What has science done to clear up this mystery of vitality? Professor
Loeb, our most eminent experimental biologist, has succeeded in
fertilizing the eggs of some low forms of sea life by artificial means;
and in one instance, at least, it is reported that the fatherless form
grew to maturity. This is certainly an interesting fact, but takes us no
nearer the solution of the mystery of vitality than the fact that
certain chemical compounds may stimulate the organs of reproduction
helps to clear up the mystery of generation; or the fact that certain
other chemical compounds help the digestive and assimilative processes
and further the metabolism of the body assists in clearing up the
mystery that attaches to these things. In all such cases we have the
living body to begin with. The egg of the sea-urchin and the egg of the
jelly-fish are living beings that responded to certain chemical
substances, so that a process is set going in their cell life that is
equivalent to fertilization. It seems to me that the result of all
Professor Loeb's valuable inquiries is only to give us a more intimate
sense of how closely mechanical and chemical principles are associated
and identified with all the phenomena of life and with all animal
behavior. Given a living organism, mechanics and chemistry will then
explain much of its behavior--practically all the behavior of the lower
organisms, and much of that of the higher. Even when we reach man, our
reactions to the environment and to circumstances play a great part in
our lives; but dare we say that will, liberty of choice, ideation, do
not play a part also? How much reality there is in the so-called animal
will, is a problem; but that there is a foundation for our belief in the
reality of the human will, I, for one, do not for a moment doubt. The
discontinuity here is only apparent and not real. We meet with the same
break when we try to get our mental states, our power of thought--a
poem, a drama, a work of art, a great oration--out of the food we eat;
but life does it, though our science is none the wiser for it. Our
physical life forms a closed circle, science says, and what goes into
our bodies as physical force, must come out in physical force, or as
some of its equivalents. Well, one of the equivalents, transformed by
some unknown chemism within us, is our psychic force, or states of
consciousness. The two circles, the physical and the psychical, are not
concentric, as Fiske fancied, but are linked in some mysterious way.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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