; it rises on
the one hand, serves its purpose of life, and falls back on the other.
In going through the cycle of life the mineral elements experience some
change that chemical analysis does not disclose--they are the more
readily absorbed again by life. It is as if the elements had profited
in some way under the tutelage of life. Their experience has been a
unique and exceptional one. Only a small fraction of the sum total of
the inert matter of the globe can have this experience. It must first go
through the vegetable cycle before it can be taken up by the animal. The
only things we can take directly from the inorganic world are water and
air; and the function of water is largely a mechanical one, and the
function of air a chemical one.

I think of the vital as flowing out of the physical, just as the
psychical flows out of the vital, and just as the higher forms of animal
life flow out of the lower. It is a far cry from man to the dumb brutes,
and from the brutes to the vegetable world, and from the vegetable to
inert matter; but the germ and start of each is in the series below it.
The living came out of the not-living. If life is of physico-chemical
origin, it is so by transformations and translations that physics cannot
explain. The butterfly comes out of the grub, man came out of the brute,
but, as Darwin says, "not by his own efforts," any more than the child
becomes the man by its own efforts.

The push of life, of the evolutionary process, is back of all and in
all. We can account for it all by saying the Creative Energy is immanent
in matter, and this gives the mind something to take hold of.

II

According to the latest scientific views held on the question by such
men as Professor Loeb, the appearance of life on the globe was a purely
accidental circumstance. The proper elements just happened to come
together at the right time in the right proportions and under the right
conditions, and life was the result. It was an accident in the thermal
history of the globe. Professor Loeb has lately published a volume of
essays and addresses called "The Mechanistic Conception of Life,"
enforcing and illustrating this view. He makes war on what he terms the
metaphysical conception of a "life-principle" as the key to the problem,
and urges the scientific conception of the adequacy of
mechanico-chemical forces. In his view, we are only chemical mechanisms;
and all our activities, mental and physical alike, are only