the man is not lost.
"The sense of personal identity is maintained across the flight of
molecules," just as it is maintained in the state or nation, by the
units that remain, and by the established order. There is an unwritten
constitution, a spirit that governs, like Maeterlinck's "spirit of the
hive." The traditions of the body are handed down from mother cell to
daughter cell, though just what that means in terms of physiology or
metabolism I do not know. But this we know--that you are you and I am I,
and that human life and personality can never be fully explained or
accounted for in terms of the material forces.

VIII

LIFE AND SCIENCE

I

The limited and peculiar activity which arises in matter and which we
call vital; which comes and goes; which will not stay to be analyzed;
which we in vain try to reproduce in our laboratories; which is
inseparable from chemistry and physics, but which is not summed up by
them; which seems to use them and direct them to new ends,--an entity
which seems to have invaded the kingdom of inert matter at some definite
time in the earth's history, and to have set up an insurgent movement
there; cutting across the circuits of the mechanical and chemical
forces; turning them about, pitting one against the other; availing
itself of gravity, of chemical affinity, of fluids and gases, of osmosis
and exosmosis, of colloids, of oxidation and hydration, and yet
explicable by none of these things; clothing itself with garments of
warmth and color and perfume woven from the cold, insensate elements;
setting up new activities in matter; building up myriads of new unstable
compounds; struggling against the tendency of the physical forces to a
dead equilibrium; indeterminate, intermittent, fugitive; limited in
time, limited in space; present in some worlds, absent from others;
breaking up the old routine of the material forces, and instituting new
currents, new tendencies; departing from the linear activities of the
inorganic, and setting up the circular activities of living currents;
replacing change by metamorphosis, revolution by evolution, accretion by
secretion, crystallization by cell-formation, aggregation by growth;
and, finally, introducing a new power into the world--the mind and soul
of man--this wonderful, and apparently transcendental something which we
call life--how baffling and yet how fascinating is the inquiry into its
nature and origin! Are we to regard it as Tyndall