did, and as others
before and since his time did and do, as potential in the constitution
of matter, and self-evolved, like the chemical compounds that are
involved in its processes?

As mechanical energy is latent in coal, and in all combustible bodies,
is vital energy latent in carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so forth,
needing only the right conditions to bring it out? Mechanical energy is
convertible into electrical energy, and _vice versa_. Indeed, the circle
of the physical forces is easily traced, easily broken into, but when or
how these forces merge into the vital and psychic forces, or support
them, or become them--there is the puzzle. If we limit the natural to
the inorganic order, then are living bodies supernatural?
Super-mechanical and super-chemical certainly, and chemics and
mechanics and electro-statics include all the material forces. Is life
outside this circle? It is certain that this circle does not always
include life, but can life exist outside this circle? When it appears it
is always inside it.

Science can only deal with life as a physical phenomenon; as a psychic
phenomenon it is beyond its scope, except so far as the psychic is
manifested through the physical. Not till it has produced living matter
from dead can it speak with authority upon the question of the origin of
life. Its province is limited to the description and analysis of life
processes, but when it essays to name what institutes the processes, or
to disclose the secret of organization, it becomes philosophy or
theology. When Haeckel says that life originated spontaneously, he does
not speak with the authority of science, because he cannot prove his
assertion; it is his opinion, and that is all. When Helmholtz says that
life had no beginning, he is in the same case. When our later
biophysicists say that life is of physico-chemical origin, they are in
the same case; when Tyndall says that there is no energy in the universe
but solar energy, he is in the same case; when Sir Oliver Lodge says
that life is an entity outside of and independent of matter, he is in
the same case. Philosophy and theology can take leaps in the dark, but
science must have solid ground to go upon. When it speculates or
theorizes, it must make its speculations good. Scientific prophecy is
amenable to the same tests as other prophecy. In the absence of proof by
experiment--scientific proof--to get the living out of the non-living we
have either got to conceive