phenomena of life; its essence, its origin, we can only know as
philosophy and idealism know them. We have to turn philosophers when we
ask any ultimate question. The feeling we have that the scientific
conception of life is inadequate springs from the philosophical habit of
mind. Yet this habit is quite as legitimate as the scientific habit, and
is bound to supplement the latter all through life.

The great men of science, like Darwin and Huxley, are philosophers in
their theories and conclusions, and men of science in their observations
and experiments. The limitations of science in dealing with such a
problem are seen in the fact that science can take no step till it has
life to begin with. When it has got the living body, it can analyze its
phenomena and reduce them to their chemical and physical equivalents,
and thus persuade itself that the secret of life may yet be hit upon in
the laboratory. Professor Czapek, of the University of Prague, in his
work on "The Chemical Phenomena of Life" speaks for science when he
says, "What we call life is nothing else but a complex of innumerable
chemical reactions in the living substance which we call protoplasm."
The "living substance" is assumed to begin with, and then we are told
that the secret of its living lies in its chemical and physical
processes. This is in one sense true. No doubt at all that if these
processes were arrested, life would speedily end, but do they alone
account for its origin? Is it not like accounting for a baby in terms of
its breathing and eating? It was a baby before it did either, and it
would seem as if life must in some way ante-date the physical and
chemical processes that attend it, or at least be bound up in them in a
way that no scientific analysis can reveal.

If life is merely a mode of motion in matter, it is fundamentally unlike
any and all other modes of motion, because, while we can institute all
the others at will, we are powerless to institute this. The mode of
motion we call heat is going on in varying degrees of velocity all about
us at all times and seasons, but the vital motion of matter is limited
to a comparatively narrow circle. We can end it, but we cannot start it.

The rigidly scientific type of mind sees no greater mystery in the
difference in contour of different animal bodies than a mere difference
in the density of the germ cells: "one density results in a sequence of
cell-densities to form a horse; another a dog; an