cular
forces determine whether the solar energy shall weave a head of a
cabbage or a head of a Plato or a Shakespeare, does it not meet all the
requirements of our conception of creative will?

Tyndall thinks that a living man--Socrates, Aristotle, Goethe, Darwin, I
suppose--could be produced directly from inorganic nature in the
laboratory if (and note what a momentous "if" this is) we could put
together the elements of such a man in the same relative positions as
those which they occupy in his body, "with the selfsame forces and
distribution of forces, the selfsame motions and distribution of
motions." Do this and you have a St. Paul or a Luther or a Lincoln. Dr.
Verworn said essentially the same thing in a lecture before one of our
colleges while in this country a few years ago--easy enough to
manufacture a living being of any order of intellect if you can
reproduce in the laboratory his "internal and external _vital
conditions_." (The italics are mine.) To produce those vital conditions
is where the rub comes. Those vital conditions, as regards the minutest
bit of protoplasm, science, with all her tremendous resources, has not
yet been able to produce. The raising of Lazarus from the dead seems no
more a miracle than evoking vital conditions in dead matter. External
and internal vital conditions are no doubt inseparably correlated, and
when we can produce them we shall have life. Life, says Verworn, is like
fire, and "is a phenomenon of nature which appears as soon as the
complex of its conditions is fulfilled." We can easily produce fire by
mechanical and chemical means, but not life. Fire is a chemical process,
it is rapid oxidation, and oxidation is a disintegrating process, while
life is an integrating process, or a balance maintained between the two
by what we call the vital force. Life is evidently a much higher form of
molecular activity than combustion. The old Greek Heraclitus saw, and
the modern scientist sees, very superficially in comparing the two.

I have no doubt that Huxley was right in his inference "that if the
properties of matter result from the nature and disposition of its
component molecules, then there is no intelligible ground for refusing
to say that the properties of protoplasm result from the nature and
disposition of its molecules." It is undoubtedly in that nature and
disposition of the biological molecules that Tyndall's whole "mystery
and miracle of vitality" is wrapped up. If we cou