e meat"--without influence on quality or
digestion. Yet this problem must be cleared up before we can arrive at any
understanding of the whole subject. In all attempts at "reducing to
simpler terms," it must be borne in mind that "force" reveals its nature
in ever higher stages, of which every one is new. Even cohesion cannot be
reduced to terms of gravitation, nor the chemical affinities and molecular
forces to something more primitive. They are already something "outside
the recognised order of nature." In a still higher form force is expressed
in the processes of crystallisation. At the formation of the first crystal
there came into action a directing force of the same kind as the will of
the sculptor at the making of the Venus of Melos. This new element, which
intervenes every time, Lloyd Morgan regards, with Herbert Spencer
("Principles of Biology"), as "due to that ultimate reality which
underlies this manifestation, as it underlies all other manifestations."
There can be no "understanding" in the sense of "getting behind things":
even the actions of "brute matter" cannot be "understood." The play of
chance not only does not explain the living; it does not even explain the
not-living. But life in particular can neither be brought into the cell
from without, nor be explained as simply "emerging from the co-operation
of the components of the protoplasm," and it is "in its essence not to be
conceived in physico-chemical terms," but represents "new modes of
activity in the noumenal cause," which, just because it is noumenal, is
beyond our grasp. For only phenomena are "accessible to thought."

Among the biologists who concern themselves with deeper considerations,
Oscar Hertwig,(95) the Director of the Anatomical Institute at Berlin, has
expressed ideas similar to those we have been discussing, little as this
may seem to be the case at first sight. He desires to oust the ordinary
mechanism, so to speak, by replacing it by a mechanism of a higher order,
and in making the attempt he examines and deepens the traditional ideas of
causality and "force," and defines the right and wrong of the
quantitative-mathematical interpretation of nature in general, and of
mechanics in particular. He follows confessedly in Lotze's path, not so
much in regard to that thinker's insistence upon the association of the
causal and the teleological modes of interpretation, as in modifying the
idea of causality. O. Hertwig puts forward his own t