finition of life not only does not lead us any nearer
to the comprehension of its processes, and especially of the richness and
the organization of its forms and functions, but that it {140} clearly
shows us how little the origin of life is explained. For this very
definition necessarily and obviously leads us to the questions: Whence do
those internal relations originate, whence their adjustment to external
relations, and whence the continuity of this adjustment? The answer to
these questions this definition still owes us.

Therefore, not only self-consciousness and freedom, not only sensation and
consciousness, but also life and the organic, remain a phenomenon which--at
least, according to the present state of our knowledge and
reasoning--enters into the realm of the world of phenomena as _something
new_ that can not be explained from the foregoing, although it presupposes
the foregoing as the _condition_, not the cause, of its appearance; and no
matter whether we have to think of the modality of its origin as a sudden
or as a gradual one.

Sec. 4. _The Elements of the World, the Theory of Atoms, and the Mechanical
View of the World._

The investigating and thinking mind, when it attempts to explain the
appearances and forms of that which exists, finds itself led further and
further back, until it finally arrives at the last elements of the world
and of matter. Whether we take the problem of life as solved or unsolved,
the living has matter and its subordination to the efficiency of all its
chemical and mechanical powers in common with the lifeless; and the
organic, in its first beginnings, stands extraordinarily near to, and is
grown on the ground of, the inorganic,--if not according to the category of
cause and effect, still according to that of condition and consequence, of
basis and structure. Therefore we stand at last before the {141} question
of the final elements of matter, which, indeed, constitutes organic as well
as inorganic bodies.

The answer to this question is attempted by the theory of atoms: the
doctrine which teaches that the whole material world is composed of simple
particles which are no farther divisible, and from whose juxtaposition the
chemical elements--and, in respect to their other forms of existence and
combination, the whole world of bodies, with all their forms, states, and
changes,--are composed.

This theory has not only the practical value that the physical (and
especially the c