them. Vitality, says Huxley, has no more reality than
the horology of a clock. Yet Huxley sees three equal realities in the
universe--matter, energy, and consciousness. But consciousness is the
crown of a vital process. Hence it would seem as if there must be
something more real in vitality than Huxley is willing to admit.

II

Nearly all the later biologists or biological philosophers are as shy of
the term "vital force," and even of the word "vitality," as they are of
the words "soul," "spirit," "intelligence," when discussing natural
phenomena. To experimental science such words have no meaning because
the supposed realities for which they stand are quite beyond the reach
of scientific analysis. Ray Lankester, in his "Science from an Easy
Chair," following Huxley, compares vitality with aquosity, and says that
to have recourse to a vital principle or force to explain a living body
is no better philosophy than to appeal to a principle of aquosity to
explain water. Of course words are words, and they have such weight with
us that when we have got a name for a thing it is very easy to persuade
ourselves that the thing exists. The terms "vitality," "vital force,"
have long been in use, and it is not easy to convince one's self that
they stand for no reality. Certain it is that living and non-living
matter are sharply separated, though when reduced to their chemical
constituents in the laboratory they are found to be identical. The
carbon, the hydrogen, the nitrogen, the oxygen, and the lime, sulphur,
iron, etc., in a living body are in no way peculiar, but are the same as
these elements in the rocks and the soil. We are all made of one stuff;
a man and his dog are made of one stuff; an oak and a pine are made of
one stuff; Jew and Gentile are made of one stuff. Should we be
justified, then, in saying that there is no difference between them?
There is certainly a moral and an intellectual difference between a man
and his dog, if there is no chemical and mechanical difference. And
there is as certainly as wide or a wider difference between living and
non-living matter, though it be beyond the reach of science to detect.
For this difference we have to have a name, and we use the words
"vital," "vitality," which seem to me to stand for as undeniable
realities as the words heat, light, chemical affinity, gravitation.
There is not a principle of roundness, though "nature centres into
balls," nor of squareness, though crysta