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All there is outside the sphere of physical science belongs to religion, to philosophy, to art, to literature. Huxley spoke strictly and honestly as a man of science, when he related consciousness to the body, as the sound of a clock when it strikes is related to the machinery of the clock. The scientific analysis of a living body reveals nothing but the action of the mechanical and chemical principles. If you analyze it by fire or by cremation, you get gases and vapors and mineral ash, that is all; the main thing about the live body–its organization, its life–you do not get. Of course science knows this; and to account for this missing something, it philosophizes, and relegates it to the interior world of molecular physics–it is all in the way the ultimate particles of matter were joined or compounded, were held together in the bonds of molecular matrimony. What factor or agent or intelligence is active or directive in this molecular marriage of the atoms, science does not inquire. Only philosophy can deal with that problem.

What can science see or find in the brain of man that answers to the soul? Only certain movements of matter in the brain cortex. What difference does it find between inert matter and a living organism? Only a vastly more complex mechanics and chemistry in the latter. A wide difference, not of kind, but of degree. The something we call vitality, that a child recognizes, science does not find; vitality is something sui generis. Scientific analysis cannot show us the difference between the germ cell of a starfish and the germ cell of a man; and yet think of what a world of difference is hidden in those microscopic germs! What force is there in inert matter that can build a machine by the adjustment of parts to each other? We can explain the most complex chemical compounds by the action of chemical forces and chemical affinity, but they cannot explain that adjustment of parts to each other, the cooerdination of their activities that makes a living machine.

In organized matter there is something that organizes. “The cell itself is an organization of smaller units,” and to drive or follow the organizing principle into the last hiding-place is past the power of biological chemistry. What constitutes the guiding force or principle of a living body, adjusting all its parts, making them pull together, making of the circulation one system in which the heart, the veins, the arteries, the lungs, all work to one common end, cooerdinating several different organs into a digestive system, and other parts into the nervous system, is a mystery that no objective analysis of the body can disclose.

To refer vitality to complexity alone, is to dodge the question. Multiplying the complexity of a machine, say of a watch, any conceivable number of times would not make it any the less a machine, or change it from the automatic order to the vital order. A motor-car is a vastly more complex mechanism than a wheelbarrow, and yet it is not the less a machine. On the other hand, an amoeba is a far simpler animal than a man, and yet it is just as truly living. To refer life to complexity does not help us; we want to know what lies back of the complexity–what makes it a new species of complexity.

We cannot explain the origin of living matter by the properties which living matter possesses. There are three things that mechanics and chemistry cannot explain: the relation of the psychical to the physical through the law of the conservation and correlation of forces; the agent or principle that guides the blind chemical and physical forces so as to produce the living body; and the kind of forces that have contributed to the origin of that morphological unit–the cell.

A Western university professor in a recent essay sounds quite a different note on this subject from the one that comes to us from Harvard. Says Professor Otto C. Glaser, of the University of Michigan, in a recent issue of the “Popular Science Monthly”: “Does not the fitness of living things; the fact that they perform acts useful to themselves in an environment which is constantly shifting, and often very harsh; the fact that in general everything during development, during digestion, during any of the complicated chains of processes which we find, happens at the right time, in the right place, and to the proper extent; does not all this force us to believe that there is involved something more than mere chemistry and physics?–something, not consciousness necessarily, yet its analogue–a vital x?“