ld only grasp what it
is that transforms the molecule of dead matter into the living molecule!
Pasteur called it "dissymmetric force," which is only a new name for the
mystery. He believed there was an "irrefragable physical barrier between
organic and inorganic nature"--that the molecules of an organism
differed from those of a mineral, and for this difference he found a
name.

III

There seems to have been of late years a marked reaction, even among men
of science, from the mechanistic conception of life as held by the band
of scientists to which I have referred. Something like a new vitalism is
making headway both on the Continent and in Great Britain. Its exponents
urge that biological problems "defy any attempt at a mechanical
explanation." These men stand for the idea "of the creative
individuality of organisms" and that the main factors in organic
evolution cannot be accounted for by the forces already operative in the
inorganic world.

There is, of course, a mathematical chance that in the endless changes
and permutations of inert matter the four principal elements that make
up a living body may fall or run together in just that order and number
that the kindling of the flame of life requires, but it is a disquieting
proposition. One atom too much or too little of any of them,--three of
oxygen where two were required, or two of nitrogen where only one was
wanted,--and the face of the world might have been vastly different. Not
only did much depend on their coming together, but upon the order of
their coming; they must unite in just such an order. Insinuate an atom
or corpuscle of hydrogen or carbon at the wrong point in the ranks, and
the trick is a failure. Is there any chance that they will hit upon a
combination of things and forces that will make a machine--a watch, a
gun, or even a row of pins?

When we regard all the phenomena of life and the spell it seems to put
upon inert matter, so that it behaves so differently from the same
matter before it is drawn into the life circuit, when we see how it
lifts up a world of dead particles out of the soil against gravity into
trees and animals; how it changes the face of the earth; how it comes
and goes while matter stays; how it defies chemistry and physics to
evoke it from the non-living; how its departure, or cessation, lets the
matter fall back to the inorganic--when we consider these and others
like them, we seem compelled to think of life as something,