ot even satisfactorily understand, much less
explain, the nature of an organism and its internal forces on purely
mechanical principles." It is the view Goethe took when he said, "Matter
can never exist without spirit, nor spirit without matter."

Tyndall says Goethe was helped by his poetic training in the field of
natural history, but hindered as regards the physical and mechanical
sciences. "He could not formulate distinct mechanical conceptions; he
could not see the force of mechanical reasoning." His literary culture
helped him to a literary interpretation of living nature, but not to a
scientific explanation of it; it helped put him in sympathy with living
things, and just to that extent barred him from the mechanistic
conception of those of pure science. Goethe, like every great poet, saw
the universe through the colored medium of his imagination, his
emotional and aesthetic nature; in short, through his humanism, and not
in the white light of the scientific reason. His contributions to
literature were of the first order, but his contributions to science
have not taken high rank. He was a "prophet of the soul," and not a
disciple of the scientific understanding.

If we look upon life as inherent or potential in the constitution of
matter, dependent upon outward physical and chemical conditions for its
development, we are accounting for life in terms of matter and motion,
and are in the ranks of the materialists. But if we find ourselves
unable to set the ultimate particles of matter in action, or so working
as to produce the reaction which results in life, without conceiving of
some new force or principle operating upon them, then we are in the
ranks of the vitalists or idealists. The idealists see the original
atoms slumbering there in rock and sea and soil for untold ages, till,
moved upon by some unknown factor, they draw together in certain fixed
order and numbers, and life is the result. Something seems to put a
spell upon them and cause them to behave so differently from the way
they behaved before they were drawn into the life circuit.

When we think of life, as the materialists do, as of mechanico-chemical
origin, or explicable in terms of the natural universal order, we think
of the play of material forces amid which we live, we think of their
subtle action and interaction all about us--of osmosis, capillarity,
radio-activity, electricity, thermism, and the like; we think of the
four states of matter,-