organic; the difference between the two lies
in the purposive activity of the elements that build up a living body.

Or is life, as a New England college professor claims, "an _x_-entity,
additional to matter and energy, but of the same cosmic rank as they,"
and "manifesting itself to our senses only through its power to keep a
certain quantity of matter and energy in the continuous orderly ferment
we call life"?

I recall that Huxley said that there was a third reality in this
universe besides matter and energy, and this third reality was
consciousness. But neither the "_x_-entity" of Professor Ganong nor the
"consciousness" of Huxley can be said to be of the same cosmic rank as
matter and energy, because they do not pervade the universe as matter
and energy do. These forces abound throughout all space and endure
throughout all time, but life and consciousness are flitting and
uncertain phenomena of matter. A prick of a pin, or a blow from a
hammer, may destroy both. Unless we consider them as potential in all
matter (and who shall say that they are not?) may we look upon them as
of cosmic rank?

It is often urged that it is not the eye that sees, or the brain that
thinks, but something in them. But it is something in them that never
went into them; it arose in them. It is the living eye and the living
brain that do the seeing and the thinking. When the life activity
ceases, these organs cease to see and to think. Their activity is kept
up by certain physiological processes in the organs of the body, and to
ask what keeps up these is like the puppy trying to overtake its own
tail, or to run a race with its own shadow.

The brain is not merely the organ of the mind in an external and
mechanical sense; it is the mind. When we come to living things, all
such analogies fail us. Life is not a thing; thought is not a thing; but
rather the effect of a certain activity in matter, which mind alone can
recognize. When we try to explain or account for that which we are, it
is as if a man were trying to lift himself.

Life seems like something apart. It does not seem to be amenable to the
law of the correlation and conservation of forces. You cannot transform
it into heat or light or electricity. The force which a man extracts
from the food he eats while he is writing a poem, or doing any other
mental work, seems lost to the universe. The force which the engine, or
any machine, uses up, reappears as work done, or as heat or l