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What has science done to clear up this mystery of vitality? Professor Loeb, our most eminent experimental biologist, has succeeded in fertilizing the eggs of some low forms of sea life by artificial means; and in one instance, at least, it is reported that the fatherless form grew to maturity. This is certainly an interesting fact, but takes us no nearer the solution of the mystery of vitality than the fact that certain chemical compounds may stimulate the organs of reproduction helps to clear up the mystery of generation; or the fact that certain other chemical compounds help the digestive and assimilative processes and further the metabolism of the body assists in clearing up the mystery that attaches to these things. In all such cases we have the living body to begin with. The egg of the sea-urchin and the egg of the jelly-fish are living beings that responded to certain chemical substances, so that a process is set going in their cell life that is equivalent to fertilization. It seems to me that the result of all Professor Loeb’s valuable inquiries is only to give us a more intimate sense of how closely mechanical and chemical principles are associated and identified with all the phenomena of life and with all animal behavior. Given a living organism, mechanics and chemistry will then explain much of its behavior–practically all the behavior of the lower organisms, and much of that of the higher. Even when we reach man, our reactions to the environment and to circumstances play a great part in our lives; but dare we say that will, liberty of choice, ideation, do not play a part also? How much reality there is in the so-called animal will, is a problem; but that there is a foundation for our belief in the reality of the human will, I, for one, do not for a moment doubt. The discontinuity here is only apparent and not real. We meet with the same break when we try to get our mental states, our power of thought–a poem, a drama, a work of art, a great oration–out of the food we eat; but life does it, though our science is none the wiser for it. Our physical life forms a closed circle, science says, and what goes into our bodies as physical force, must come out in physical force, or as some of its equivalents. Well, one of the equivalents, transformed by some unknown chemism within us, is our psychic force, or states of consciousness. The two circles, the physical and the psychical, are not concentric, as Fiske fancied, but are linked in some mysterious way.

Professor Loeb is a master critic of the life processes; he and his compeers analyze them as they have never been analyzed before; but the solution of the great problem of life that we are awaiting does not come. A critic may resolve all of Shakespeare’s plays into their historic and other elements, but that will not account for Shakespeare. Nature’s synthesis furnishes occasions for our analysis. Most assuredly all psychic phenomena have a physical basis; we know the soul only through the body; but that they are all of physico-chemical origin, is another matter.

II

Biological science has hunted the secret of vitality like a detective; and it has done some famous work; but it has not yet unraveled the mystery. It knows well the part played by carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen in organic chemistry, that without water and carbon dioxide there could be no life; it knows the part played by light, air, heat, gravity, osmosis, chemical affinity, and all the hundreds or thousands of organic compounds; it knows the part played by what are called the enzymes, or ferments, in all living bodies, but it does not know the secret of these ferments; it knows the part played by colloids, or jelly-like compounds, that there is no living body without colloids, though there are colloid bodies that are not living; it knows the part played by oxidation, that without it a living body ceases to function, though everywhere all about us is oxidation without life; it knows the part played by chlorophyll in the vegetable kingdom, and yet how chlorophyll works such magic upon the sun’s rays, using the solar energy to fix the carbon of carbonic acid in the air, and thereby storing this energy as it is stored in wood and coal and in much of the food we consume, is a mystery. Chemistry cannot repeat the process in its laboratories. The fungi do not possess this wonderful chlorophyllian power, and hence cannot use the sunbeam to snatch their carbon from the air; they must get it from decomposed vegetable matter; they feed, as the animals do, upon elements that have gone through the cycle of vegetable life. The secret of vegetable life, then, is in the green substance of the leaf where science is powerless to unlock it. Conjure with the elements as it may, it cannot produce the least speck of living matter. It can by synthesis produce many of the organic compounds, but only from matter that has already been through the organic cycle. It has lately produced rubber, but from other products of vegetable life.