se to man. Science is powerless
to penetrate this mystery, and philosophy can only give its own elastic
interpretation. Why consciousness should be born of cell structure in
one form of life and not in another, who shall tell us? Why matter in
the brain should think, and in the cabbage only grow, is a question.

The naturalist has not the slightest doubt that the mind of man was
evolved from some order of animals below him that had less mind, and
that the mind of this order was evolved from that of a still lower
order, and so on down the scale till we reach a point where the animal
and vegetable meet and blend, and the vegetable mind, if we may call it
such, passed into the animal, and still downward till the vegetable is
evolved from the mineral. If to believe this is to be a monist, then
science is monistic; it accepts the transformation or metamorphosis of
the lower into the higher from the bottom of creation to the top, and
without any break of the causal sequence. There has been no miracle,
except in the sense that all life is a miracle. Of how the organic rose
out of the inorganic, we can form no mental image; the intellect cannot
bridge the chasm; but that such is the fact, there can be no doubt.
There is no solution except that life is latent or potential in matter,
but these again are only words that cover a mystery.

I do not see why there may not be some force latent in matter that we
may call the vital force, physical force transformed and heightened, as
justifiably as we can postulate a chemical force latent in matter. The
chemical force underlies and is the basis of the vital force. There is
no life without chemism, but there is chemism without life.

We have to have a name for the action and reaction of the primary
elements upon one another and we call it chemical affinity; we have to
have a name for their behavior in building up organic bodies, and we
call it vitality or vitalism.

The rigidly scientific man sees no need of the conception of a new form
or kind of force; the physico-chemical forces as we see them in action
all about us are adequate to do the work, so that it seems like a
dispute about names. But my mind has to form a new conception of these
forces to bridge the chasm between the organic and the inorganic; not a
quantitative but a qualitative change is demanded, like the change in
the animal mind to make it the human mind, an unfolding into a higher
plane.

Whether the evolution of th