automatic
responses to the play of the blind, material forces of external nature.
All forms of life, with all their wonderful adaptations, are only the
chance happenings of the blind gropings and clashings of dead matter:
"We eat, drink, and reproduce [and, of course, think and speculate and
write books on the problems of life], not because mankind has reached an
agreement that this is desirable, but because, machine-like, we are
compelled to do so!"

He reaches the conclusion that all our inner subjective life is
amenable to physico-chemical analysis, because many cases of simple
animal instinct and will can be explained on this basis--the basis of
animal tropism. Certain animals creep or fly to the light, others to the
dark, because they cannot help it. This is tropism. He believes that the
origin of life can be traced to the same physico-chemical activities,
because, in his laboratory experiments, he has been able to dispense
with the male principle, and to fertilize the eggs of certain low forms
of marine life by chemical compounds alone. "The problem of the
beginning and end of individual life is physico-chemically clear"--much
clearer than the first beginnings of life. All individual life begins
with the egg, but where did we get the egg? When chemical synthesis will
give us this, the problem is solved. We can analyze the material
elements of an organism, but we cannot synthesize them and produce the
least spark of living matter. That all forms of life have a mechanical
and chemical basis is beyond question, but when we apply our analysis to
them, life evaporates, vanishes, the vital processes cease. But apply
the same analysis to inert matter, and only the form is changed.

Professor Loeb's artificially fathered embryo and starfish and
sea-urchins soon die. If his chemism could only give him the
mother-principle also! But it will not. The mother-principle is at the
very foundations of the organic world, and defies all attempts of
chemical synthesis to reproduce it.

It would be presumptive in the extreme for me to question Professor
Loeb's scientific conclusions; he is one of the most eminent of living
experimental biologists. I would only dissent from some of his
philosophical conclusions. I dissent from his statement that only the
mechanistic conception of life can throw light on the source of ethics.
Is there any room for the moral law in a world of mechanical
determinism? There is no ethics in the physica