In the position it assumes towards actuality science resembles a man who has reduced all language to mere grammar and now finds himself hard put to it to explain how purely grammatical signs and formulæ could ever have given rise to actual speech. As grammar presupposes actual speech--is secondary, derived from it--so the mechanical, re-actual view presupposes actuality--is secondary, derived from it--and it is against all common-sense to seek now to turn the tables with an endeavour to prove the possibility of the living language “actuality,” assess its title to existence, by the “grammar” of the scientific conception of things. From this position, the fact that anything ever happens at all, remains an eternally unfathomable mystery. The first claim upon the genuine thinker is that he should understand clearly that a something given is present, whose simple existence represents also the _power to exist_; whose activity has no need of being proven, since proving itself by itself. The endeavours of science from its re-actual position, to govern and administer actuality itself also, betray a limitedness and crudity of thought at which later generations will stand amazed. So long as science fails to understand and respect her natural limitations, so long as she keeps trying to interpret the actual mechanically, so long is she as serious a danger to the world as faith. In the treatment of the problem of physiology that follows I can be brief, because all the details here relate to a technical domain to which the majority of my readers are unlikely to bring either interest or ability to understand. Just as physics--in the widest sense of the word--may be briefly designated as the teaching that informs us of the relations existing between “bodies,” so physiology may be succinctly termed the teaching that instructs us as to the relations existent between living beings and the external world. Where living beings are comprehended as processes of combustion pure and simple, every relationship betwixt them and their environment becomes a _form of alimentation_. The intellectual as the vegetative, the psychic as the physical life, are here comprised under the one common, all-inclusive concept of alimentation. Whether I appropriate, assimilate something to myself through the organs of sense and thought or through the tongue and the digestive apparatus, both proceedings are the same--forms of alimentation. Accordingly we find the Buddha calling living beings “āhāraṭṭhitikā,” _i.e._ “existing through alimentation,” and placing this expression--as synonymous--alongside “sañkhāraṭṭhitikā,” _i.e._ “existing through Sankhāra,” compounded, conditioned.