constituted life--what it was that made the "wonderful
difference between the dead particles and the living particles of matter
appearing in other respects identical." He thought there might be some
bond between physico-chemical phenomena, on the one hand, and vital
phenomena, on the other, which philosophers will some day find out.
Living matter is characterized by "spontaneity of action," which is
entirely absent from inert matter. Huxley cannot or does not think of a
vital force distinct from all other forces, as the cause of life
phenomena, as so many philosophers have done, from Aristotle down to our
day. He finds protoplasm to be the physical basis of life; it is one in
both the vegetable and animal worlds; the animal takes it from the
vegetable, and the vegetable, by the aid of sunlight, takes or
manufactures it from the inorganic elements. But protoplasm is living
matter. Before there was any protoplasm, what brought about the
stupendous change of the dead into the living? Protoplasm makes more
protoplasm, as fire makes more fire, but what kindled the first spark of
this living flame? Here we corner the mystery, but it is still a
mystery that defies us. Cause and effect meet and are lost in each
other. Science cannot admit a miracle, or a break in the continuity of
life, yet here it reaches a point where no step can be taken. Huxley's
illustrations do not help his argument. "Protoplasm," he says, "is the
clay of the potter; which, bake it and paint it as he will, remains
clay, separated by artifice, and not by nature, from the commonest brick
or sun-dried clod." Clay is certainly the physical basis of the potter's
art, but would there be any pottery in the world if it contained only
clay? Do we not have to think of the potter? In the same way, do we not
have to think of something that fashions these myriad forms of life out
of protoplasm?--and back of that, of something that begat protoplasm out
of non-protoplasmic matter, and started the flame of life going? Life
accounts for protoplasm, but what accounts for life? We have to think of
the living clay as separated by Nature from the inert "sun-dried clod."
There is something in the one that is not in the other. There is really
no authentic analogy between the potter's art and Nature's art of life.

The force of the analogy, if it has any, drives us to the conclusion
that life is an entity, or an agent, working upon matter and independent
of it.

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