iophores of Weismann, the plastidules of Haeckel; they
all presuppose millions of molecules peculiarly arranged in the
protoplasm.

On purely mechanical and chemical principles Tyndall accounts for the
growth from the germ of a tree. The germ would be quiet, but the solar
light and heat disturb its dreams, break up its atomic equilibrium. The
germ makes an "effort" to restore it (why does it make an effort?),
which effort is necessarily defeated and incessantly renewed, and in
the turmoil or "scrapping" between the germ and the solar forces, matter
is gathered from the soil and from the air and built into the special
form of a tree. Why not in the form of a cabbage, or a donkey, or a
clam? If the forces are purely automatic, why not? Why should matter be
gathered in at all in a mechanical struggle between inorganic elements?
But these are not all inorganic; the seed is organic. Ah! that makes the
difference! That accounts for the "effort." So we have to have the
organic to start with, then the rest is easy. No doubt the molecules of
the seed would remain in a quiescent state, if they were not disturbed
by external influences, chemical and mechanical. But there is something
latent or potential in that seed that is the opposite of the mechanical,
namely, the vital, and in what that consists, and where it came from, is
the mystery.

III

I fancy that the difficulty which an increasing number of persons find
in accepting the mechanistic view of life, or evolution,--the view which
Herbert Spencer built into such a ponderous system of philosophy, and
which such men as Huxley, Tyndall, Gifford, Haeckel, Verworn, and
others, have upheld and illustrated,--is temperamental rather than
logical. The view is distasteful to a certain type of mind--the
flexible, imaginative, artistic, and literary type--the type that loves
to see itself reflected in nature or that reads its own thoughts and
emotions into nature. In a few eminent examples the two types of mind to
which I refer seem more or less blended. Sir Oliver Lodge is a case in
point. Sir Oliver is an eminent physicist who in his conception of the
totality of things is yet a thoroughgoing idealist and mystic. His
solution of the problem of living things is extra-scientific. He sees in
life a distinct transcendental principle, not involved in the
constitution of matter, but independent of it, entering into it and
using it for its own purposes.

Tyndall was another great scie