality back to it? Can we make the dead live? You may bray
your living body in a mortar, destroy every one of its myriad cells, and
yet you may not extinguish the last spark of life; the protoplasm is
still living. But boil it or bake it and the vitality is gone, and all
the art and science of mankind cannot bring it back again. The physical
and chemical activities remain after the vital activities have ceased.
Do we not then have to supply a non-chemical, a non-physical force or
factor to account for the living body? Is there no difference between
the growth of a plant or an animal, and the increase in size of a
sand-bank or a snow-bank, or a river delta? or between the wear and
repair of a working-man's body and the wear and repair of the machine he
drives? Excretion and secretion are not in the same categories. The
living and the non-living mark off the two grand divisions of matter in
the world in which we live, as no two terms merely descriptive of
chemical and physical phenomena ever can. Life is a motion in matter,
but of another order from that of the physico-chemical, though
inseparable from it. We may forego the convenie