dentify those substances.

How utterly unmechanical a living body is, at least how far it
transcends mere mechanics is shown by what the chemists call
"autolysis." Pulverize your watch, and you have completely destroyed
everything that made it a watch except the dead matter; but pulverize or
reduce to a pulp a living plant, and though you have destroyed all cell
structure, you have not yet destroyed the living substance; you have
annihilated the mechanism, but you have not killed the something that
keeps up the life process. Protoplasm takes time to die, but your
machine stops instantly, and its elements are no more potent in a new
machine than they were at first. "In the pulp prepared by grinding down
living organisms in a mortar, some vital phenomena continue for a long
time." The life processes cease, and the substances or elements of the
dead body remain as before. Their chemical reactions are the same. There
is no new chemistry, no new mechanics, no new substance in a live body,
but there is a new tendency or force or impulse acting in matter,
inspiring it, so to speak, to new ends. It is here that idealism parts
company with exact science. It is here that the philosophers go one
way, and the rigid scientists the other. It is from this point of view
that the philosophy of Henri Bergson, based so largely as it is upon
scientific material, has been so bitterly assailed from the scientific
camp.

The living cell is a wonderful machine, but if we ask which is first,
life or the cell, where are we? There is the synthetical reaction in the
cell, and the analytical or splitting reaction--the organizing, and the
disorganizing processes--what keeps up this seesaw and preserves the
equilibrium? A life force, said the older scientists; only chemical
laws, say the new. A prodigious change in the behavior of matter is
wrought by life, and whether we say it is by chemical laws, or by a life
force, the mystery remains.

The whole secret of life centres in the cell, in the plant cell; and
this cell does not exceed .005 millimetres in diameter. An enormous
number of chemical reactions take place in this minute space. It is a
world in little. Here are bodies of different shapes whose service is to
absorb carbon dioxide, and form sugar and carbohydrates. Must we go
outside of matter itself, and of chemical reactions, to account for it?
Call this unknown factor "vital force," as has so long been done, or
name it "biotic energy," as