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One wishes Professor Henderson had told us more about how life fits itself to the environment–how matter, moved and moulded only by mechanical and chemical forces, yet has some power of choice that a machine does not have, and can and does select the environment best suited to its well-being. In fact, that it should have, or be capable of, any condition of well-being, if it is only a complex of physical and chemical forces, is a problem to wrestle with. The ground we walk on is such a complex, but only the living bodies it supports have conditions of well-being.

Professor Henderson concedes very little to the vitalists or the teleologists. He is a thorough mechanist. “Matter and energy,” he says, “have an original property, assuredly not by chance, which organizes the universe in space and time.” Where or how matter got this organizing property, he offers no opinion. “Given the universe, life, and the tendency [the tendency to organize], mechanism is inductively proved sufficient to account for all phenomena.” Biology, then, is only mechanics and chemistry engaged in a new role without any change of character; but what put them up to this new role? “The whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric.”

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Another Harvard voice is less pronounced in favor of the mechanistic conception of life. Professor Rand thinks that in a mechanically determined universe, “our conscious life becomes a meaningless replica of an inexorable physical concatenation”–the soul the result of a fortuitous concourse of atoms. Hence all the science and art and literature and religion of the world are merely the result of a molecular accident.

Dr. Rand himself, in wrestling with the problem of organization in a late number of “Science,” seems to hesitate whether or not to regard man as a molecular accident, an appearance presented to us by the results of the curious accidents of molecules–which is essentially Professor Loeb’s view; or whether to look upon the living body as the result of a “specific something” that organizes, that is, of “dominating organic agencies,” be they psychic or super-mundane, which dominate and determine the organization of the different parts of the body into a whole. Yet he is troubled with the idea that this specific something may be “nothing more than accidental chemical peculiarities of cells.” But would these accidental peculiarities be constant? Do accidents happen millions of times in the same way? The cell is without variableness or shadow of turning. The cells are the minute people that build up all living forms, and what prompts them to build a man in the one case, and the man’s dog in another, is the mystery that puzzles Professor Rand. “Tissue cells,” he says, “are not structures like stone blocks laboriously carved and immovably cemented in place. They are rather like the local eddies in an ever-flowing and ever-changing stream of fluids. Substance which was at one moment a part of a cell, passes out and a new substance enters. What is it that prevents the local whirl in this unstable stream from changing its form? How is it that a million muscle cells remain alike, collectively ready to respond to a nerve impulse?” According to one view, expressed by Professor Rand, “Organization is something that we read into natural phenomena. It is in itself nothing.” The alternative view holds that there is a specific organizing agent that brings about the harmonious operation of all the organs and parts of the system–a superior dynamic force controlling and guiding all the individual parts.

A most determined and thorough-going attempt to hunt down the secret of vitality, and to determine how far its phenomena can be interpreted in terms of mechanics and chemistry, is to be found in Professor H. W. Conn’s volume entitled “The Living Machine.” Professor Conn justifies his title by defining a machine as “a piece of apparatus so designed that it can change one kind of energy into another for a definite purpose.” Of course the adjective “living” takes it out of the category of all mere mechanical devices and makes it super-mechanical, just as Haeckel’s application of the word “living” to his inorganics (“living inorganics”), takes them out of the category of the inorganic. In every machine, properly so called, all the factors are known; but do we know all the factors in a living body? Professor Conn applies his searching analysis to most of the functions of the human body, to digestion, to assimilation, to circulation, to respiration, to metabolism, and so on, and he finds in every function something that does not fall within his category–some force not mechanical nor chemical, which he names vital.