ll that they
claim? The cell is the unit of life; all living bodies are but vast
confraternities of cells, some billions or trillions of them in the
human body; the cell builds up the tissues, the tissues build up the
organs, the organs build up the body. Now if it is not thinkable that
chemism could beget a cell, is it any more thinkable that it could build
a living tissue, and then an organ, and then the body as a whole? If
there is an inscrutable something at work at the start, which organizes
that wonderful piece of vital mechanism, the cell, is it any the less
operative ever after, in all life processes, in all living bodies and
their functions,--the vital as distinguished from the mechanical and
chemical? Given the cell, and you have only to multiply it, and organize
these products into industrial communities, and direct them to specific
ends,--certainly a task which we would not assign to chemistry or
physics any more than we would assign to them the production of a work
on chemistry or botany,--and you have all the myriad forms of
terrestrial life.

The cell is the parent of every living thing on the globe; and if it is
unthinkable that the material and irrational forces of inert matter
could produce it, then mechanics and chemistry must play second fiddle
in all that whirl and dance of the atoms that make up life. And that is
all the vitalists claim. The physico-chemical forces do play second
fiddle; that inexplicable something that we call vitality dominates and
leads them. True it is that a living organism yields to scientific
analysis only mechanical and chemical forces--a fact which only limits
the range of scientific analysis, and which by no means exhausts the
possibilities of the living organism. The properties of matter and the
laws of matter are intimately related to life, yea, are inseparable
from it, but they are by no means the whole story. Professor Henderson
repudiates the idea of any extra-physical influence as being involved in
the processes of life, and yet concedes that the very foundation of all
living matter, yea, the whole living universe in embryo--the cell--is
beyond the possibilities of physics and chemistry alone. Mechanism and
chemism are adequate to account for astronomy and geology, and
therefore, he thinks, are sufficient to account for biology, without
calling in the aid of any Bergsonian life impulse. Still these forces
stand impotent before that microscopic world, the cell, the f