specially
in his mind the deductions of Spencer. For we may review the whole known
series of mechanical motions and their mechanical causes, and imagine their
mechanical increase and their mechanical complication the largest possible;
and still the life-motion of the organic will never result therefrom. If
such a keen psychical and physiological investigator and thinker, and such
an authority in the realm of the motions of atoms and molecules, as Gustav
Theodor Fechner--"Einige Ideen zur Schoepfungs- und Entwicklungsgeschichte
der Organismen" ("Some Ideas about the History of the {136} Creation and
Development of Organisms"), Leipzig, 1873, p. 1, f.--can find the whole
lasting and effectual difference between the organic and inorganic in
nothing else than in the way and manner of _motion_--namely, that the
motion of the _organic_ molecules is different from that of the _inorganic_
molecules--and when he traces this difference with mathematical exactness,
then an assertion which simply denies that difference, without attempting
to show the identity of the two motions, to say nothing of proving this
identity, is nothing more than a clear evidence that the mechanical theory
has not yet succeeded in explaining the origin of life, and that those
scientists who so haughtily look down upon the abuse of "_vital power_," to
the efficacy of which their antagonists began to resort when their
knowledge came to an end, make exactly the same abuse with their
"_mechanism_." That organic motion, even the organic motion of molecules,
_once present_, comes into dependence on the well known laws of mechanism,
we naturally will not deny; any more than that the human body, when serving
the will of the mind, follows in its motions the laws of physiology and
mechanism.

Preyer seems to make a mistake similar to that of those who efface
sensation and motion, when, in an essay on the hypothesis of the origin of
life, in the "Deutsche Rundschau," Vol. I, 7, he even effaces the
difference between life and sensation, and simply identifies life and
motion. "Self-motion, called life, and inorganic movement of bodies by
agencies outside of themselves, are but quantitatively, intensively, or
gradually different forms of motion; not in their innermost being
different.... Our will changes many kinds of motion into heat, makes {137}
cold metal to be red-hot simply by hammering.... Likewise inversely, as the
law of the conservation of force must require, a